Jonas Polsky

by Jonas Polsky

I’m “straight edge.” The only other expression I know to describe myself with is “teetotaller”, but I don’t think anyone has used that since the fifties.

It doesn’t matter which I use, because either is met with blank stares.

I’m a person who chooses to not drink or do drugs. The English language only has two expressions for that, because it’s a tremendously unpopular choice. A choice that requires a lot of justification. I’ve spent a lot of time explaining that it’s not due to religion, or being in recovery, I just don’t do it.

The more I’ve aged, the more reasons, or situations to be sober I’ve encountered, so there’s no one thing to point to that explains why. I didn’t get high and stab my cousin, and no one died in a drunk driving accident. Religion and tragedy apparently are the only acceptable excuses for self-imposed sobriety.

When I was really young, I was into punk music, and some of that music was straight edge and would tell you that drinking and smoking wasn’t cool. I was at a very impressionable age, and I let these musicians poison my mind with the idea that you could enjoy life more by staying sober.

Then I moved to a farm. I was probably twelve years old, and that’s when the “bug” to smoke marijuana kicked in, but there was none to be found. The town I lived in had a gas station and no supermarket. I have no idea where my mother got our food. I was socially stranded, and the only thing people were doing in my town was chewing tobacco.

My parents divorced when i was seven, and the judge in the divorce, in his infinite wisdom thought it best for my younger sister and I to live with our mother, and the three other children to live with our dad. My father was permissive, reclusive, and probably despondent. As a result his home was filled with wild children chain-smoking cigarettes, and up to all hours drinking and taking LSD.

Visiting them was a culture shock, and for a child that with almost no exposure to any of those things, I was frightened, and probably disgusted by it.

Then I became an adolescent and suddenly had access to marijuana and beer. I alternated between the worry that my obsessive tendencies would turn me into a drug addict, or alcoholic at the first indulgence. This was accompanied by the fear that drugs would ruin my ability to think clearly, and impact my status as a budding fifteen-year-old intellectual, which I was not. I didn’t want to live with the uncertainty that I was lazy, or bad in school because I’d taken drugs.

As the years passed, different rationale floated in and out, but whatever the situation was, I just never started. When you’re nineteen and have never smoked a cigarette, you’ve likely passed the point of no return in being interested in getting high.

Society has a funny way of explaining what is expected of you; mostly through tradition, expectations, and guilt. When I explain that I don’t drink I’m met with looks of suspicion, and scorn. Frequently I’m told that I’m lying, and must have been in rehab, and clearly that was the answer. Otherwise, why would someone choose to not drink?

Drugs and alcohol impact the brain and nervous system to simulate an emotion. Emotions, the most of which I think, can be accessed naturally. Elation, confidence, happiness, they are all available in non-ingestible forms. Unfortunately, in order to feel them, you have to go out and do something with yourself. That’s the give-and-take with sobriety.

Drugs and alcohol represent a temporary “escape” from the tedium, and hopelessness that is human life. I am not afforded the comfort of this escape. I live in a miserable world, and I face it each day sober, and it is horrifying.

The upside of this knowledge is that I endeavor each day to improve my life, and the world around me, as opposed to hiding from it.

In George Orwell’s ‘1984’ they depict alcohol as a means of pacifying, and satiating the proletariat. The injustice, and abuse the prole suffers in a blue collar job is erased when he can down a liter of beer and feel like a king, until the following morning when reality beckons.

I’m straight edge. It’s not sexy, or cool, and probably the ultimate social hindrance. The funny part is being sober is actually the most normal, and sensible method of existence, but try explaining that to society. I have.