A Little Less of Me

I'm afraid of losing myself.

People say that all the time. "I lost myself." It's such a common expression that I don't think we really consider what it means.

What if you actually did?

Not your memories. Not your personality. Not your ability to function.

What if you lost the part of you that's actually there to experience any of it?

I've caught glimpses of this, and it scares the absolute shit out of me.

When I drink regularly, something happens to my awareness. It's difficult to explain because it isn't something I can point to. I'm still thinking, still working, still having conversations. From the outside, nothing is particularly different.

But something inside me feels quieter.

The world becomes a little less vivid. Things that used to interest me don't seem quite as interesting. Experiences that used to carry emotional weight begin to feel ordinary. My curiosity fades. My thoughts become less deliberate.

I'm still here.

Just a little less here than I was yesterday.

And the next day, a little less again.

It's not like a light going out. It's more like a dimmer switch being turned down so slowly that my eyes keep adjusting to the darkness.

I can still see.

I just don't remember how bright everything used to be.

That's what terrifies me.

Because right now, there's still a part of me that notices.

I can recognize when I'm becoming less present. I can compare how I feel today with how I remember feeling before. There's something inside me that says, Hey, something isn't right. Where the fuck are you going?

But what happens when that part of me starts to fade too?

What happens when the very awareness that recognizes something is missing becomes the next thing to disappear?

Who sounds the alarm then?

Who wakes me up?

I imagine myself years from now. I get out of bed, make coffee, go to work. I talk to friends, laugh at jokes, make plans for the weekend. Maybe I even tell people I'm happy.

To everyone around me, I'm perfectly normal.

But inside, there's nobody home.

I'm going through the motions of a life I used to experience. My behavior is intact, my memories are intact, but the richness of being alive has faded into something mechanical.

A zombie.

Not the kind that wanders around looking for brains. The kind that looks you in the eyes, smiles, and asks how your day was.

The kind you would never recognize as a zombie.

The kind that doesn't recognize itself.

And that's the truly horrifying possibility.

I wouldn't know I was gone.

There wouldn't be some final moment of awareness where I could say goodbye to myself. No realization that I'd crossed a line. No dramatic ending.

Just a gradual fading, until the person who might have noticed was no longer paying attention.

I've watched alcohol change people.

I've seen glimpses of what happens when someone slowly becomes a shadow of who they used to be. Someone can be physically present and yet feel impossibly far away.

I've experienced what it's like to love someone who's there, but not really there.

And I recognize little pieces of that same absence in myself when I drink regularly.

I don't know that the future I'm imagining is what would actually happen to me. But I know the feeling that makes me afraid of it.

It's real enough that I can recognize its arrival.

And it's subtle enough that I can imagine getting used to it.

Last month, I stopped drinking for 30 days.

And something remarkable happened.

I started feeling like myself again.

The world became more interesting. My thoughts felt sharper. I was more curious, more motivated, more emotionally engaged. Even the difficult parts of life felt more manageable.

Not because life had become easier.

Because I was more present to deal with it.

I could direct my thoughts and intentions where I wanted them to go. I could recognize what I was feeling and decide what to do with it. I felt like I was actually participating in my own existence.

I enjoyed being me.

And that's when I realized how much I had been missing.

It wasn't that I'd become stupid or incapable while drinking. I was still functioning. I was still doing the things I normally did.

But I'd lost some of the experience of doing them.

It's strange to think about how much of our existence depends on awareness.

We take it for granted because it's always there. It's the one thing through which we experience everything else.

Our memories. Our emotions. Our curiosity. Our understanding of the world. The feeling of being a person, rather than simply a collection of behaviors.

We don't just exist. We experience existing.

And I think there's an enormous difference between the two.

I've written before about alcohol creating a time warp. Evenings disappear, weekends disappear, and suddenly months have passed. You remember doing things, but somehow you don't feel like you were fully there for them.

What frightens me now is the possibility that the time warp doesn't have to end.

That eventually you could become so accustomed to experiencing less of your life that you stop recognizing anything is missing.

The days keep passing.

You keep waking up.

And a little less of you wakes up with them.

Until one morning, there's no one left to notice.

I don't want to find out how far that feeling can go.

I don't want to become comfortable with being less alive while still living.

I want to feel everything. The good, the bad, the uncomfortable, the beautiful, the mundane. I want to question things. I want to be curious. I want the world to mean something to me.

I want to be conscious of my own existence.

Because when I think about what makes me me, I keep coming back to that awareness.

And the most horrifying thing I can imagine isn't waking up one day and realizing I've lost myself.

It's waking up one day and not realizing there's anyone missing.