How Addiction Shrinks Your World
Alcohol put extreme limitations on my life.
Hello, everyone,
Before I get to today’s newsletter, I want to remind you that the Exploring Sobriety collection is now available on Amazon. It collects 50 of my earliest essays about sobriety, which I think are especially helpful for anyone who recently quit drinking. It’s available free through Kindle Unlimited or as a $4.99 ebook.
Thank you to everyone who has already checked it out. I hope you’re enjoying it, and please take a moment to leave a review after you’ve finished it. It would be a huge help to me. Thanks again!
Now, for today’s newsletter, I’d like to share how my addiction to alcohol shrank my world (and probably yours too).
The World of an Alcoholic
I’ve always hated the term “high-functioning alcoholic” because I don’t believe there really is such a thing. Even if an addict manages to function well within some domains of their life, their addiction is surely disruptive in other ways.
In my case, I managed to remain successful in school and work throughout years of heavy drinking, and so I had myself convinced that I was “high-functioning.” In reality, my addiction was completely cutting me off from the outside world.
When I was a drinker, I drank every night. Sometimes I’d try to cut down or quit drinking entirely, but it was a struggle for me to make it even twenty-four hours without getting drunk.
I could manage to get through the mornings and afternoons sober, which is what allowed me to excel academically and do well at work, but I couldn’t carry that through to the end of the day. Before going to sleep each night, I felt like I needed to get drunk.
When we talk about addictions controlling our lives, it’s easy to get lost in flowery language and metaphor. However, my alcoholism controlled my life in a very basic, practical way: I had to schedule every evening around my drinking.
Most nights, that meant staying in my apartment. If I had a potential event and I didn’t really need to be there, I’d skip it. It was too much of a hassle to go out when I knew I’d need to return home in time to get drunk.
When there was an event that I truly needed to go to, I’d go, but even then, I’d plan for an early exit. I was always watching the clock, calculating whether I’d have enough time to get home and get drunk before I needed to go to bed.
In this manner, day to day and night to night, alcohol kept me from going out and having fun. I was living in Chicago during my worst drinking years. It’s a fun and vibrant city, but with each year I experienced less and less of it.
My addiction shrank my life in many ways: It cut me off from opportunities, from friends, and from growing as a person. But it shrank my world in a very literal way too. My sphere of movement was reduced to the point at which I barely left my apartment.
Sadly, it wasn’t just my day-to-day life that was affected. Alcohol also got in the way of traveling on vacations. For several years in a row, I didn’t even leave the city of Chicago. It’s hard to imagine now, but I spent those entire years never going more than a few miles from my house. Even a trip to Roger’s Park, a neighborhood on the edge of the city, felt like an over-complicated ordeal that wasn’t worth the effort.
While alcohol certainly got in the way of going to a friend’s house at night, it was all the more disruptive when it came to major travel.
After all, how could I possibly enjoy a trip when I couldn’t go twenty-four hours without getting drunk? Instead of being fun, travel felt like a nightmare, because I knew I’d have to schedule it all around my drinking habit.
To add to this, even if I had wanted to travel, I wouldn’t have been able to afford it. I was spending all of my spare cash on booze and cigarettes.
Opening Up My World
My world has opened up since getting sober. It didn’t happen right away, but after I quit drinking, I gradually broke out of the self-imposed cage that I had been living in for a decade.
Instead of spending night after night in my apartment, I started to go out and have fun. I made new friends, found new hobbies, and began to explore the world again.
I started to travel more too. It became much easier to take trips when I didn’t have to plan them around alcohol. And, the massive amount of money that I saved from getting sober has helped to make traveling feel far more affordable.
If you’re a regular reader of my newsletter, you also might remember that I even ended up moving abroad a couple of years ago. A move like this would absolutely never have been possible during my drinking years. I wouldn’t have had the energy or courage to make a leap like this. (And even if I had moved abroad, I would have been too busy getting drunk every night to enjoy it.)
I’ve been to more places in the past year than in a decade of drinking. I’ve done more interesting things and met more interesting people.
It boils down to this: Alcohol closes us off from the world. Sobriety allows us to reconnect.