The best you can &
the best you are able

There is a phrase you hear constantly, and which I have spent more time than I should admit thinking about.

I’m doing the best I can.

You hear it from co-workers under pressure. You hear it from family members in conflict. You hear it from yourself, often, when something has not gone the way you wanted and you are looking for the explanation that lets you keep moving.

My claim about this phrase is that it is, strictly speaking, always true. What you do is the best you can — by definition. You did it. You did not do better. Therefore the thing you did was the best you were capable of doing in that exact configuration of body, mind, mood, context, and circumstance.

The standard objection is reasonable enough. I know you can do better. I’ve seen you do better. You ran a faster mile last Tuesday. You wrote a better paragraph the previous draft. You spoke more kindly the previous conversation. You handled the same situation more capably six months ago. The track record disproves the claim.

But the objection confuses two related quantities. The best you can is what you do in any given instant, on any given day, in whatever state you happen to be in. The best you are able is the ceiling — what you can accomplish when you attack the issue in optimum condition.

The track record proves the second. The disappointing moment was the first.

Take the college runner with a PR in the mile of 3:45. He goes out to a frat party the night before practice and drinks until 2 AM. The next morning he runs 4:55.

He is doing the best he can. He is not doing the best he is able.

The two numbers are the same person. Same legs, same lungs, same training. What changed was the state. The state determined the ceiling that day.

This is not a moral failure. It is not a lack of will. It is not, in any meaningful sense, the runner’s fault that he ran 4:55. He ran the best he could given the state he had created. The 4:55 was the honest measurement of his capability at 7 AM on the morning after a frat party.

The interesting question is not why he ran 4:55. It is what relationship he wants to have with the gap between 4:55 and 3:45 over the rest of his life.

The best you are able is not a fixed number. It moves. The direction it moves depends entirely on what the best-you-cans across many days look like.

If most of your days are operating near the ceiling — sleep good, mind clear, body unstressed, not metabolizing alcohol from the previous evening — the ceiling rises. The body adapts. The mind sharpens. The thing you could not do last year you can do this year. The best you are able moves upward because the best you can has been pressing against it consistently.

If most of your days are operating well below the ceiling — sleep fragmented, mind muddy, body processing the previous night’s beverages, mood pulled lower than your baseline — the ceiling stagnates. You never approach it. The body adapts to mediocrity. The thing you could do last year you cannot quite do this year, and a year from now you will not be able to do this year’s version either. The best you are able stays where it was, then quietly begins to fall, because nothing in your life is asking it to rise.

This is the most important fact about drinking that the popular literature does not name.

The conventional account is that drinking is bad because of acute consequences — the hangover, the missed deadline, the broken promise, the embarrassing thing said at the office party, the DUI. These are real. They are also small.

The actual cost of sustained consumption is the relationship it forces between best you can and best you are able. Take any meaningful metric. Your mood. The number of times in a week you can genuinely empathize with another person. The number of times you tell someone close to you that you love them and mean it as a transmission rather than a verbal habit. The depth of pleasure you get from listening to a song that should move you, or from a conversation that should land, or from a sentence on a page that should illuminate something.

Any of these metrics, under sustained alcohol consumption, will strictly decline over time. Not in jumps. In slow continuous gradient. The best-you-cans of any given week trend slightly below where they were a year ago, which trended slightly below the year before that. The best-you-are-able — the ceiling — stops rising because nothing is reaching it. Then the ceiling starts to fall, because the muscle of reaching it has atrophied. And the gap between what you do today and what you would have been capable of, had your last decade gone differently becomes the actual measurement of what drinking has cost.

There is no acute moment when this becomes visible. There is no Tuesday you wake up and say my ceiling has dropped twelve percent over the last three years. The decline is too slow to feel. It is only legible in retrospect, comparing the person you were at thirty-two to the person you have become at forty-one. And by then the gap is large enough that it cannot be closed without months of work, sometimes years.

I was passed out on the bathroom floor, which, luckily (I think?) had carpet. I should probably explain how I got into this state, although I would note that anyone with a drinking history like mine could probably fill in the blanks. I was married at the time (we’ll call her my ex), had a young family and had in-laws visiting. We were making dinner for the whole crew, and the expected chaos was playing out in real time. I should also mention that we were abroad, and did not speak the local language. Compounding issues, I was also out of work while trying to negotiate (unsuccessfully, as it turned out) my temporary work status and ability to work in the local economy; a fact that I seemed to be questioned about repeatedly, as if by repetition the circumstances would change.

I had gone to the bathroom, not to relieve myself physically, but to relieve myself mentally. I was sitting in the bathroom to catch a moment’s peace. It was then I had the thought, you know what I could use? Just a quick nap. That’s how I ended up passed out on the floor of the bathroom. It all made so much sense in the moment.

My ex, sometime later, knocked (as I had been in there for a while) and asked how I was. Awakened, now, and apparently wanting neither to lie nor express the truth, I mentioned I’m just finishing up. I’ll be right out. This, sadly, was the best I could do at that moment.

What we were seeing was actually a lie. It was also, in the strictest sense, the truth. He would, in fact, be right out. He would stand up off the carpet, splash water on his face, look in the mirror for approximately one second, open the door, and return to the family.

But the larger thing the sentence was doing — communicating to his partner that nothing was wrong, that he was a person handling his ordinary life like an ordinary adult — was a fabrication so complete that it amounted to a small act of marriage erosion that he had no capacity to recognize at the time.

He is not telling this story to invoke pity, or to perform contrition, or to use the bathroom floor as theater. He is telling it because it is the clearest available example, in his own life, of the philosophical distinction this essay has been building toward.

I’ll be right out was, on that afternoon, the best he could do.

It was not the best he was able to do. The best he was able would have been a different sentence entirely. Something like: I’m sorry. I passed out on the bathroom floor. I have been hiding from you for months. The work situation collapsed two weeks ago and I have not figured out how to tell you. I am drinking through the days because I do not know what else to do. We need to talk about how we get me back.

That sentence would have been hard. It would have launched a difficult conversation. It might have led, eventually, to a different marriage, or to no marriage, or to the same marriage on different terms. It would have been, by any meaningful measurement, more honest, more dignified, more worthy of the family on the other side of the door.

He could not produce that sentence. The state he had built — the years of drinking, the months of failed negotiation, the afternoon’s specific quantity of alcohol, the depleted nervous system, the carpet still imprinting on my cheek — had set his ceiling for that afternoon at exactly I’ll be right out.

He was doing the best he could.

He was not doing the best he was able.

The hardest part of the engineering response to drinking is not the mechanical act of not drinking. The hardest part is what the gap looks like once you can see it clearly.

For some months after stopping, you spend a great deal of time looking backward at moments like the bathroom floor and recognizing them, often for the first time, as moments when your ceiling had been set artificially low by the substance you were using. The accumulation of these recognitions is its own kind of grief. The bathroom floor is one. The conversation that should have gone differently is another. The decision that should have been made earlier is a third. The relationship that quietly drained because you were operating at sixty percent of your actual capacity for six years is a fourth.

You did the best you could in each of them. You did not, in any of them, do the best you were able. The ceiling was lower than it had to be. The state, more than anything else, was the variable.

The forward-looking version of the same observation is what makes the work tractable. The best you are able is not fixed. The ceiling rises when the best-you-cans approach it. Every day spent not metabolizing alcohol, sleeping properly, eating something the body recognizes, moving the body a little, talking to another person with full attention — each of these is the best-you-can of that day pressing against the ceiling.

A year of this kind of pressing and the ceiling has moved. Five years and the ceiling is somewhere you would not have recognized as possible from the bathroom floor.

This is not a promise. It is a measurement. The people I know who have stopped drinking and stayed stopped for years are not happier in some vague self-help sense. They are operating closer to their actual capability. The gap between what they do and what they are able to do has closed.

The thing that gets returned, in sobriety, is not what the wellness industry tells you it is. It is not bliss. It is not transcendence. It is the very specific gift of being able to produce, when the moment requires it, a sentence other than I’ll be right out.

That gift is, in my experience, the one I have come to consider worth the work.

— Ben Walker