When Drinking Became Part of Me
The beginning
I knew drinking would be a problem from the first time I tasted alcohol. I was 17.
I remember the day perfectly. I was at a concert with a friend from high school. The year was 2003. She bought a shot of whiskey from the bar (they didn’t ask for IDs) and gave me a sip. As the alcohol sank into my mouth, all my senses agreed that it tasted terrible and I coughed. But, to keep up appearances, I kept taking sips. Obviously, I didn’t want to look uncool with the popular kids. After a few sips, I felt lightheaded and kind of enjoyed the feeling.
Believing that whiskey couldn’t be the only type of alcohol that kids my age drank, in time I began experimenting with other drinks that were easier on the palate: wine, champagne, cocktails, and eventually beer. They were much better. Alcohol became my drink of choice when going out with friends.
As I entered college in 2004, drinking quickly became a habit. Any time my friends and I had over 30 minutes to kill between classes, we would go to the bar on the other side of the street from campus and have a few shots of cachaça. In case you’ve never heard of it, cachaça is a Brazilian drink made from sugarcane and it tastes like pure alcohol. But at this point, the taste didn’t matter. I longed for the buzz. By my last semester at college, I was drinking almost 6 days a week.
You could call my habit ‘social drinking’. I drank to be a part of the crowd. I first drank to be accepted by the cool kids; I continued drinking because I no longer knew how to socialize without it. Drinking made me feel at ease, comfortable, confident, social, flirty. I could be funny and witty. People paid attention to me. When I went to a social event and didn’t consume any alcohol, I felt socially awkward, out of place, and shy. Soon, I couldn’t even fathom going out and not drinking.
After I left college, there weren’t any more daily (rather nightly) escapes to bars and clubs and adult life settled in. Drinking was pushed to the weekends and required a lot more effort to coordinate. Even then, not everybody had the stamina to go on drinking binges for the entire weekend. Jobs took a bigger toll on us than college. So I started going out by myself.
When you are a compulsive drinker, there is always one specific bar where everyone knows you and you feel comfortable going alone. You might even have a tab there — which I did. When there was no one to go with me, I would go to my favorite bar alone. I would always arrive with a beer already in hand — bought at a gas station on the way — to the dismay of the owner. I would then proceed to drink for hours and only go home when the bar closed.
In 2013 I had my first depressive episode. It was very severe and I was confident that I was going to die. I reached out for help with my doctor and my therapist and after about 6 months of therapy twice a week and a combination of meds, the depression started to subside.
It was clear to me that my drinking would eventually lead to death. Or worse. So, on July 6th, 2015, after 13 years of devotion to alcohol, I quit.
