He started seeing things that had no business being there and hearing voices when nobody was speaking. At first, he blamed the alcohol. Then he realised the frightening things did not always disappear when he was sober, and he no longer trusted his own mind.
By Gogo Bathini Mbatha
Sneakily, with stealth, an ominous moment arrives when the glass in your hand ceases to be a choice, a comfort, or even a crutch; it becomes an ocean, and you are going under.
You do not just drink the alcohol; you surrender your body to it, slowly at first, line by line, until the amber waters rush over your crown and seal you beneath a heavy, suffocating stillness. Up above, the world you once belonged to — the voices, the warmth, the life that once begged you to stay — shrinks into a muffled, desperate echo, crying out to you from behind a wall of thick, impenetrable liquid.
I know that place because I lived there.
Ngasengihlanya. Yes, I went mad.
Alcohol had become an enchanting yet deeply evil and toxic mistress, one that knew precisely how to make me feel wanted while quietly taking pieces of me away. It offered comfort when I was uncomfortable with myself, relief when my thoughts became difficult to bear and a temporary escape from a reality I increasingly did not want to face.
I kept returning to it because, in those moments, alcohol seemed to understand me better than I understood myself. What I did not see was that this seductive relationship was becoming increasingly destructive. The more I surrendered to it, the more it demanded from me, until it began taking things I never imagined I could lose: my appetite, my sense of time, my judgement, and eventually my grip on reality.
That was when the figures began appearing.
I would sit in the dimness of my room and stare into corners where the shadows no longer behaved as shadows should. Shapes would drift across the room, looking like people or things shaped like people, except that they seemed to have no lower bodies. They appeared suspended inches above the floor, their bodies somehow incomplete, as though the darkness had erased everything below a certain point and left the rest hanging in the air.
I would stare at them, trying to understand what my eyes were showing me, sometimes looking away and then looking back, hoping that whatever I had seen would have disappeared.
Then came the voices. I would hear them close to my ears, sometimes as though several people were speaking at once, their words dissolving into a low, chaotic hum. I could not always make out what they were saying, but I knew they were there. They invaded the silence of my room and followed me into the hours when I should have been sleeping.
The frightening thing was not only that I saw those figures when I was blind drunk. There were times when the glass was empty, and they remained. I could still hear voices when I was sober. I could still see people who were not there.
The alcohol had taken me to a place where I could no longer rely on sobriety to restore the boundary between what was real and what existed only inside my head. The mistress that had once seemed to offer me escape had followed me into the very corners of my mind where I had expected to find refuge.
My relationship with time began to collapse as well. I could no longer tell whether it was Monday or Sunday, and the distinction stopped mattering. Tuesday could dissolve into Friday without creating any sense of urgency.
Days were no longer marked by clocks, sunlight, work or appointments; they were measured by the level of alcohol remaining in the bottle and by whether there was enough money in my pocket to buy another one.
As long as I had alcohol and money for the next bottle, I could convince myself that everything was in order. That became my peculiar definition of security. I could be hungry, exhausted, confused or surrounded by things that were not really there, but if I knew there was enough money to keep drinking, I felt that I had what I needed. Everything else could wait.
I was living in a world of my own, and in that world there was an enormous swimming pool filled to the brim with whisky. I did not imagine myself standing beside it, deciding whether to enter. I was already in the water. I had become so accustomed to being surrounded by alcohol that the idea of climbing out seemed more frightening than remaining submerged. The pool had become my private kingdom, except I was gradually losing everything beyond its edges.
Sobriety became the true nightmare.
The mere thought of being sober could make my stomach twist and my skin crawl. There was something deeply uncomfortable about having to face the world without alcohol between me and my own thoughts. I had become so dependent on that feeling of being intoxicated that its absence could feel like deprivation.
If there was another bottle waiting for me, I could tolerate almost anything. I could tolerate the hunger, the exhaustion, the confusion and even the strange things happening inside my head because I knew I could drink again.
Food gradually disappeared from my life. People around me noticed that I was losing weight. My clothes began hanging loosely from my body, my collarbones became more prominent, and people wondered whether something was wrong with me. They did not know that I could barely eat anymore.
My taste buds had become indifferent to ordinary food. Bread did not have the appeal it once had. Water seemed uninteresting. Proper meals had become almost irrelevant because my mind had become fixated on alcohol.
My body was asking for nourishment, but my mind wanted something else.
My eyes became dark red and permanently bloodshot, while my mind was becoming darker in ways that nobody could see simply by looking at me. I was losing weight, I was barely eating, I was losing track of the days, I was seeing people who did not exist, and hearing voices without anyone speaking, yet I kept finding ways to explain each thing separately.
I could blame the weight on not eating properly, the eyes on drinking too much, and the confusion on the strange hours I was keeping. Even the hallucinations could be dismissed as something that happened when I had drunk too much alcohol.
That was the strange power alcohol had acquired over me. It could be responsible for the damage and still persuade me that the damage was not serious enough to make me stop. It could make me sick and then offer itself as the thing that would make me feel better.
It had become an enchanting, poisonous presence in my life, one I knew was hurting me but could not imagine living without.
In the middle of that wreckage, my Indian landlord saw what I could not. He warned me many times about my drinking, but his concern was never expressed as irritation with a troublesome tenant or as the judgement of someone who thought he knew better than me.
There was something much more personal in the way he spoke to me. He had watched me deteriorate over time, watched the alcohol take hold of my life and watched me become a version of myself that was increasingly difficult to recognise.
While I was still finding reasons to drink, he was witnessing the consequences that I had become too intoxicated, too frightened or too lost to acknowledge.
I imagine there must have been moments when he wondered what had happened to the man he had known before the drinking became this consuming. Perhaps that is why his warnings stayed with me. He was not speaking to the bottle in my hand; he was speaking to me. Beneath the bloodshot eyes, the weight I had lost, the strange things I was seeing and the increasingly erratic person standing before him, he was still trying to reach the human being he believed was somewhere inside all of that.
One day, his concern became a plea. He spoke to me in fluent isiZulu, not with the detached tone of somebody offering advice that could be ignored, but with the urgency of someone who feared that he might be watching a man disappear before his eyes:
“Shandu utshwala buzokubulala. Buyeke, isikhathi sisavuma.”
(Shandu, this alcohol will kill you. Leave it while time is still on your side.)
Those words have stayed with me because they came from someone who had no obligation to carry my burden. He could have looked away. He could have decided that what I did with my life was my own business. Instead, he kept warning me, kept trying to reach me and, at a time when I had become increasingly detached from my own wellbeing, cared enough to tell me something I did not want to hear.
I was living inside a world that alcohol had created for me, but he was looking at me from the outside and seeing the cost. He could see the man disappearing beneath the drinking even while I was still telling myself that I was managing. His words were therefore not simply a warning about alcohol. They were an attempt to pull me back towards myself while there was still enough of me left to reach.
His warning was about time, and that is what haunts me most when I remember that period. I had stopped caring what day it was, yet I was behaving as though I had an endless supply of tomorrows. I was spending today as though tomorrow were guaranteed.
The swimming pool in my mind had become so vast that I could no longer see its edges. The water that had once seemed comforting had become the entire landscape of my life, and alcohol had become the mistress I kept returning to even as she stripped away everything I needed to remain myself. She had made surrender feel like comfort for so long that I did not recognise how completely I had surrendered.
My landlord was telling me there was still time to turn around.
I did not understand how little of it I had left.
Gogo Bathini Mbatha: Founder of Sober Beings/ Traditional Healer/ Researcher/ Spiritual Educator