Chapter 12: Alcohol Was Never Just About Alcohol

Alcohol has been at the table for some of the warmest evenings of my life, and it was in the room for some of the worst. That sentence took me years to write with both halves still in it. 0

It softened a social stiffness Mormonism helped produce. It made some meals richer, some conversations easier, and some musical improvisations more honest and divine. The combination is what makes it impossible to treat alcohol as the simple freedom symbol many ex-Mormons want it to be. 0

I understand why the symbol exists. When coffee is suspicious, wine is forbidden, and a drink marks the boundary between insiders and outsiders, alcohol becomes more than alcohol. It becomes adulthood, normalcy, defiance, proof that the old authority no longer governs your body. Ordering a beer at thirty-five can be a small act of repossession. 0

My own tutors were two ex-Mormon friends in a group chat. I reported, like a teenager, that I had tried wine and a few shots in a club, and they walked me through the basics with the patience of men teaching a late reader: stick to simple things at first, your palate is new; mix the vodka with juice. And some Sprite, one added — for the Mormon in you. It was ridiculous and tender in equal measure. We had been raised to fear this menu, and now we were translating it for one another a decade after everyone else our age. 0

But symbols distort. Once alcohol becomes a badge of liberation, it becomes harder to ask what it is doing. You are not just drinking. You are proving something to an absent authority. You are performing freedom for yourself. That is a bad condition for judgment, especially around a substance that works by loosening judgment. 0

Mormonism was immature about alcohol. Its prescription was zero, for everyone, forever. Discernment was replaced by prohibition, abstinence was worn as a loyalty marker, and many people were left with only fear or rebellion. Neither is a mature relationship to a substance. The church did not teach people to evaluate context, motive, dependency, social pressure, loneliness, or family history. But it was not hallucinating when it treated alcohol as morally relevant. 0

Alcohol changes things. That is why people drink it. Sometimes it makes a dinner warmer or a guarded conversation easier. Sometimes it makes the worst available choice easier. For some people, the only wise relationship to alcohol is none at all, and that is not fear; it is knowledge. No slogan can hold that. 0

Sobriety is the first reality worth getting comfortable in. It is the state most attuned to survival, and survival is not a small good. A good life usually requires staying alive for a long time, remaining answerable to other people, remembering what happened, and noticing danger before it becomes dramatic. Sobriety is not merely the absence of pleasure. It is the ordinary instrument by which a person learns the world well enough to keep living in it. 0

But ordinary reality is not the only reality worth perceiving. There are levels of inebriation that can reveal warmth, musical courage, emotional honesty, the strangeness of familiar rooms, the beauty of other people when the usual defenses soften. Those revelations are not automatically fake because they arrive through a substance. They are not necessarily escape. Sometimes they are a different angle on reality. 0

Years later I put it this way to a believing friend: sobriety is calibrated to keep us safe, and I am calibrated to be too safe. The sober self is not the truest self. It is the safest, most productive self, and most of the time it should be in charge. But some of what I am proud of since leaving — the heartfelt performance instead of the careful one, telling a friend what he means to me and meaning it — happened a drink past my default settings. So did a couple of things I am not proud of. Both facts belong in the ledger. 0

The risk is that altered perception can feel like insight when it is only permission. It can disclose beauty and overstate it. It can loosen fear and responsibility. For many people, some risk may be worth taking in order to understand reality more fully. But it should be treated as risk, not proof of sophistication, rebellion, or healing. 0

Abstaining because Mormonism forbade alcohol and drinking because Mormonism forbade it both keep Mormonism at the center. The better question is harder: what kind of thing is this, and what does it do in my life? 0

Does it make me more present or less present? Does it help me receive pleasure cleanly, or smuggle pain past my own attention? What patterns appear around it? What do the people who love me experience when I drink? What do I become more likely to say, do, ignore, or excuse? 0

Mormonism spared people from asking them by answering in advance. That protected some people from harm. It also left many unpracticed. When the old answer lost authority, they had to learn discernment late, sometimes with higher stakes than they understood. That is one quiet tragedy of overprotection: it can keep you safe long enough to delay the wisdom you will need when safety ends. 0

I wish I had inherited a moral framework that could say: this can be good, this can be dangerous, this affects people differently, this requires honesty, and this should not become identity. Instead I inherited taboo, passed through rebellion, and now want clarity. Clarity says something less satisfying and more useful: some Mormon warnings become more believable as you age, not because Mormonism was true, but because human nature is not fake. 0

Appetite is not fake. Neither is regret, and neither is pleasure. The drink was never just a drink. The adult question is what else it is. 0