Later this month will be my six-year sobriety anniversary, so in honor of that, I thought I’d share my little story here, for anyone who might be curious. Even though my story is so stupid and pathetic and unexciting that it’s embarrassing to even write out and post, I like to think that this might be helpful for someone, at some point, in some capacity. Who knows.

In AA, there’s this huge emphasis on “sharing your story,” it’s seen as a thing of great value; in fact, some meetings are entirely focused on a single person narrating the story of their addiction and getting sober, like you all just sit and listen to one member talk, for the better part of an hour (they’re called “speaker meetings”). And the Big Book, which is basically AA’s Bible, has a massive section of personal stories. Share your story, they said, it will be helpful, they said. Share your story, share your story! Fine. Here is mine:

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Chapter 1: Irish Whiskey

The first time I tried alcohol it was like discovering magic. I felt like I’d met my soul mate, the handsome fairytale prince who had come to save me. It was like the cure to everything that was wrong with me (i.e. my then-undiagnosed personality disorder). I thought to myself: “wow, so all I need to do is just drink all the time!” And immediately after that I thought: “huh, I am probably going to be an alcoholic one day!” But that did not stop me.

I was, at the time, sixteen or seventeen or so, and at home with my parents and sister. My family of origin loves to drink, and alcoholism definitely runs in the family. When I was growing up, alcohol was always present, and my parents drank daily in the evenings to wind down after work. They were never drunk or poorly behaved or anything; it was just how they relaxed. As a little kid, I always thought it was annoying, because the stuff smelled bad, and was a constant spill risk, and why were they so obsessed with it, anyway; and I knew I’d never want to drink that gross stuff; my exact words were, “why would you want to drink something that makes you stupider?” If only I’d retained that innocence!

This chapter of my story is called Irish Whiskey, but actually, my first drink was not whiskey. It was rum. Around the holidays, my parents always kept Gosling’s dark rum around, for mixing into eggnog, and one night my sister offered to mix me a cocktail of rum and juices – which I coolly accepted, but was quietly thrilled about, because by this point I was an angsty teenager and curious about alcohol, but also characteristically, pathologically passive, and always waiting for someone else to approach me first. So this was great. It was a festive wintry night, we were all sitting around playing Scrabble and watching TV in the living room, and I remember its murky purplish color and exactly which glass it was in and everything. It was delicious; it was the cure to all my problems. I’d finally found it. With this, I could do anything.

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This is where the whiskey comes in. Like I said, the rum was only a seasonal specialty, around my house. Whiskey was more of a regular item. Then, in the spring when I was seventeen, my family went on our first trip abroad, on a long-awaited trip to Ireland. Suffice it to say that whiskey was a big part of that trip. The legal drinking age for liquor over there is eighteen, but people in restaurants didn’t really care, so, basically, I was drinking all over that country, along with my family, both in public and in private. We were all having quite a lot of Jameson’s. This was where I developed a real taste for the stuff.

At this point, I was not yet drinking every day, nor suffering from hangovers or any other negative consequences. It wss purely fun, and I looked forward to it but didn’t yet require it to survive the day.

I think this phase lasted about a year, for me. That summer, I got into a situationship with an older guy who was a very sick alcoholic, and he and I would drink a lot of whiskey together (he is dead now — I found his obit while googling him randomly nine years later; God rest his soul), and long story short it was a very sad and messy and I came to associate whiskey with that guy, so after it ended, I found I’d lost my taste for whiskey. Now the smell of it made me sick. But that also did not stop me.

Chapter 2: Vodka

Around this age, eighteen or so, I got into vodka. It didn’t have that cloying stink of the brown liquors. It was clear, and mixed well with diet lemon-lime soda, my drink of choice – plus, Burnett’s came in all kinds of fun flavors, like pink lemonade, strawberry, even birthday cake! I’d come with my Dad to the liquor store and point out the flavor I wanted, and he’d buy it for me. Drinking was a lot of fun, at this point.

Usually I drank alone, just sitting around at home listening to my music and zoning out like I like to do. But I’d also drink with friends, sometimes, at this point, like I’d pack a mixed drink in a thermos to go see people in town, or for hanging out with my little friends from the grocery store where I worked part-time after school. We had some fun and questionable times together. Alcohol made it possible for me to be fun and social and romantic and impulsive. Like a kid that age was, I assumed, supposed to be.

But I have always been terrified of getting in trouble, so I also played it fairly safe. I never had a fake ID or anything. I never did any drugs, simply because no one ever offered them to me; if anyone had, I would have jumped on it; again, the pathological passivity. I waited until my twenty-first birthday to go to the liquor store and buy vodka with my own money; I took it home to my little efficiency apartment and drank alone while I did my homework, and that was my 21^st birthday.

I never went out to frat parties (those weren’t my people – I didn’t have “people”). I would, however, get drunk before hanging out with the guy that I was seeing my junior year, and he often said that I seemed to have a problem and should stop. And I adored that guy, and would do anything to make him like me, but even that didn’t stop me. He didn’t understand; I had to drink, in order to get around in the world at all. If not for alcohol I couldn’t even be here! This was my medicine.

This time period overlapped with one of the worst restrictive phases of my ED, as well, so I was very skinny, and it didn’t take a lot for me to get completely shitfaced. The college administration saw that I was unwell and forced me to see a counselor and a nutritionist, and told me they’d expel me if I didn’t get up to a healthy weight. (This was a small, private, insular, prestigious liberal arts school where everyone knew everyone and there was nowhere to hide.) The nutritionist they sent me to could clearly see that I was unwilling to actually recover, and agreed to meet me where I was: to help me get to a “healthy” BMI and maintain the bare minimum that the school required in order for me to stay a student. So she and I met weekly to track my calories and weight and help me achieve and maintain that bare minimum number. She was pretty confused and concerned each week when she read my food diaries and saw that I used so much of my daily caloric allowance on vodka (3 Tbsp = 100 calories; I measured out all my portions, but made sure I got a healthy dose). She said I might want to think about that. But that didn’t stop me.

My vodka phase lasted about five years and saw me through a lot of gross and sad situations; that guy dumped me, I was crushed and couldn’t take it anymore, etc., I dropped out of that college, I came home and got a job and did a lot of unwholesome “partying” with various connections outside of work, all fueled by vodka. I also was taking a lot of Zoloft around this time, which, in combination with alcohol, is really not great for you. I was a hot mess, and my parents told me I needed to stop dicking around and go back to college and finish my degree.

So, browsing the internet with drink in hand, I found a new college, one that was the complete opposite of the one I’d been at before (big, out-of-state, culturally-diverse fine art school in a big city), and moved there, and very quickly became obsessed with the club scene there.

I was 22, far from home, in a whole new place, and in the early days, made a Herculean effort to refashion my whole identity. I tried to be social. I glommed onto some of the first people that I met, and we went out to lots of clubs together: there were tons of clubs within walking distance of the dorms, and in this part of downtown, you were allowed to get your drinks in a plastic cup “to-go” and just wander the city with them! I did a lot of drunken dancing. I met a lot of people. I did some dangerous and creepy stuff, and messed up many a potential relationship, and got my dumb self hurt. My roommate, as well as the guy that I was casually talking to, both told me I needed to lay off the drinking – but they didn’t understand. Large chunks of that era are, mercifully, missing from my memory.

The “clubbing” phase was a strange and sad time. A few months into it, I started to feel the consequences, and started trying to quit.

Thus began the roller coaster: white-knuckling it through a few days, trying to be all wholesome and pure, then binging for a few weeks. I remember one time, on one of my early attempts to quit, I thought I’d try replacing drinking with reading, so I started reading novels all the time, just keeping myself immersed in a novel virtually every second of the day that I wasn’t in class; and I remember one time I was sitting in a classroom waiting for the professor to arrive, with a massive fresh stack of library books on my desk, and one of my classmates commented: “you read a lot!” to which I replied: “yeah, I decided to try reading instead of drinking!” and I could see him doing the mental math about how much I must have been drinking, and he got this weird look that was at once horrified and impressed, and backed away, lol. None of my attempts to quit lasted. I started trying to go to church, and feigning devoutness and asceticism during my very brief stretches of sobriety. I started to experience things like real hangovers and crippling hangxiety. I really started to become the classic “Jekyll and Hyde” figure, wracked with guilt and shame during the day and an unhinged drunken basket case by night, in a vicious self-perpetuating cycle. But, it was still so early in the game, and none of that stopped me.

Chapter 3: Wine

I guess it was around this time, that I was realizing I had a problem with liquor, that I decided to switch to wine. My mom was a wine drinker, after all, and she was always so balanced, so healthy, and never ungraceful; she had been telling me for some time that perhaps I should switch to wine, as wine doesn’t get you trashed as quickly. Plus, I’d already been drinking pink lemonade Burnett’s with diet 7-Up for some time, and sometimes I’d even mix it with wine, if there were wine around – so it was pretty natural for me to transition to sparkling sweet wines, and from there I discovered Sutter Home pink moscato ($5/bottle), which became my drink of choice in my last year of college.

Needless to say, switching to wine did not make anything better. It was just a different era, and I still drank liquor when I went out on occasion; but, the vast majority of the time, I’d drink wine in my parked car. That year, I shared a suite in a dormitory with some very sweet, sane, healthy, well-rounded girls who seemed to genuinely care about me, so, obviously I couldn’t drink in the dorm or keep alcohol there. So, I’d walk to the grocery store at some point during the day, between classes or after, and buy a few bottles of wine and carry them around in my backpack with my laptop and books, and after class I’d go sit in my parked car and listen to music and drink wine out of grocery store Styrofoam cups while the city around me got dark. That became my thing.

So, drinking had become really easy, at this point. Because wine didn’t hit as hard as liquor, I found that I could day drink. I frequently drank in my car before classes, especially if I had something scary in class like a presentation or a group project. (I carried mouthwash, now, too, out of paranoia that people would be able to smell it on me.) Basically, I drank all the time now, and my friendships all suffered greatly because of it. Because of my nasty, isolationist behavior, I’d already had a falling out with a friend/former roommate, a girl I really loved and admired and wanted to stay friends with (to this day I still deeply regret losing her); and I was becoming resentful and bitter and closing myself off from people who cared about me, I guess as a protective measure so that wouldn’t happen again.

This is where I was at when I graduated college. I was sick and shaky with hangxiety throughout my graduation ceremony; I barely remember it; I only started to feel calm and happy at brunch afterwards, drinking white wine at a restaurant with my family.

But nothing would slow me down!

I came home, and got a job, and lived at home and worked for a while, and kept on drinking a ton of wine every evening until I passed out. I was also super bulimic at this point. The job that I’d gotten, as a dog grooming trainee, was hard; it was really hard, I did not have a natural knack for it, and I was simply not cut out for it, and as a former “gifted child” and Phi Beta Kappa and all that, I did not take well to not being good at a thing. But I seemed to have no other options; so I drank more and more in the evenings (which is pretty normalized, in that workplace culture; there was a running joke in that salon that dog groomers are all either on antidepressants, or alcoholics, or both). Not that I blame the job, or anything else. It was, of course, always me all along.

Alcohol was really holding me back, now. I was trying to be religious; after much waffling, I’d finally joined the Catholic Church, and now that I was accountable before God, it really weighed on me that I had a problem. A few months after joining the church, I found myself tangled up in yet another problematic situationship (two, if I’m being honest), and just constantly hungover and anxious during the day, getting drunker and drunker at night, spending more and more on wine, and my parents were mad at me and ashamed of me, and so yeah, with the help of the Church, I became aware that I had to address the problem.

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