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.
