Current Events > Alcoholism seems incredibly easy to slip in to.

(+) Yeah! (+)

Giant_Aspirin posted...

the reason many alcoholics choose to abstain entirely is because its far easier to have none than it is to have a reasonable/responsible amount

Yeah, AA has its issues but the quote "One is too many and a thousand is never enough" fucking nailed it.

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Can definitely relate to that.

oh and were experiencing mild withdrawals I think. Hard to say.

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lilORANG posted...

Yeah, I have a strict rule of not drinking on nights before a work day. Which basically means Friday and Saturday night is it for me. Lots of alcoholism in my family, but I've never felt the urge to drink non-stop.

Me lol. But sometimes I won't drink Saturday if I'm not feeling it, but it's a rarity. I do on occasion drink on a work night if I go in really late but it's unlikely.

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It's why I've never drank.

I drink 2-4 cans of Grape Kickstart a day, mostly for the flavor.

If I found an alcohol I like, I'd drink that daily. And not to get drunk but it'd affect me.

So I don't even run the risk

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We agreed to not drink this weekend either. Progress.

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couple excuses that regularly catch us...

We have different days off. Im off on weekends, shes off two random days every week.

understandably she wants to drink on her days off too.

or, if we only have a little bit left on a Monday or something, Ill end up grabbing more so we have enough to last the night.
but then sometimes we dont finish, so well have leftover on Tuesday, end up buying more etc

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lilORANG posted...

Yeah, I have a strict rule of not drinking on nights before a work day. Which basically means Friday and Saturday night is it for me. Lots of alcoholism in my family, but I've never felt the urge to drink non-stop.

same as me dude. my dad was an alcoholic and drank himself to death. and im sure theres lots of alcoholism on his side of the family

i avoid drinking alone and i try to cut down on it weekdays. but i do go hard on social occasions or with friends

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but also i do feel a lot more confident, less anxious/worried and in a more positive mindset when im drunk. and i feel like things make more sense when ive had a little to drink

its a scary road to go down so im hyper aware not to drink for a self esteem boost

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I kind of agree. A few weeks ago I started drinking like 4 drinks throughout the day regularly. I stopped buying alcohol altogether because it felt like I was about to pick up a nasty addiction.

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wackyteen posted...

It's why I've never drank.

I drink 2-4 cans of Grape Kickstart a day, mostly for the flavor.

If I found an alcohol I like, I'd drink that daily. And not to get drunk but it'd affect me.

So I don't even run the risk

I'm pretty sure 2 to 4 beers a day is actually healthier than 2 to 4 Kickstarts.

Yeah most sources say 2 cans of beer for a male is considered moderate and not harmful alcohol consumption.

So Imma go out on a limb and say thats healthier than 40 to 80 grams of sugar a day. Thats literally 3 ounces of sugar for 4 cans. Visualize that. Thats a ton of sugar.

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lww99 posted...

couple excuses that regularly catch us...

We have different days off. Im off on weekends, shes off two random days every week.

understandably she wants to drink on her days off too.

or, if we only have a little bit left on a Monday or something, Ill end up grabbing more so we have enough to last the night.
but then sometimes we dont finish, so well have leftover on Tuesday, end up buying more etc

this is awesome that you're able to recognize yourself rationalizing it. the addicted brain is insanely good at making excuses that defy reason.

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I guess I'm lucky that drinking never appealed to me.

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This topic honestly helps a lot. Feels good that Im not alone in this.

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'Tis a Friday and the urge to drink is there but I'm going to be a good boy. Tomorrow I plan on walking the boardwalk with the wife and doing more things outside (weather permitting) to try and distract from the desire.

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*looks @ the fifth of Jameson on my coffee table*

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LivingLegend posted...

Literally cant remember the last time I had alcohol.

Im so glad I have no drinking vice.

Even if I was majorly depressed I wouldnt drink a drop.

do you have a vice? Or do you just handle stress well


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Yep we smoke daily. Feels like that should be enough.

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Many people you pass by in public on an average day are likely functioning alcoholics. They dont exhibit the slurring, sickly, stumbling look, are able to carry a conversation just fine, but they knocked back a few shots before going out. Its super common. Once they do it enough it just becomes their new normal and the body adjusts to it.

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Ive met a few with legit, life changing problems. I refuse to let myself get there ugh

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VipaGTS posted...

Many people you pass by in public on an average day are likely functioning alcoholics. They dont exhibit the slurring, sickly, stumbling look, are able to carry a conversation just fine, but they knocked back a few shots before going out. Its super common. Once they do it enough it just becomes their new normal and the body adjusts to it.

Can confirm, although I've had to shift to beer during the week so my studies don't suffer.

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we agreed to save it for the weekends when were both off. Doesnt happen very often

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not today Satan

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Its not your fault so just have it.

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Yeah, it is. I fucked up my health recently from drinking because I let it get out of hand.

There's a lot that went into my alcoholism. Bad role models, shitty home life, and eventually the feeling that I was outgrowing the people around me despite the good things they'd done for me. I hated who I was when I was sober, so I would drink to the point of getting blackout drunk so I wouldn't have to deal with that.

The situation at home that I lived with for years was that I felt like an unwelcome guest. I spent a lot of time living at home with my mum and her partner, and her partner's a shitty old drunk with his own baggage. He gives me the creeps, and he goes on these long benders where he's either elated and being a fucking nuisance, or he's screaming swear words in the back room and calling me the c-word and the like. The entire time I was in this environment, I would be within earshot as he called me a lazy little shit and made jokes about me being slow and lazy because I would do everything in my power not to speak with him or be around him. This, along with a tumultuous school life, meant I didn't go out at all or have many friends - so I'd be stuck listening to that sort of thing.

So when I turned 18 and school ended, and by some miracle had made friends in the last couple years, I would spend most of my time at a friend's house. Over the last 7 years since school ended, I probably spent more time at his place than I've spent at my home - we hung out, we had a similar sense of humour and we would party.

I know pretty much my entire social circle through this guy. I wouldn't have made such good friends with the other guys from high school without being so close to this guy. And over the years, he's taken care of me in some really shameful moments, where I really didn't deserve any sympathy. I was really socially stunted, so being around people who were more bold and outgoing would help me develop social skills, and in return I would supplement his social skills. At best, it was a symbiotic relationship - I wouldn't have been able to survive in a social setting without that help.

So what does this have to do with my alcoholism?

I wanted to elaborate on this relationship because it's complicated, and that has informed my alcoholism. I have no doubt that having an alcoholic parent and a severely alcoholic step-parent had an impact on my drinking, and I drank liberally around friends because I felt comfortable and safe in their company and I wanted to cut loose. But shit changed, and I began to stagnate.

My self-worth was tied closely to my friends. I believed that I could only survive on the goodwill of others - if I were to diverge and assert my own tastes, I would either create friction or be ignored, and either of those would damage the relationships I had with others. I began to come into my own and step out of the shadows, but it felt like when I would try to express myself, I would be overshadowed again - like I would be put back into the supplementary role I'd been playing for years at this point. I felt like I had no stake in conversations, because people would talk over me. I felt too self-conscious recommending songs to put on, and my best friend was one of the people who would basically control the flow of music all night - he'd let you put stuff on, it was on his phone and he was cool with whatever, but he tended to have final say and he'd get less tactful the drunker he got.

In response to this lack of control, I think I began to drink more to mask my negative emotions and to numb myself to be okay with this. I internalized the idea that my contributions were cringy or not as enjoyable as everyone else's, and I would only insist on sharing when I was really drunk or when the situation allowed enough flexibility for me to share my own stuff with people. But I would drink so much because in my mind, I was only relaxed enough to be casual when I was drunk. I felt better being social when I was drunk, and being social when I was sober was incredibly anxious.

So my self-worth was tied to my friends and how they reacted to me. I felt ignored and small when I was sober, but I felt at ease when I was drunk. So my self-worth came to be connected to whether I was drinking or not.

Over time, things changed. Friends from high school started getting married and having kids. Everyone in my friend group, barring my best friend, found an SO and settled down. I'd always spent the most time with my best friend because he was easy to speak to - we were thick as thieves. But over time, I realised that I wanted to spend time with other friends as well as my best friend. So we would end up at one of our mutual friend's place, partying and having fun. We'd spend time with a mother of 4 who'd shacked up with a relative of a friend who was dad #4 - small town, very esoteric relationships, but he was a good guy. I realised that my drinking was getting out of hand, and I didn't have an exit strategy. I was usually the only person getting drunk in a group, and when we would hang out with other people, there'd usually be reservations about whether I could drink or not. I couldn't be in a social situation without being drunk.

And then 2020 started.

Keep in mind - 2020 wasn't just the pandemic year. It was the year that Australia became devastated by the worst bushfires in recorded history. Those fires started in June of 2019, started to make the news around September and became a national crisis in December. January was when we had one of the worst heatwaves in living memory, and subsequently had some of the worst bushfires days in living memory. I was lucky enough to live in a town that wasn't so affected, but throughout January and February, our air was so polluted I couldn't see to the end of my street. I woke up one morning choking on bushfire smoke, and I had to sit on the floor of my bathroom with a cloth around my mouth and nose to breathe properly. I was checking the bushfire reports daily to see if my dad was gonna be okay in northern NSW - at one point, if his town went up in flames, the only escape he had was to go west towards the Northern Territory and South Australia through a thin corridor between two separate, massive bushfires. I was stressed.

It was around December or January where I picked up a nasty habit. I would leave my best friend's place at 9pm on Thursdays - we'd usually chill until 11 - and go to the local drive-thru bottleshop before they closed at 10. I'd buy enough alcohol to get blackout drunk, and I'd sit at my kitchen table and drink until I fell asleep. And then I would only spend time with people if I could drink - I would usually be the only one drinking. It only got worse during the pandemic - I was getting blackout drunk 3-4 days a week at the height of the pandemic, mostly at my kitchen table.

And then, one day in October, I bought a box of mixed alcohol and took it to my friend's house. I necked a 200ml bottle of salted caramel Kahlua. And my hands started buzzing with static.

You know when you get pins and needles? It was like that, but I could still feel my hands. They just tingled for hours on end - they were still tingling at 5am.

I went and got a blood test, and they measured the liver enzymes in my blood. My understanding is that the borderline acceptable amount of enzymes they could have found was 40 per sample of blood. They found 169 liver enzymes.

I had to get sober. But remember - my self-worth was tied to how drunk I was. I hated who I was when I was sober, and the only way I could be comfortable in my own skin around other people was if I was drunk.

My last drink was around December 17th, 2020. I've been sober for nearly 3 months now. And I've stopped hanging out with my best friend.

I owe my best friend a lot. That made it harder to stop spending time with him. But I realised how unhappy I was when I was around him.

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Whenever I'm being spoken over nowadays - it's him speaking over me. Aspects of his personality annoy the fuck out of me, like when he sings the same chorus or lyric from a song over and over all day, every day, for weeks. I never liked it when he would like touch my shoulder or anything - I didn't like when anyone would touch me because of the bullying I went through, but well into adulthood, I didn't want my best friend touching me. I'm so touch-starved, but between being touch-starved and hugging my friend, I'd rather be touch-starved. I shrugged off facetious comments because it was the nature of our friendship for me to cop a joke from time to time - I only recently started replying in kind, and I think my comfort in being nasty like that is affecting my relationships with others.

These are aspects of his personality that people like him for. That people respond positively to. Where I'm the outlier. They aren't negative aspects necessarily. But I hate them.

And having gotten sober, and subsequently had to cope with the effects of sobriety, I came to the conclusion that I hadn't liked my friend for a long time. For all that he had done for me over the years, for all the things he had done for me to help me fit in and feel included, I couldn't get past his faults. Being around this guy was like being nails on a chalkboard, and I think I've known for years. Being drunk helped me cope with the aspects of his personality I couldn't stand.

He means well, and I believe he's meant well most of the time we've been friends. There have been times where he's been spiteful and made joke after joke about the same shitty thing at my expense, but there have been times where I've been a real fucking menace and he took care of me when I was too drunk and belligerent to take care of myself. But I can't keep being friends with someone out of obligation, because it's the status quo and because it makes him feel better.

I think what really kicked this off was remembering all the times someone had asked me "why do you let him treat you like that? Why don't you get him back for it?" And the thing is, I didn't want to be mean back. I didn't want to make jokes about his high-strung mother - who he would explicitly make uncomfortable for his own amusement, and because he knew it made me squirm when he would be shitty towards her. I didn't want to make jokes about his alcoholic father. But I learned to indulge in it, and now I feel gross about it.

I didn't get him back for the longest time because my self-worth was tied to how people reacted to me. If he makes a joke about fucking my mother and people laugh, that's a positive reaction despite being sick of that fucking joke about him becoming my stepfather for the 50th time. When he would harp on something I said and turn it into a running joke, it's positive attention despite how bad it feels. If I speak up about it, I'm just gonna come across as a tightass and people will double down on it. And the fact is that because I was bullied during school, because I went through a decade of feeling like shit, I didn't want to make anyone else feel as bad as I ever did.

That's not to say that my mean streak was directly tied to how I was treated by my best friend. I got way meaner about certain people. I was a backstabber, if the person was disliked by our wider group. I was two-faced if it was entertaining. And I really fucking regret that.

I wanted people to like me, and the only time I felt loose and casual enough to feel comfortable in my own skin was when I was drunk. So when I began to grow out of how my best friend treated me, I would drink more to thicken my skin and deal with it. And then it got bad enough that I would confront him about it and he'd apologize and make a conscious effort to not go there. But the fact that he made that accommodation made me feel even worse, especially when I noticed him stopping himself from doing something that bothered me. And that's just the shit that was hurtful, that was reasonable to ask him to stop. I couldn't stand his constant fucking singing by the end, and that's just a casual innocuous habit that makes him happy y'know.

I only came to this conclusion once I had stopped drinking. Being around him while I've been sober has been so fucking uncomfortable. I clench my jaw and I want to be as far away from him as possible. He recently rested a hand in my shoulder in a good faith sort of way, and I shifted my entire body to get away from him. I have this primal revulsion to being around him, because I realise how unhappy I feel when I spend time around him.

Things didn't used to be like this. My feelings towards my best friend changed over time - and they should, because people change as they grow up and mature. But I was maintaining a status quo by drinking, and the only way I've been able to cope with sobriety is by spending the least amount of time with him as humanely possible.

The connecting thread throughout my stint with alcoholism has been comfort. I feel comfortable around my friends, and drinking loosened me up and made me more receptive to being around people. Then, as they came to know me, I began to feel a disconnect between our personalities - and the best way to bridge that gap and maintain a sense of goodwill with them was to drink. Then I became dependant on alcohol during a time of crisis and stress - I severely disliked who I was when I wasn't inebriated, and I had no choice but to live with the hellish reality of once-in-a-lifetime bushfires and a global pandemic, so I made a conscious choice to get blackout drunk as often as I could during a time where social norms were degrading. And then I drank my way into a health problem.

It is very easy to lose your sense of self and neglect your own personal growth due to alcohol. You want to feel comfortable, safe and loved, but you don't develop enough as a person to find those things in your day to day life - you get a taste of how that feels when you're really vibing on your alcohol of choice, but it's fleeting and it comes with a physical, financial and metaphorical cost.

We all need comfort, and we all need to cut loose sometimes. It can be hard to find release without something to take the edge off. But you're right about it being easy to slip into alcoholism, because when you've spent your entire life feeling alienated and downcast and you find something that helps you talk to people and make real connections slightly outside of your usual wheelhouse, it feels like a fucking godsend. It makes you re-evaluate whether you deserved to get bullied for reasons outside of your comprehension, and the answer tends to be "no, I didn't, because I'm fucking awesome". But that's the alcohol talking - you're the same person as always the next morning, and the next morning after your next drink. And I think we all know it's the alcohol talking. I don't know anyone who drank themselves into loving themselves.

To move forward, we need to feel like we're fucking awesome when we're not drinking. And the process of getting to that place is a lot of hard work, compassion and personal understanding, whereas it might be a bottle of gin away to feel like that for a night. I'm getting there after three months sober - and sobriety only clicked after 2 months of sobriety, to the day almost. But it's still a process I'm going through. To be honest, I'm going through a rough patch at the moment.

But yeah. Alcoholism is very easy to slip into

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When i need an excuse i just ask an alcoholic for one.

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MrMallard posted...

But yeah. Alcoholism is very easy to slip into

My dude, I've actually read the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, and the last bunch of chapters are personal stories.

Your two posts could have been published in there as a part 1 of your story. You fucking nailed it.

@MrMallard

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thank you for saying that. I feel like I stole the show kind of, like what I said could be seen as attention-seeking. But sobriety is a process, and I'm going through a rough patch at the moment so talking about it helped me feel better. The topic resonated with me - it was easy to slip into alcoholism.

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I drank six or so beers at the start of this week and got really really sick and now the thought of beer taste/smell makes me sick

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Been drinking while working at home it's been great. I've been concentrating much better and more productive

Also +10 charm during meetings

For me it got to the point where I was drunk at least 5 of 7 days a week. My record is 14 straight days. Other substances were involved.

Once flower became legal, I just did that, and have been better.

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Its definitely too easy. This shit sucks.

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i still wake up feeling dehydrated and hungover every day wtf

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lww99 posted...

i still wake up feeling dehydrated and hungover every day wtf

Detox effects linger a lot more than you'd think.

Drink a lot of fluids, try to sleep well.

Also start taking a B vitamin supplement, alcohol abuse really fucks with your thiamine levels.

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I'm glad I don't have an addictive personality. I do things because I want to do them, not because I feel compelled to doing them. I drank two weekends in a row once last year. I felt like death after the second time. Haven't touched alcohol in about 6 months.

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I dont get drunk or anything but I drink 6 nights a week lol

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And weed shouldnt be mentioned as a cure too, thats disgusting

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JBaLLEN66 posted...

I dont get drunk or anything but I drink 6 nights a week lol

so youre a member of the club lol

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lww99 posted...

so youre a member of the club lol

gotta function somehow

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Got some beer for us since were both off. But just enough for tonight

5 days gone lol. But Im not sure I plan on entirely stopping, just heavily cutting back

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Thats great for you if you can. Alcohol isnt the devil, its just people develop bad habits with it. I tried to moderate for a long time. That route just doesnt work for me. Maybe ill try the moderation thing again after a while.

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That's why you stick to drinking on the weekends only, or don't drink at all.

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JBaLLEN66 posted...

And weed shouldnt be mentioned as a cure too, thats disgusting

Not a cure. But when a large chunk of your drinking is due to boredom and "chasing a feeling that isn't normalcy", weed is a significantly better choice than drinking every day in a row. It's a crutch, but at least you can be normal and not want to drink. It helps.

It's a bandaid, not a treatment.

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No drinks for me or my wife for a week now so that's good

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