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The author wished to remain anonymous.
As someone who loves reading, I understood addiction from a very young age. There was a point in my life while growing up where I read books just for the pleasure of it, and then it got to a point where I read books because I could not get through a day without reading one. At the beginning of it all, it was difficult to see the difference from how I was from when I just read for pleasure to how I was when I read as a necessity. The same confusion was present when I became an alcohol addict. A distinction can be easily made from a person who drinks and a person who is addicted to alcohol but to the person in question this is a rather hard distinction to make.
As a young girl I could never understand why people became addicts in the first place. In my mind it seemed like a very simple thing to rationalize, it did not make sense to me why would a person capable of rational thinking, choose to be an addict when they have seen the various negative effects that an addiction to substances has on people and the communities they live in, but as I grew older I realized that people do not just wake up and decide to be addicts, they start and gradually they become one. I grew up in a very big family in the rather dull town of Newcastle in the province of Kwa-Zulu-Natal, South Africa. My mother passed away when I was 2 and a half years old, and I had to be raised by my grandmother. Both my uncle, my aunt and all their children lived in my grandmother’s house. There was a total of nine children in the house with age differences raging from 2-5 years. This meant that we were all around the same age and were all left to the care of our grandmother most of the time as my aunt worked, my one uncle was an alcoholic who spent most of his time in shebeens (illicit bar/club) then he did at home, my other uncle operated a shebeen of his own from our yard and he too was drunk most of the time. As my grandmother was old and there were so many of us, it was hard to instill discipline and to keep up with what each child was getting up to. We were not wealthy or any close to being middleclass, but I wouldn’t say we were poor either as we could afford most necessities.
My cousins and I had a lot of freedom for children as young as we were. We were allowed to come and go as we pleased and do things that most children would normally get in trouble for as there was no one to check on us. I was always the most responsible one of the bunch, when my cousins were out in the streets, I would be at home cooking and ensuring that my grandmother was well taken care of. I was also very gifted in school, and I worked hard to have good grades because I wanted a way out of that environment, and I knew that education was the only option for me. My brains and good head for numbers is what made my uncle entrust me with the duty of working the counter in his shebeen when he was too drunk to do it himself. I was 13 when I started working the counter at the shebeen and two of my cousins aged 14 and 16 were also recruited by my uncle to serve drinks.
I had never drunk before, and I had vowed to myself that I would never become an alcohol addict as I had seen from my uncles what it does to you and the people around you. Both my uncles tended to be violent when they were under the influence and because I knew that was not who and how they were when they were sober, I hated alcohol and wanted nothing to do with it because I knew it changed you and made you into someone you are not. I believe it will come as a surprise that I started drinking within a year of working at the shebeen. My work was behind the counter but my cousins who served drinks would empty the beer left over from customers and drink it. they tried to give me some and convince me to steal some beers for them but to no avail until they succeeded.
I remember the day I started drinking as if it were yesterday. At school, a girl came to me to speak to me woman to woman and she told me that I should stay away from her boyfriend and to make me remember she gave me a very hot slap. I remember getting home that day crying from both the physical pain of the slap and the emotional pain of being betrayed by my first boyfriend. When I told my cousins, they told me that the only thing that could make me feel better was a cold beer and a cigarette and just like that I agreed and a plan was formulated that during our evening shift at the shebeen, I was to steal 3 beers for each of us and cigarette to share. The plan succeeded and it was on that day that my rollercoaster of a relationship with alcohol began. The drinking started out small because I had to be careful to ensure that my uncle did not notice the shortages in his stock. We would steal a beer or two during our shifts and at times I would rob customers off their change when they were too drunk to notice in order to cover the cost of the beers I took from stock for myself and my cousins.
As time went by my eldest cousin came up with a new plan for us to get more alcohol for ourselves without being at risk of being caught for stealing stock by our uncle. As she was older and looked womanlier, she received a lot of attention from the male customers in the shebeen. She suggested that she will allow the customers to touch her when they are drunk, flirt with them and then ask them to buy her drinks. We had to wait for my uncle to be drunk enough and pass out before we carried this plan and boy did it work. We always had enough alcohol and cigarettes from then on and sometimes we would share some with our other cousins and our friends at school.
By the time I turned 15 I was a regular drinker, and I was drunk almost every weekend. Surprisingly I continued to do well at school and my drinking did not disturb me from my duties at the shebeen. I believe it was for this reason that I did not realize that I may have a drinking problem because drinking did not seem to disturb me in anyway and so I drank even more. When I turned 16, I started dating an older boy who introduced me to partying and cannabis, at that time I was already addicted to nicotine and not a single adult in my household seemed to mind the fact that we were smoking.
When I started partying is when things started to go downhill. I would get so drunk that I would black out and I engaged in unsafe sexual practices. I contracted multiple STI in my teenage years, but I never got pregnant. I ended up concluding that I must be infertile because all the people around me who were living the same life I was living were already teenage mothers of 1 or more children. I drank in school; I drank after schools and sometimes I would skip school to hangout with my boyfriend and his friends to get drunk and smoke weed the whole day. None of this seemed like an issue to me, the reason I had hated alcohol in the first place was because my uncles were violent drunks, but I wasn’t violent when I was drunk. I was happy, friendlier, and kinder than usual and so I figured that drinking was not such a bad thing after all, it depends on how a person chooses to behave when they are under the influence. I did have regrets for decisions I made while drunk, such as having unprotected sex with people I barely knew but I always seemed to come up with some excuse to convince myself that I did not have a problem, I was simply living my best life.
My marks at school started to drop and when I reached the 12th grade I was under a lot of pressure because I had big dreams for myself and I knew that as a child who had been known to be gifted in school her whole life, there were a lot of people who were counting on me to do well. My teachers, my family, and members of my community. I worked hard but with the extra stress I drank even harder. The weekdays were for schoolwork and weekends were for being blackout drunk. I continued with this behavior until I graduated high school. In that summer, I was overjoyed about graduating with good marks and being accepted to study at a prestigious university and it called for a celebration.
I was now allowed to drink at the shebeen as my uncle considered me to be old now that I had finished school even though I was not yet 18 years old, the legal drinking age in South Africa. I was drunk and high almost the whole summer. One day I went out drinking with my friends and I got so drunk that I fell in the middle of the street and could not get up and I was almost hit by a car. I suffered a head injury from the fall and was hospitalized for 3 days. That is when I started to realize that I might have a problem because in those three days I spent at the hospital all I could think of was my next drink. I tried to reduce my alcohol intake when I got back home but it was really difficult. what served as a wake up call for me was the day my uncle died in an alcohol related incident.
I was coming back from a party in the early hours of the morning and my friends were dropping me off. When I got off the car, I realized that my uncle was on the other side of the road barely able to stand up straight on his own. I started laughing at him and told him to stay put, I would cross as soon as there were no more cars and help him cross. I too was drunk but at least I could still stand. It appears that my uncle did not hear me saying he should stay put or he simply chose to ignore me but in a blink of an eye, he had stumbled into the road and got hit by a passing bus. I stood rooted at the spot, and I could feel all the alcohol rushing out of my body. He did not die instantly; he was in a coma for months and then he passed. Losing my uncle was really hard for me and part of me blamed myself for his death because I felt that maybe, had I been sober, I could have been a lot quicker to cross and go help him cross the road. After my uncle’s accident I realized that I had a drinking problem and so did most members of my family and I knew that staying there would only make the situation even worse.
So, I left for Johannesburg as soon as the university opened. I had taken a vow that I will stop drinking because If I did not, I would end up just like my uncle or lost with no future living for my next drink. Staying sober was difficult as the university lifestyle consisted of an active drinking culture that was very tempting. I soon realized that I would not be able to stop on my own and so I decided to attend the university’s counselling division where I was able to talk to a therapist on a weekly basis. That seemed to help for a couple of months but when I failed some modules at the end of the year, I relapsed and started drinking again. In my second year at university, I was part of the club culture, I dated older, foreign men so they could buy me drinks in the club, and I went back to engaging in unsafe sexual practices.
After feeling sick for about a month, I tested positive for HIV and aids in September 2021 and that is when I knew that I had to choose whether I wanted to live, or I wanted to give my life away to alcohol and to allow this disease to kill me. I decided that I still wanted to live and that the only way I could live was if I stopped drinking and for real this time. My grades were bad, and the school advised me to dropout because there was no way I could still pass the semester. I dropped out and came back home, started receiving treatment for HIV and started attending the Alcoholics Anonymous program in my Town. This month marks my fifth month of sobriety and I if I said it was easy, I would be lying. I still wake up everyday feeling like the only thing that could make my day better is a drink, but this means that every day I must make the decision to be sober. I know the pain that alcohol has brought to me and my family, the dreams that I have to delay and the diseases that I have contracted. I know the life I want to live, and I know that I do not want to go back to being the person I was. So, every day I wake up and I choose to be sober.
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