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My drinking originally started somewhere around 7th or 8th grade when my mom decided it was fun to give me Fuzzy Navels. I didn’t really start drinking heavily until I was 15, though. I was invited to a party with some much older male friends and was overly excited to be included. As a 15 year old girl, I should have been very weary of going to parties and drinking with guys who were all at least 19 or older, but I wasn’t. I should have been even more concerned when they told me to lie about my age when I got there and tell everyone I was 17, but that didn’t set off any red flags either. Even the “gifted” students aren’t all that bright sometimes.
I had never been drunk before that first party, so I had no idea what I was getting into. Everybody was passing around a huge bottle of Jack Daniels. Little 15 year old me was already entirely wasted and had no clue, but one of the other people there dared me to finish the bottle the next time it came around. There were about two inches left in the bottom, and my dumb ass said “Well I can’t turn down a dare!” and slammed it. As you can imagine, it did not end well for me that night. I haven’t been able to tolerate the smell of Jack Daniels since.
Unfortunately, the “funny story” stuck around though and got me the attention I wanted, so I kept partying with these friends and getting black out wasted for the next couple of years. Some pretty awful things happened as a result, which only intensified my drinking rather than bringing it to a grinding halt like it should have. Eventually, I quit partying with those older guys and started drinking with my actual friends. We had a great time getting way too drunk, singing dumb songs, crying, puking, and telling each other all the “funny” things we could remember the next day.
That lasted a couple years, until I was 21 and hit the bar scene. Then it was game on. Free drinks all the time, so many options to choose from, new people to get attention from and a jukebox won my heart for a few more years. I put myself in more dangerous situations and slept around more than I’d like to admit.
I ended up getting an abusive boyfriend who didn’t like going out, so we stayed home and drank a bit. He did pills, so I ended up getting into that too. My job sucked, so I quit, got another one, quit, got another, quit.. I wasn’t happy anywhere anymore. My sister, who lives on the opposite side of the country from me, actually took a flight here and essentially kidnapped me at one point. She told me to pack my stuff and put it in the car and we drove across the country because she was convinced that if I didn’t change the path I was on, specifically leaving the abusive drug-addicted boyfriend, I would end up dead in a ditch somewhere. She had no clue that he had actually confessed to me that he’d been thinking of places he could hide my body once, or that I’d chalked that up to the drugs talking and convinced myself I could handle it and had no plans to leave him. Today I can say she was probably right that it would’ve ended that way if I had stayed at the time.
I drank significantly while I was away from home, mourning the end of this dysfunctional relationship. This took more effort than usual because she lives in a state that doesn’t promote that sort of behavior, but I didn’t hesitate to find ways around it. I actually ended up packing all my things up and driving back home a few months later, and the boyfriend contacted me as soon as he knew I was back. We got back together and it was honestly awful, but I didn’t see it that way. I was just glad to be with him. I was just as addicted to him as he was to his pills.
At some point, I finally realized he wasn’t treating me right and decided there was something wrong with me because I still wouldn’t leave. We got engaged somewhere during this, and I was so happy that I cried when he asked me. Then I cried later because I knew he didn’t love me the way I wanted to be loved and he never would, and I was fully intending to live the rest of my life that way anyway. This dropped me into a strong depression and I started drinking a couple gigantic bottles of wine each week. I’m talking like gallon jugs.
Eventually, we broke up. He had kicked me out or locked me out of the apartment repeatedly, and I already had an apartment of my own with just a bed in it for when this happened. I paid rent that I couldn’t afford for an apartment I didn’t live in just for this reason, but this was the first time I had left him. I ended up taking a step back from drinking once the stress level didn’t seem so bad. I thought I was past the worst of it, but I’d still regularly drink way too much and end up pretty wasted and have a hangover.
I became a Christian a couple months after and almost entirely quit drinking but would still have a few here and there. Without most of my stress and anxiety, I didn’t have a strong urge so much anymore, so I thought everything was all well and good. If I only drank when I was feeling bad, that was fine, right? I didn’t see that I was using alcohol as a coping mechanism to bury my feelings, or that actively setting out to get drunk was an issue.
I didn’t realize I had a significant problem until I went to an AA meeting to support a friend and heard a lot of things that I identified with in a pretty serious way. I went home that night and wanted to drink but didn’t because I was thinking about what a jerk move it would be to drink right after leaving AA. The urges were strong, but I attributed it mainly to my stubbornness and feeling like I had been told I couldn’t. I recognized I had an unhealthy pattern of drinking but still didn’t see the magnitude of it.
I attended additional meetings the next two nights then had a heart to heart with an older lady there who I knew from church on Wednesday. She was telling me all about how many people she’d had to bury in the program who couldn’t stop, but my mind kept shutting out what she was saying and all I was really getting from it was “So I should finish my wine, but I absolutely should not tell her about it.”
This scared the daylights out of me, so when I went home that night, I decided I would dump the rest of my wine.. and I couldn’t make myself do it. I started arguing with myself that I should just finish it instead and nobody would even know, and dumping it would be stupid and wasteful, and I would hate myself if I did that. Immediately, my thoughts were flooded with unlimited justifications and reasons to drink the wine, and that’s when I finally realized there was truly a problem. I’d never noticed because I had literally never tried to quit.
I started going to AA a few nights a week but that didn’t do as much for me as I’d hoped after the initial revelation. It was useful for a while, but I kept feeling like I didn’t belong there because I’d never gotten a DUI or gone to jail. It didn’t matter that I definitely should have gotten many DUI’s but just hadn’t been caught, or that I’d actually been pulled over once and blown a 0.24 and the police had let me go for whatever reason with strict directions to get a ride home. I was convinced I didn’t belong at the meetings because I hadn’t ruined my life in some clear and obvious way, and after the first couple of weeks, my urges had less to do with alcohol itself and more with the bar environment. I wanted to go out and listen to lame music, have dumb inappropriate conversations with strangers and get to “be myself” in a way I felt I never could sober. I talked myself out of meetings without ever understanding that “life had become unmanageable” didn’t just mean legal trouble, and my life had been unmanageable for a very long time.
The ex-fiancé kept popping up throughout all of this, and we had gotten back together and broken up numerous times. He became a Christian around the same time I did and quit all the drugs, so I thought things could finally work. They couldn’t, and they didn’t. It brought up a ton of stress again, although astronomically less than it did before, and my desire to drink would creep up again whenever we were arguing and each of the hundred times we broke up.
I was sober again for about 2.5 months when I relapsed on New Years Eve this year. I had gone to my church’s New Years Eve party, and it was fun it first, but I kept thinking more and more as the night progressed that it just wasn’t the atmosphere I wanted. They had video games and board games and food, but I wanted loud music and dancing. I recognized my thoughts heading down the wrong path and started trying to think of what I could do to prevent myself from slipping. Ironically, this is ultimately what sealed the deal on my relapse that night.
I knew there was a sober AA event a few minutes away and decided maybe that’s where I needed to be for the night. Sounds reasonable, right? Never mind the fact that I was literally standing inside a church at that moment, surrounded by people who would’ve been more than happy to talk some sense into me. Never mind that I was in the absolute safest place I possibly could’ve been if I wanted to stay sober. So I said goodbye to some people, “Happy New Years” to others, assured everybody I’d be back after I checked out another event briefly, and walked out.
I did fully intend to come back to the church, but I knew as soon as my feet hit the gravel in the parking lot that I’d be ending my night at the bar if I left. I knew without a shadow of a doubt, and I hesitated for a second and considered going back in. But I’d just said goodbye to so many people, and wouldn’t that be embarrassing?
So I kept walking. By the time I got to the AA event, it was over and everyone was heading home, but the event was next door to a bar so I stopped in there instead. I missed the ball drop because I was too busy trying to get another shot from the bartender to even notice what was happening around me, and I blacked out after that. I ended the night crying my eyes out and puking in my bathroom. I have no memory of coming home, but apparently I drove, and I’m not proud of that at all.
It seems like we always hear the stories of drug addicts, but alcoholism is accepted and almost glorified in our culture. I guess because it’s legal, people think it must not be as bad as any other addiction. As someone who’s attended both AA and NA (Narcotics Anonymous), I can tell you that the daily readings are exactly the same and it’s a majority of the same people in both groups. These diseases are one and the same. I’ve been sober again since that night and have had no desire to drink currently, but I suspect it’ll most likely come back like it always does and I have to be ready to fight it off when that happens.
I know this isn’t for everyone, but the honest answer to what’s helped me more than anything is praying. When my emotions feel too heavy, rather than reaching for a drink, I go into my bedroom, kneel by my bed and pray. I fight off temptation by letting my higher power, who is stronger and much more capable than I ever could be, do the fighting for me. Giving up my desire to control things by my own power is the best decision I’ve ever made and the reason I’m sober today.
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