The Long Journey: Introduction

My age slips away from me most days. When I’m asked, I often count back the years to make sure I’m right. Usually it’s too tedious to do that during a conversation, so I’ll say 26, 27, or 28. They’re all basically the same age. But when I was younger, I never lost track. The difference between 16 and 17 is just as meaningless as 26 to 27, and yet I never for a moment forgot how old I was as a teenager. Once I got out of college though, I stopped caring. It didn’t make sense to me to measure my life in years anymore.

That kind of thinking made it easier to lose track. Looking back now, I think I was actively avoiding marking the passage of time. A bad breakup in the waning days of college stuck with me for longer than it should have. As is the conventional wisdom, my close friends remarked that time would heal the wound. I tried to heal a little faster by making sure time flew.

So, here I am five years later. After school, I spent a year trying to write for a living, which was enlivening but unsuccessful. That landed me in an Amazon warehouse, followed by a year learning to program so I wouldn’t have to work in an Amazon warehouse ever again. Now, I find myself on the other side, a young but eager coder with a career ahead of me for the first time.

My friends were right, time did mostly heal the wound. The problem is, I used liquor to make the nights more tolerable and the days less memorable. That habit is now deeply entrenched.

The Problem

I started drinking in college. I never went near the stuff before that, so much so that in high school I took up the sanctimonious practice of declaring myself teetotal, despite never having tried a drop. While most of my college peers were more experienced with drinking when I started, it didn’t long for me to surpass them. I remember a moment when a close friend took note of the fact that I was usually a few drinks ahead of other people when a weekend night started. I took that to heart, worried about it, but I didn’t change my habit.

As the breakup got into full gear, I kicked the drinking up a notch. By this time, I was having two or three beers a day just to take the edge off. It didn’t seem like a problem in those days. I wasn’t hungover in the morning, I never got sick, and I never blacked or browned out. During the breakup, I popped up to five or six beers a night, with no discernible change in symptoms other than more hours of the evening spent on the habit.

The year of writing after graduation didn’t help. I didn’t have anyone to keep me honest other than myself, and I couldn’t be relied on to act as my own moderator. I could get completely smashed on a weeknight and it wouldn’t matter. I had friends and family, most of whom were in a very similar practice, but I didn’t have anyone reliant on me, so it didn’t matter whether I was in good condition or not. I found myself during this time idolizing functional alcoholics, because they proved you could live with the habit. I took a defeatist pleasure in the mantra “It is my god-given right to destroy my own body.”

The Amazon Warehouse robbed me of the idealism that I started out with. Now I had a job that required me to reach a warehouse at 6:00 AM, and strenuous quotas to hit. But I didn’t stop drinking. By this point, it wasn’t surprising for me to polish off ten beers in an evening. I was making my own money for the first time too, so I was able to obtain as much beer as I wanted to drink. It wasn’t uncommon for me to hit the factory floor the next morning and rush through my quotas feeling downright malarial from the hangover. I told myself during this time that I would quit the heavy drinking as soon as there was a reason to: Someone would come into my life, or I’d find a job that I cared about. Those would serve as the triggers to pull me back to normal.

They didn’t. Once I was back in school, and afterwards, working at a job I truly cared about, I didn’t quit the drink. No doubt, it was far too late for that. So long had I systematically denied that there was a problem, told myself that quitting wasn’t about my willpower but about getting the proper impetus, that alcohol had ample time to sink its claws into me. Now, the goals that I had as delimiters turned into dreams that were blocked by my alcoholism — i.e., “I can’t be dating because nobody will want to be with a drunk like me.”

I didn’t notice that my memory was slipping away. I didn’t notice that my joy for the small things was dissipating. I didn’t notice the perpetual slight head cold I had. Once the drinking became a lifestyle, it also became way too easy to conflate its symptoms with those of aging. I thought the memory slippage, the malaise, the exhaustion, were all part of going on 30, so I disregarded the drink as a factor. Unbeknownst to me, I was doing exactly what every addict does: willfully ignoring the telltale signs of a serious problem.

The Goal

When I’m sober, my mornings are happier. Obviously, I don’t have rotgut when I wake up. My mouth isn’t dry. I don’t smell like whiskey. My desk isn’t cluttered with bottles and cans. I can remember the last thing I did the night before. What’s weird, though, is the smaller things I notice. I stand up straighter in the shower. I look up and around more. I smell things. I like music more. I can really feel the sunlight.

I knew that ultimately, being drunk would feel normal. That’s kind of the idea: a tolerance to alcohol is, after all, just acclimatization to the feeling of being drunk. What I didn’t know about was that sobriety would begin to feel abnormal. Any more, I don’t feel like myself if the sun has set and I haven’t had a drink. Many times, I’ve lost a sober streak to a night that feels particularly empty. Not only do I eschew the pleasures of a sober morning for those of a drunken evening, I also intentionally avoid being sober.

I’m not an exceptional case. 1 in 8 Americans have an alcohol problem of some sort (and COVID can’t have helped that number). A lot of you, like me, are probably still young and possibly still unaware of the problem.

I intend for this series of articles to chronicle my own escape from under the bottle, and it’s my hope that there will be some wisdom and some encouragement to be gleaned from my journey. I will take note of the little victories and the large failures alike, and I hope to leave this series behind so that someone else might be spared my mistakes. I also hope to provide evidence of the joys that come with leaving the drink behind.

Happiness and health to you all, and see you tomorrow,

~ UM