I have been actively drinking heavily since my mid twenties. It started with club nights and has progressed to nights hidden in my bedroom downing a bottle of wine in 10 minutes and passing out. I am ashamed, disappointed in myself, scared and frustrated. I have tried multiple times to quit and even went to a 3 month live in rehab. I have tried Antibuse and Naltrexone and private counseling. I was able to stop drinking for a year, but as of the past few years, I am again a regular drinker downing a bottle of wine (or a little more) per night. It has ruined relationships, interfered with my job and caused my family deep hurt and disappointment. Despite all these effects, I cannot seem to stop.
I think my alcohol addiction is both genetic and environmental. My grandfather was a raging alcoholic for his entire life and died of liver failure at 57. I seem to be the only person in my family now with an addiction problem. I have also had a difficult life including no relationship with my father (not even knowing who he was until I was 19), the death of my sister who had been given up for adoption and died before I ever got to meet her. My mom has both bi-polar and PTSD and quit working and participating in society when I was 17. I also have been diagnosed with bi-polar type II and take medication to manage my moods. My extended family is small and dysfunctional and I don't have any kind of relationship with them. Despite these things, I am actually quite functional, healthy physically (as far as I know) and have a wonderful sense of humor. That is also why this is so difficult. I consider myself an intelligent woman who should "know better" or be able to work my way out of this. But I cannot and I think the primary reason I can't/don't is because I don't want to. Despite all the negatives, alcohol makes me feel happy when I drink. I feel warm, safe, happy, friendly. I love the physical feeling of loss of motor skills to a degree. Of feeling like my rational mind switches off and I can forget all the bad in my life. It is the only break I get from reality in my waking life.
I also believe there are many environmental contributions to this addiction. I have written a piece that describes some of my feelings on why I, and so many others these days, seem to struggle so significantly with alcohol. Here is my piece:
Gen X- the nothing generation
What will happen to me when I am old? I am 41. I am from a
generation that has no safety net. No guarantees, no helping hand, no
appreciation for my service, my efforts or my time. I will not live in the nice
retirement home with a hair salon and room service. I will not live in a center
with an activities director and an on call nurse. I will not receive memory
care or play in a bridge group over lunch in the thousand square foot dining
room lined in oak, seated on a leather upholstered chair. My husband will not
leave me money to help provide for me after his death because it’s most likely
I will be divorced or single. I will not drive a luxury car that I have had
faithfully serviced every 3 thousand miles because I could afford it. I will
not get a reliable social security check.
I am from the generation after the boom. We are not a
generation of boomers, we are the generation of implosions. The second largest
economic meltdown in US
history happened during the primary earning years of my generation. AIDS happened
during my generation. 4 wars happened during my generation (so far). The space
program ended during my generation. We have fewer jobs than there are
people to fill them. My generation is not able to affect change as boomers have
because we are too busy working as a part time barista and a part time Walmart
clerk with no insurance to worry about or contribute to the efforts to make
life better for anyone other than ourselves- it’s not that we don’t want to; we
just can’t. We are simply making life go on, until the next day and then will
have to start over again, to figure out how we will make it through that day.
My parents generation invested heavily, because they could
afford it and now they have lost a significant portion of that investment
because our economy collapsed in a 21st century financial
Armageddon. Our trust funds and college funds will be emptied and go unpaid.
Inheritance is a completely foreign word. Retirement is theory, a story only
told of what happened in the “old” days. (One 80 year old barista says to the
other ”boy, I heard back in the day they had this thing called “retirement” when
you could actually stop working and live off the money you had and the money
the government had saved for you to thank you for your years of service.
Really??? I thought that was just old people’s dementia talking”)
My generation will not age well. We have been raised on
processed fast foods. Chemical ingredients that we are not allowed to feed
animals. Genetically modified products that don’t exist in nature. We are the
generation of the drive through. The drive though restaurant, the drive through
ATM . We are the
generation of “Instant”. Instant food. Instant information (faxes, texts tweets and instagram). The generation of the
quick cut and attention deficits and hyperactivity. The generation of fake.
Fake tans, fake hair, fake nails, fake boobs, fake butts, fake news. We
are a generation that has grown up with terrorism. Watching people die,
literally falling from the sky in front of our eyes. Of gun violence and school
shootings.
Our generation developed it’s own counter-culture: grunge similar to hippies in that they were a group of disillusioned young people
wanting to express themselves differently and change the way their world worked
because of a lack of confidence and happiness with the world as it was presented
to us. Unfortunately, so much of that lifestyle and attitude came accompanied
by anger, depression (the most depressed generation ever), massive amounts of
drugs and not just weed and LSD, but meth and herion. Our counterculture was
not one of positivity, it was one of expressing our pain and unhappiness,
through the pain of piercing our flesh and tattooing on images that we believed
expressed who we really were on the inside by manifesting it in illustrations
on the outside.
It really is not a wonder then, that we are the next
generation of alcoholics. Alcohol is now as common at a gathering as water. In
fact, I don’t think we really can even meet socially without it. Women are the
new alcoholics as well. The surge of cheap accessible wine and it’s acceptance in our culture is
bringing civility to alcoholism. It’s one thing to down a beer or hard liquor, and quite
another to sip a glass of wine in our society. They even tout its health BENEFITS (of course
in limited quantities). We don’t like the world we see and we feel powerless to
change it. We are all on antidepressants and anti-anxiety meds. We don’t enjoy
sex as it has been enjoyed for millennia because it could literally kill us.
We’re all getting older now, fading out as the focus
population. We are a lost generation that got cheated and screwed over. Why
should I do my best to live a healthy long life? Frankly, I’m over it. This
ride sucked and many of us are NOT disappointed that it’s finite. Thank god it
is.
Believe it or not I am not a fatalistic person but rather a pragmatic one. Frustrated, disappointed, scared, but trying to do the best I can to survive each day with some measure of grace and forward movement. I am now off for the evening trying to think of ways to not drink tonight. Wish me luck.
I found you through the dishwasher's comments. At first I found your comment a shock, but I heard you, and I was curious, so here I am.
ReplyDeleteI'm a baby boomer, but feel the same disillusionment and cynicism and despair that comes with looking around eyes wide open at the world. Reality is enough to make any sane person want to alter it somehow, dull the senses, stop the pain through any means available. That's my theory and I'm sticking to it.
I wish you luck and strength with the drinking. I'm the lightweight alcoholic in my family, but it was becoming a habit and a need and the whole bottle nights made me feel like shit on every level the next day. But wine is good for us, and the pretty bottles and glasses mask the truth that alcohol is alcohol and unhealthy dependence is unhealthy dependence. The off switch is broken in my family. More, more, more is good. Keep drinking is the party line. I sympathize with the struggle. It's all my sister and I talk about, and our brother who won't talk about anything, as he tries his best to drink himself to death. Literally. It's heartbreaking and we are powerless, as is he, I suppose.
Anyway, it's a shame you started this blog in January and haven't posted again, and a shame no voices from the void have chimed in. I imagine they will. I have no right to talk, as I've been an absent blogger for months.
I'm trying to be better.
Keep writing. It's good cheap therapy.
Thank you so much Mel for your reply and kind comments. I haven't posted since January for several reasons: a). I'm not really a blogger, it's not my thing, b). I didn't think anyone would see it, so what's the point, and c). I didn't want to think about alcohol and writing about it made me think about it.
ReplyDeleteI'm glad that my comments or blog struck a cord with you. I am saddened to hear that alcohol seems to be a common theme in your family. I imagine that makes it all that much harder to deal with. Alcohol is a taboo subject in my family. NO ONE talks about it. My relatives and in fact even my friends were shocked to find out I was (am) an alcoholic. I didn't drink in front of people (at least rarely to excess, perhaps if at a party or something). But I was a shockingly severe alcoholic. AT LEAST a bottle a night, usually more. I was a fall down mean drunk. I crashed through shower doors, kicked holes in walls and screamed bloody murder at my loved ones. Unfortunately even through this I was able to carry on a 'normal' life. I didn't get hangovers. I held a good steady job, I had friends, I appeared healthy and well adjusted. I had intimate relationships (though they all ended because of my drinking). I was (am) a member of one of the biggest, if not THE biggest group of burgeoning alcoholics: professional women. With the onset of cheap wine ("$2 Buck Chuck" anyone?), drinking wine has become the new normal. It is "mommy juice". It's what we do when we go out for a celebration, we meet our friends after work for a drink, we unwind after work with a drink. It's wine, after all, not NightTrain. It's incredibly dangerous and so unrecognized.
I was shocked when I told my friends of my alcoholism how many of them didn't know and how many of them said "yeah, I probably have a problem too". So sad.
I went through rehab this year (again) in March. It was a wonderful experience and SO different than my first go-round. The first session was through an AA program and it was awful. All I heard every day was what a fuck up I was, how I made bad decisions and couldn't trust myself; how I'd hurt so many people and that I needed to surrender to god or I would never be healed (I am an athiest). I came out worse than when I went in. That's why I waited so long to go to rehab this last go round. But it couldn't have been more different. I went through a Kaiser program. It was in a hospital and it was treated like the disease that it is; an involuntary illness that needs to be treated by doctors. We were on a medical unit, had on call medical support, group therapy, individual therapy, skill building classes and at every opportunity we were told "this is not YOU, this is a behavior that can be changed. You're not a bad person, you just have a bad problem, but you can fix it". I have been sober 7 months now.
At any rate, Mel, I so appreciate the connection with someone who can identify in any way with what I have/go through. Addiction is so isolating and shameful. Its so nice to find someone who understands, doesn't judge and can show some compassion.
I hope to hear more from you. About your life and your experience.
Thank you and be well,
Elizabeth
I don't know how long this sobriety will last. I think of it like a disease: I am in remission, but it could come back tomorrow. It's a tight rope of balance. I wish sober people understood that. That it's not a choice, it's a disease. That it takes more 'willpower' to overcome addiction that it would to be to give up sugar for the rest of your life. Few people could actually do it and sugar is nowhere as addictive as alcohol.
I am sorry to hear that your brother won't talk about it at all. I have a cousin like that. He is an addict but absolutely will not accept it or talk about it. It is so frustrating. You are forced to watch someone you love hurt themselves and there is literally nothing you can do to stop them.
Well, I'm back with another post by popular demand. Ha! So I've been having a terribly hard time lately being obsessed with thoughts of drinking. I want to soooo badly. I feel I need to. It's like water to me; vital to life. Every morning I wake up and think "I'm not going to think about that today. It's not going to be a part of my world or my thoughts". By 7pm I am cursing the world that I cannot have a drink. It's all I think about all night. That's when I would drink. Alone from 7 to midnight. I don't know what to do with myself after those hours. I have panic attacks sometimes from not having it. I cry. I pace. I've even thought of securing myself to my desk chair with a belt so I don't go out and buy it (ridiculous, I know - just unbuckle it, but in my head it counts as effort). I've tried hobbies; I paint, I have started a graphic tee business and I'm happy about doing those things but in the evenings I am so preoccupied with thoughts of drinking that I just can't get into the hobbies. I hate TV so that can't serve as a distraction for me.
ReplyDeleteIt's ironic: I think of myself as a failure when I drink and I think of myself as a failure when I just think about drinking. I can't seem to win. Sometimes I think I could do it again and manage it. They told us in rehab "it's only a problem if it's a problem. Some people can come out of rehab and manage their drinking". I would like to think I'm one of those people, but I kinda doubt it.
When I was drinking I never got hangovers. My body felt like it needed alcohol. In fact, if I had an upset stomach from something, a glass of wine would actually settle it. I never did have any significant physical issues from it. I got regular kidney and liver tests and everything consistently came back fine. The only physical side effect I had (sorry to be graphic) was diarrhea every day. But it wasn't painful and I even figure "hey, maybe I lose some weight from it, so it's not such a bad thing". Yeah, retarded. I posted yesterday on my facebook account that I was "coming out" as an alcoholic. That I had been for most of my adult life and wanted people to be aware that alcoholics and addicts are not homeless bums. We're your neighbor, your co-worker, your aunt. I did it as an educational effort, but to be honest it was also a somewhat self serving effort. I want sober people to understand the burden we deal with. We handle everything else that they do; every obligation, every duty, every responsibility and we do it all while dealing with a terrible illness that we don't really even talk about. Addicts work harder at life everyday than the average person. Which is another reason why they should be treated with respect and dignity. They're working even harder than 'you' to just live life. Give them credit for that.
So, I'm not sure what I'll do tonight to combat it. I will likely sit in my room and binge on netflix, chips and cigarettes (I have taken to smoking clove cigarettes since I've been sober to replace that drive to imbibe something). Sad. It's awful that my nights are so hard and sad even when I don't drink. Almost makes me think "why not", just get it over with and drink. But, I'll try not to again tonight and wait for tomorrow to come.
Good luck to me and you.