How I Became an Alcoholic

I never suspected that I could develop such a strong addiction.

Photo by Li Yang on Unsplash

I’ve been sober for nearly 8 years, but before that, I spent about a decade as a heavy, daily drinker. I went through anywhere from a six-pack to a case of beers nearly every day, throughout essentially all of my twenties. It wasn’t until just a few months before my thirtieth birthday that I finally managed to quit.

It’s surreal to me that I ever drank so much and that my addiction lasted for so long. How did I go from being a relatively happy child to a young adult who couldn’t make it 24 hours without getting drunk?

In today’s newsletter, I’m going to recount how I went from sneaking sips of wine to drinking every day. I’ve told some of this before, but there are many new readers to this newsletter over the past year who have never heard it. As we approach the end of the year, I think it’s a perfect time to revisit it.

For those of us who have gotten sober, it’s useful to look back at how we became addicts in the first place because it helps to keep us from making the same mistakes again. I believe that the better we understand our addictions, the more likely we are to stick with sobriety. I hope that for you reading this, my story will resonate with you.

Early Warning Signs

Something that I find odd is that even as a very young kid, I was already drawn to the idea of drinking. I remember sneaking sips of wine at my synagogue when I was all the way back in elementary school, and the first time that I ever got a little drunk, I was still only in middle school.

By the time I was a high school student, I had already escalated to binge drinking. Fortunately, I attended a very strict boarding school, which kept me from drinking too often. I was only able to drink every few months when I was off-campus for the weekend.

I wasn’t addicted to alcohol in those early years, but I was already strongly drawn to it. When I drank, I was already drinking about as much as I could. I always wanted to get drunker and drunker.

Why was alcohol so appealing? The truth is that even after all of these years I don’t understand exactly why.

In part, I was driven by simple curiosity. It was interesting to me to experience the world through an altered mental state. I was experimenting with pot plenty at the time too, for much the same reason.

In addition to this, however, I think there also might have been an aspect of “self-medicating.” In high school, I was struggling with major depression, and the alcohol let me forget about that problem for one night at a time.

Becoming a Daily Drinker

When I was in college, my drinking problem matured from occasional binge drinking to daily drunkenness.

I was always extremely unhappy to be at college. I went to university because it was expected of me and because I couldn’t think of an alternative. I don’t think that I was emotionally ready for the experience at all.

I wasn’t completely aware of it at the time, but the depression that had begun in high school was still going strong while I was in college. I thought that I was mostly better, so I stopped taking my medication for it, which only made things worse.

This led to me drinking more and more during my freshman and sophomore years. Of course, some of this drinking could be chalked up to the normal college experience of pushing boundaries and partying. However, I also started drinking more often alone in my dorm room, which was certainly an alarming sign.

My mental health wasn’t the only thing suffering—I also had a host of interconnected physical health problems. I herniated three discs in my back, which led to sciatica, which caused a ton of pain and insomnia. My drinking increased as a way to numb the literal pain and help me fall asleep.

Things came to a head during my junior year. I left school with the intention of permanently dropping out. Instead, I got back surgery and enrolled in some long-distance courses. During that semester, my drinking came to a halt. I had pain meds from my back surgery and took the warning not to mix them with alcohol seriously.

However, when I re-enrolled in school, I got off the pain meds and started drinking every single day. By this point, there were a whole host of factors driving me toward daily drinking:

• It replaced the pain meds.

• It masked my depression.

• It helped me deal with the loneliness of being at a new school without many friends.

Post-College

The entire time I was in college, I had myself convinced that my drinking habit was normal for a college student. Even though I realized that I was drinking an unhealthy amount, I just assumed that I would get things under control after I graduated. That’s not how things played out.

Instead, after I graduated college, I began to drink even more.

I graduated in December 2008, right in the middle of the “Great Recession.” I couldn’t find a normal job (although I’ll admit I didn’t try all that hard), so I ended up doing freelance work while living on my own in a small apartment.

It was the perfect recipe for disaster.

I had no external schedule to follow, so I ended up procrastinating work so that I could drink throughout the day. Eventually, I was barely working at all, and just surviving by loading up on credit card debt.

I also had barely any friends in town, so I basically just sat by myself in my apartment all day and night. The boredom encouraged me to drink even more.

By that point, my addiction had become a self-reinforcing cycle. The more I drank, the crappier my life got, which only made me want to drink more.

Over the following decade, my life and my addiction had ups and downs. I’d manage to quit for a few months, and get my life a bit more together, but then I’d go back to drinking and things would get worse again.

By my mid-twenties, drinking had become a very normal part of my life, and I could barely imagine going a day without it. In some measures, I was still living a high-functioning life, but in others, I was struggling to get by.

I often wonder what would have happened if I kept drinking into my thirties. In the best case, maybe my life would have stayed about the same. More likely, it would have gotten worse, or I’d simply have let my drinking habit kill me.

Fortunately, I never had to find out. I got sober at age 29, and my life finally started getting better.

I hope you’ve found today’s newsletter interesting. In next week’s I plan to focus on how I finally quit drinking after so many years hooked on alcohol. Thanks for reading, and please make sure to subscribe!