Wynford Ellis Owen
The real question is not why does he drink?
The real question / Y cwestiwn go iawn.
A young man takes his first drink long before the party begins.
Not because he hungers for the taste,
but because he cannot bear to arrive as himself.
The glass becomes a passport,
a quick border-crossing into a country
where he feels louder, looser, lighter —
anyone but the one he must live with when he is sober.
So the question is not, “Why does he drink?”
That is too shallow, too tidy.
The real question is far more human:
“What is it inside him that feels so unbearable
that he must abandon himself just to walk through a doorway?”
What wound taught him that his own skin is unsafe?
What silence convinced him that his true nature
is something to be fled rather than carried?
What early loneliness taught him that presence
must be softened, blurred, dissolved
before it can be offered to others?
And if this is the true question,
what does it ask of the healers —
the counsellors, the therapists,
those who one day may guide him home?
First, it asks for reverence.
For the understanding that alcohol is not the problem
but the protection.
A shield forged in crisis,
a strategy woven out of shame and fear.
To condemn it is to deepen the wound.
It asks for a room where he can meet himself
without flinching.
Where the parts he has exiled
are welcomed back with patience,
and where the quiet truth of him
is held gently enough that he dares to look at it.
It asks for a companion
who does not rush him toward transformation,
who does not demand the mask be dropped
before he has learned to breathe without it.
And it asks — above all
that the healer never collude with the escape.
Never soothe him away from his own depths.
Never hurry him past the ache that must be witnessed
before it can be healed.
For recovery is not the absence of drink.
It is the presence of a self
he no longer needs to run from.
It is the long, patient journey
from estrangement to belonging,
from disguise to truth,
from fleeing to finally coming home.