My Lies Were the Bodyguards of My Addiction

By Gogo Bathini Mbatha

If you had asked me, in my worst years, who was in charge of my drinking, I would have answered without blinking. I was.

I thought I was the one doing the pouring. It took me years to see that the bottle was pouring something into me as well, and what it poured was a liar.

Every bottle I finished left something behind in me. Not a headache, not a hangover. It left behind a fat and well-fed liar who grew stronger with every drink, until I could no longer tell the difference between the stories I told myself and the truth.

I do not mean the ordinary kind. Most of us bend the truth for the people around us, and that is normal, if not admirable. I mean the kind who lies to himself every morning and believes it by lunchtime. I built stories that never existed, furnished them, and moved in. That is the madness of it. Lying to others is a habit, but lying to yourself and believing it is a sickness.

I knew what the drink was doing. I could see it eating my health, my name and my future. Yet I told myself the real problem was witchcraft.

I grew up hearing that my grandfather never touched alcohol. Never. So what did I do with that fact? I turned it inside out. I announced that I was drinking on behalf of the ancestors, especially my grandmother. A man who could not stop was now a man on a spiritual errand. It was a very comfortable story, and I wore it like a good coat.

The coat fitted perfectly, and the reason is what I am. I am a traditional healer. Who was going to argue with a healer about the will of his ancestors? The lie did not have to be sewn from scratch. It was cut to my measurements. When anyone expressed the smallest doubt, whether friends, relatives or ordinary people, I lectured them. I told them how foolish it would be not to carry out the will of my ancestors and drink as per command.

I presented my swimming in booze as an integral part of my calling, and I dared anybody to challenge me.

That is the danger of this particular lie. I told it so often, and with such conviction, that a part of me began to believe it. The more a person repeats a lie with conviction, and a drunkard does it better than most, the more he starts to believe it himself. It dresses in the stolen coat of the truth, and it can keep that coat on for years, until somebody brave enough pulls one thread and the whole thing unravels.

My late mother would not let me hide behind that story. She saw the coat for what it was: the lie of a drunk, dressed up as the word of the ancestors. She knew, and she was not afraid to tell me that I was a drunk lying about my ancestors. She looked me straight in the eye and told me I was not drinking for her mother. I was drowning in alcohol because ngiyaphapha. Full stop.

No ancestors to blame, no grandmother to invoke, no spiritual errand to hide behind. Just me and the bottle.

She refused to let me dress up my drinking as something noble when it was destroying me. My mother was a straight talker. She had a way of cutting through all the nonsense and bringing me face to face with myself. I have never stopped missing that about her.

I had seen what drink did to my family, my friends, the whole community. I had buried people it took. And still I told myself it would not happen to me. I was smarter. Wiser. More careful than they were. Every word of that was a lie. I could see that I was spending money recklessly when drunk, and I still refused to be corrected.

Here is the painful part about being a liar: you start trusting other liars. You do not notice that you have joined the choir, singing from the same hymn book, The Glorified Gospel of Liars. And their lies are tailor-made for you, so that you keep paying for the lifestyle. Alcoholics are clever people. Not one of them will ever criticise the sponsor.

The first time I knew the lying had turned chronic was when it reached my clients. I called them small lies because I would fall short on something that was ninety-nine per cent done. A flight, already paid for, missed because I was drunk. Muthi ingredients sitting right there, all of them available, never mixed, and a lie to cover it because I was drunk. A call-out appointment where I simply did not show up, and a story ready for the phone call afterwards because I was far too drunk to stand.

Those lies became my armour. I was ashamed to look at my own life and admit it had become unmanageable. I lied so well that I forgot how sensitive my work is. People bring me their sick children, their grief, their fear.

I took advantage of my family and my clients, and I did it under the heavy influence of drink, which I now know was never an excuse, only a reason.

Even then, it never crossed my mind that I was an alcoholic. Not Gogo Bathini Mbatha, with millions of viewers on YouTube. That is what I told myself. My ego was running on magical horsepower, and it carried me a very long way in the wrong direction.

Nobody tells you that the liar gets fed by the very applause you think is keeping you upright. I fed that pathetic animal for years. Today I am learning to starve it, one honest morning at a time.

Gogo Bathini Mbatha: Founder of Sober Beings/ Traditional Healer/ Researcher/ Spiritual Educator