MY LAST DRINK – TIM OLSEN

Professor Ross Fitzgerald is proud to say that he has been sober for over 50 years. Thanks to Alcoholics Anonymous and the support he found among its members. As a prolific author, Ross Fitzgerald has again taken up the subject of recovered alcoholism in a new book My Last Drink, co-edited with Neal Price, an artist and writer who now lives in Hobart, Tasmania. The book brings together the stories of 32 recovering alcoholics and offers a window on a world of diverse backgrounds, experience and occasions of drink. To gain an insight into the contributions in the book, trauma-informed therapist, Systemic and Family Constellation practitioner Di Young and Art entrepreneur Tim Olsen joined Ross Fitzgerald on Monday 31 October 2022 to tell something of their stories.

MY LAST DRINK

TIM OLSEN

I was brought up to witness that “The only recluse for an artist is intoxication.” – Oscar Wilde.

Well, if it was good enough for an artist, then obviously it was good enough for me. For a long time, I believed that I was born a natural escape artist and probably had a propensity for drinking. I saw alcoholism as a disease I had carried from birth, a silent addict’s gene. Many people think that it’s something you develop gradually or adopt desperately during a hard time, a character defect or lack of willpower. By my early forties, I knew differently; I was in the claws of addiction, my drinking was an unmanageable crisis.

I cannot blame my addiction on my profession (as a gallerist and art dealer) but it certainly did not help. The art world eases you into a life where everything is bought, sold, resolved and discussed over a shared bottle. My life was cushioned inside an illness that became more obvious as the drinks surfaced earlier each day. I was gradually becoming more and more detached from work and family, like a man living on a park bench within his own home.

Thank God I had wonderful staff at the gallery, because I was running the gallery from a distance. My business, in those great art-boom years, was expanding — and so was I. Drinking and eating far too much, I was literally fermenting and looked 30 years older. In summer, overweight and with a suntan, my mother would describe me as “a map of self-indulgence”. I was treating my body like an amusement park.

Few can see their most negative manifestations gradually engulfing them, but I would look in the mirror and could not recognise myself. Alcoholism (and obesity) was a mask that I could not remove. For those who have an innate fear of clowns, the face of Luna Park was perhaps less frightening than mine. It is terrifying when one becomes one’s worst horror.

Every day was a quiet rampage. For most of the time, I was very good at getting through the day, but it was after everyone went to bed that I would reach into the back of a cupboard or look to the back of the fridge or freezer, and the bottle would open. I would sit, isolated, and I would drink myself into a morbid state of self-pity or oblivion.

My rock bottom was long overdue. I had been living in a state of delusion that I could get control over this thinking, that I was capable of being a controlled drinker. But ultimately, as life unfolded, it seemed evident that I was completely powerless over alcohol – anytime I started, I could not stop. I was living in a state of subconscious endlessness when it came to alcohol. The droll of daily anxiety, waiting for the early opener, or getting to a restaurant for lunch quickly.

In rehab, they talk about “crossing the thin red line” from controlled drinking to problem drinking. I believe that trauma, (chronic business and personal stress, a car accident which left me in a coma as a child, my early childhood sexual abuse – and yes, my drinking habits and obesity) was my line.

One Christmas morning, after drinking all night, I found myself under the Christmas tree surrounded by empty bottles and yet-to-be-unwrapped gifts. My son, James, was three, and he was sobbing, pleading, “Daddy, Daddy, can you please help me open my presents?” Santa might have come and gone, but Dad was a mess on the floor. My head was feeling like it had been in a vice all night and my mouth was like the bottom of a cockie’s cage. The alcoholic self totally pickled by the grog of the night before. Now my son was witnessing and becoming affected by my addiction. This was my precipice; “Enough was enough.”

After somehow gathering myself together to attend the family Christmas lunch at my sister’s, later that night I booked myself into the Betty Ford Centre in Palm Springs and, on Boxing Day, was on the first flight to Los Angeles. I have seen alcoholism played out in both my grandfathers as emotional abuse and dependency. Remembering all of this, and the deep sense of shame and guilt, my greatest reason to stop was for James, to cease this cycle within the family chronology permanently.

One of the most alarming things that happened to me while I was completing my admission in Nevada desert, was being led into an office for my initial assessment to ascertain my state of addiction. There was a man, sitting behind a desk, who resembled Keith Richards. He had obviously been to hell and back and now he had assumed that calm mien of a wise sage of recovery. He asked me, “What is the worst thing that could happen to you if you left here and continued to drink?” Almost mechanically, I replied, “I’m going to die.” It must have been what he had heard every time a new patient arrived, because he immediately replied, “No, that might not be the worst thing. Because, according to your family, you are a pain in the arse. They would be sad, of course, if you were to die but, ultimately, they would be better off without you.” I reeled with shock at the harshness of his words, but they turned out to be exactly the reality I needed to hear. Although originally only intending to stay at Betty Ford for a month, this extended to three. After 30 days I may have been sober but far from sane.

Betty Ford took an approach like no other rehab I had visited. Like a tattered tall ship, I had to have every sail ripped of grandiosity, denial and delusion torn down and dismantled so I could be rebuilt as a stronger vessel. I had to forget everything I thought I knew. I had to admit, and accept, that I was completely powerless over alcohol, to surrender and understand that I could not do this on my own, and to believe in the prospect of a miracle in discovering a spiritual humility, to hand over my addiction to something that seemed invisible and intangible.

In rehab, I was a nobody, just another addict. The Olsen name was not going to shield me or be advantageous, the buffer I had used as an excuse to be a bon vivant. Being isolated and anonymous on the other side of the world helped me focus on the delusion and ego I had been living in. A very big part of sobering up is realising that you are not special, that you are no better than anyone else. When you develop some kind of humility and go to meetings, with every kind of person, you realise that you are all reduced to being simply “garden-variety” alcoholics, as they say. Alcoholism is very egalitarian. No one is immune. Often the privileged are its greatest victims.

I continued to attend AA meetings but I was not following the program and did not have a sponsor. My “last drink” became my next relapse. A successful path to a truly happy life in sobriety requires a huge deflation in ego. To become brutally honest with oneself. It is a constant challenge when people keep praising your success when there is always a part inside you that feels like you do not deserve it. Another great quote from Oscar Wilde is, “It is often worse to be destroyed by praise, than ruined by criticism.”

The difference in coming back into the program was the realisation of the depth of my problem, the necessity for a sponsor and the dedication the program requires. I met Ross Fitzgerald at St. Mark’s at Edgecliff, where my son went to kindergarten. The last time I had been in that room, my James was playing Goldilocks – a blinding contrast. Now I go every morning to attend meetings at the Bondi Pavilion. In the 1930s, the Pavilion had a ballroom and a cabaret room where my grandparents attended parties and Harry, my grandfather, would drink to excess. The irony is not lost on me.

My commitment to battling alcoholism coincided with the spiky precipice that is turning 50 and the vulnerability to all that a midlife crisis implies. I then realised the pinnacle of sober living, “You cannot think your way into a new way of living, you can only live your way into a new way of thinking.” I could not think myself sober, only live myself into sobriety. It was not until I started putting days of avoiding alcohol together that abstinence became my lifestyle.

In the first weeks of going straight, I would use memory to trigger aversion. Memories of how squalid life had been with booze, waking up in the morning to reach into the freezer to take a swig of vodka, hanging out for the first pub to open, I had been an urbanised derelict.

When I eventually got completely sober, the clarity was both enlightening and frightening. Facing the truth of my past mistakes and behaviour was highly confronting. The only way to dissipate the shame was to accept it as a learning experience, apologise and make amends where I could. Finally, I was able to make sense of things and realise how interesting and great my life had actually been.

I have now been sober for nearly eleven years. As I sit in my home, overlooking Sydney Harbour I know how lucky I am and that I would never have achieved any of this, and the success of my gallery (30 years this year) if I had still been drinking. The gifts are apparent every day. AA is an invitation to live, to get a life!! As one may put it.

Getting sober was the best way for me to stop being a self-saboteur, an obstacle to my own happiness, and the happiness of those around me. Especially those that love me. For me, it was simple: I can have alcohol, or I can have everything. Thank God, I chose everything.

In technicolour.