After years of living in denial, I finally confronted my alcoholism when I was 35. These are the tough questions I had to ask myself.
Jenny Chang/BuzzFeed
My twentysomething social life was one long drink special. Margaritas with a crust of salt on the rim, a frosty pint spilling foam, and the always regrettable "Who wants shots?"
I had always assumed my drinking would calm down after I graduated college. Instead, it ramped up. The bars opened their pearly gates to me, and I sank into those velvet banquettes and ripped vinyl couches.
I sometimes wondered if I had a problem. I had a tendency to black out — to forget episodes from a night of drinking, even though I remained surprisingly functional (well, "functional" may not be the word for someone pouring beer on her own head) — and every pamphlet, doctor's questionnaire, and glossy magazine quiz I took listed blackouts as a risk factor for alcoholism.
The problem with checklists for alcoholism is that they look a lot like, well, being young. Do you ever drink to get drunk? Have you ever gone to work with a hangover? They might as well ask: Have you ever been 25?
Over the following decade, I kept wondering about my drinking, as my bar bills grew steeper — Patron instead of Jose Cuervo — and my taste more refined. I continued to build the case that my drinking was normal, totally normal. See that guy over there? He's at the bar every night. At least I'm not that bad. I had a good job, I never crashed my car. And yet, I was stuck.
There is a saying among former drunks: "At first drinking is fun, then fun with problems, then just problems." By my mid-thirties, I had found myself in the "problems" portion of the evening.
I quit drinking at the age of 35. How did I know it was time? I arrived at a preponderance of the evidence. Some people do have a lightning flash of recognition, but for me it was more of a slow dawning. I had to sift through data, gather bits of knowledge. I took health surveys online. I talked to my therapist. I read the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous (the bible of AA) and many alcoholism memoirs: Drinking: A Love Story, and Lit, and Smashed, and A Drinking Life, and The Tender Bar, all of which offer compelling and varied tales of people who put the cap back on the bottle for good. Listening to other people's stories may have helped me more than anything else. The more I heard other people's struggles, the more I found words for my own.
The following is a list of aha moments for me. It is not an authoritative list; it's simply one person's experience. I can't stress this enough. What alcoholism looked like for me may not be what it looked like for someone else, and how I define alcoholism may be different from a medical professional (they use the phrase "alcohol use disorder") or another problem drinker. I really can't tell anyone else if they have a drinking problem, or if they're an alcoholic, or if they need to quit. These are complicated questions you must answer on your own. What I can do is show you how I answered these questions for myself.
I spent my early career at alternative newsweeklies, where beer was sometimes kept in the fridge, and anyone walking in with sunglasses and a hangover got a high-five. You see this spirit at many companies with lots of employees in their twenties: Get the work done, and we don't ask questions.
For a long time, I was getting the work done, which is probably why none of my bosses ever confronted me about my drinking. By my thirties, I had developed some red-flag habits. In the evenings, I kept a bottle of wine by my side. I brought my laptop to the bar, and drank pints while I wrote stories. I had an insane workload, and the drinking was partly an attempt to make it tolerable. I told myself I deserved the booze, and the work didn't suffer. But then it did.
One morning, I came into my Manhattan office at 10:30 a.m., having stayed up drinking till 4, and my deeply beloved assistant editor Gchatted me at my desk: "You might want to chew some gum." He could still smell the booze on me, because I was still drunk. Another morning, I called in sick because my hangover was so toxic I couldn't possibly make it without vomiting on myself in a cab or a subway. My friends at work emailed me condolences, and I felt like such a loser.
I stopped being able to write. I had panic attacks when I woke at 5 a.m. If you've ever had a high-pressure position, then you know these can also be part of your job description. But the data points start to converge: Drinking WAS interfering with my ability to work. I was not functioning so well anymore, and it's debatable if I ever really had been.
Like lying about your weight, lying about your drinking is something many people who are not alcoholics do. "How many did you have, honey?" "Oh, two." They do it for benign reasons (they forgot) and slightly sketchy ones (to avoid an argument, to maintain a perfect image). But how often are you lying? And why?
I engaged in the typical "downscaling of the number" when necessary, but I did other things. In New York, I would go out to dinner with friends, share a bottle of wine or two, and then stop by the bodega on my way home to buy a six-pack of beer. I did this because even after a night of drinking, I needed more. I would sometimes find myself dropping casual lies to the guy who worked at the bodega about how I was just hanging out with a friend at home. Why was I lying to the guy at the bodega?
Because I knew what I was doing was wrong.
I lived alone at the time, and could drink as I wished without anyone's commentary, but I could feel the watchful eyes of those bodega guys, who probably saw my wine-stained mouth and my droopy eyes. Mostly I tried to get out of there without any interaction at all.
Other humans can be a valuable metric for our own behavior. Are you afraid of getting caught at something? It might be because what you're doing is wrong.
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