I Want To Tell You Guys A Story From My Life, About Something That Really Happened In My Family, & Then

i want to tell you guys a story from my life, about something that really happened in my family, & then i want to talk about that story in relation to what happened between ray & sand in ep10. let me be very clear -- this post is not intended to scold people for disliking ray. part of the reason i waited so long to write this was so i could have confidence that i was being fair & not letting my affection for the character colour what i wanted to say. i would really appreciate it if people who feel negatively about ray in particular took the time to read this & take it into consideration, as a sincere appeal from someone who has alcoholics in her family to really consider some of the ways i've seen this fandom talking about ray's addiction.

so. the story. some half-dozen years ago my uncle was trying to get sober. his marriage was on its last legs & no one wanted his kids to be living with their father while he was going through withdrawal if that could be avoided, so he came to stay with us for a while. my mum did her homework, understood enough to know that he shouldn't have easy access to alcohol in that time, & so we moved all of the alcohol we had to hand into a locked room in the cellar & gave the key to a neighbour for the duration of his stay. it went okay for a little while, & then my uncle had a fight with his wife over the phone, or something to that effect. in one night, he drank three half-bottles of prosecco which we'd forgotten we had stored in the garage.

we didn't even know that alcohol was there. we'd totally forgotten about it. but because we missed it, what should have been a bad night turned into a relapse. keeping alcohol in close proximity to a recovering alcoholic, especially in the early days of sobriety, makes it so, so easy for them to backslide. partly because constantly knowing it's there can wear on them, sure, but mostly because no matter how strong anyone's commitment, there will always be moments when they falter, & the easier it is made for them to relapse in those moments, the likelier it is that they will. & maybe not everyone in this situation would relapse, but you cannot know whether a person will or won't until it happens. most of it's up to factors far beyond your control. it is not worth taking that risk with someone you love.

so trust that i am speaking from bitter experience when i say that sand's home-brewing was always, always going to be a problem. they put it in the opening credits, for god's sake. i was absolutely certain from ep2, when we first found out about the plum wine, that whether ray ultimately tried to get sober or not, the easy access to alcohol that a relationship with sand granted him was destined to be point of conflict between them. sand was always going to have to confront the tension between his relationship with an alcoholic & his main (?) source of income being home-brewed alcohol, & he was always going to have to choose between them. & it is not fair to sand that he has to make that choice, i know. it's fine if you think that he made the wrong choice, or that he shouldn't have had to make that choice at all, but it was inevitable that he would have to, fair or not. because if you have an alcoholic in your life, you are most likely going to have to change your behaviours around them, in big ways & small, for their benefit. this is just how it goes.

i was astonished that there were people who seemed caught off-guard by this fight -- the only thing that surprised me was that it happened before ray was really taking rehab seriously, because i fully expected that this fight would happen after a relapse, likely one involving the plum wine, a couple months into sobriety. there was no version of this show that could both be honest about ray's alcoholism & fail to highlight this conflict at some point. they gave sand this source of income specifically so that sand & ray would have this problem down the line. it was so obvious to me that this was coming, i just took it as a given that everyone else saw it too. & again, this post is not intended to judge anyone for how they have interacted with this show or with this character, that's not what i'm here to do. but i do want to address an element of the way that i have seen some people talk about ray & his addiction.

it is fine if you don't like this character. i am not going to scold you for being understandably mad about the way that he has treated the people around him. but it is very frustrating, & sometimes downright upsetting, to occasionally see people speaking with great confidence on alcoholism despite saying things which i know from lived experience to be inaccurate, or worse, unfair. i am not here to judge you, but i am going to ask you extend a certain amount of grace to this character, & more importantly to all the people who see themselves or their loved ones in him. if you're going to talk about alcoholism, or the aspects of ray's character & actions which are intimately linked with his alcoholism, i would ask you to take some time to make sure that you do actually know what you're talking about. if you're criticizing ray -- & there is plenty to criticize! -- i would ask you to take a moment to think about whether you're really just holding him accountable, or if maybe you're being unduly harsh on him. i think there's more than a few people in this fandom who have some unexamined biases around addiction & those who suffer from it; this is an excellent opportunity for all of us to educate ourselves on this subject. i've been learning a lot about what different structured recovery programs look like; neither my uncle nor anyone else i'm close to ever pursued one, & i'd never sought out information on that before.

ray isn't real. none of the people he's hurting are real, either. but he & the people around him are a very well-written reflection of a very common, very difficult experience. you don't have to like him, but if you want to understand more about addiction i think he could be a really good starting point for that. if you don't want to, i genuinely get it -- sometimes you just want to watch a show & enjoy it without having to do homework. that's okay. but if that's your position, then please think twice before making public posts passing judgement on the show's representation of an incredibly complicated & sensitive topic.

i'll reiterate one last time that this post was not intended to judge, scold, or otherwise castigate; i hope that i've managed to maintain an acceptable level of the objectivity i was aiming for, & if i haven't, then my apologies, i definitely tried. if you're going to disagree with some of what i've written, that's fine, but please remember that i wrote all of this based on my personal experience with a family member, & be kind.