Was Alcohol the Cause of All My Problems?
Or am I blaming my addiction for more than its fair share?
When I think back on my time as a drinker, I remember a life riddled with problems.
I was lonely. I was depressed. I was broke. I was tired.
At times, I've blamed my addiction for all of these troubles. At other times, I've told myself that they were completely unrelated. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle.
Take my loneliness, for example.
In my early twenties, I had a great social life with plenty of friends. Beginning around age 25, those friendships started to fade away and my social life dried up.
By my late-twenties, I had hardly any friends at all, and I was spending every night alone in my apartment. I was overwhelmed by my loneliness.
What had happened?
An obvious answer is that I was drinking every night. I prioritized my drinking above everything else, including going out with friends. It's hard to maintain a social life when you devote all of your free time to getting drunk.
However, my drinking wasn't the only factor that led to increased loneliness. Another huge one was that I had entered law school.
Initially, I hoped law school would be a great way to make new friends. However, I didn't fit in well with most of the other students there, and I had trouble developing friendships even with the ones I liked.
Law school also ate into my time and increased my stress. I stopped going out as often because I was exhausted from school and just wanted to relax at home.
So, what was the true cause of my failing social life? Alcoholism or law school?
I don't believe it was just one or the other. They both contributed.
To make matters even worse, the drinking made me more stressed at law school, and law school became an excuse to drink more.
All of these problems—my stress at school, my drinking, and my loneliness—were intertwined and feeding off each other. It would be impossible for me to ever fully untangle how these issues all interacted with one another.
To say that my loneliness was just a result of my drinking would be an oversimplification. So too would be to say that it was just a result of being in law school.
The reality is that many of our problems in life have multiple causes and complex explanations.
And yet, despite all of this, there was still an incredibly straight forward solution to most of what was going wrong in my life: I had to quit drinking.
That conclusion might come as a surprise after I've just spent so long explaining that each of my problems had multiple causes. If alcohol was just one factor, how could sobriety solve so much?
The simple fact is that my addiction was the biggest contributing factor to my other struggles in life.
It might not have always been the sole cause, perhaps not even the main cause, but when you add up all of the various problems I was having, my alcoholism was the most frequent culprit.
Getting sober didn't instantly solve everything else in my life, but it was an enormous step in the right direction. It made some problems disappear, and it made the remaining problems far easier to address.
I used to spend a lot of energy trying to figure out exactly how much of a role alcohol had played in everything going wrong in my life. If you look back at my oldest blog posts, you'll see me sometimes blaming alcohol for everything and sometimes nothing.
I think that some of this was really me searching for an excuse to give up on sobriety. If I downplayed the role that alcohol had in my problems, it would justify me going back to it.
But the truth is that no matter how big or small a role alcohol played in any particular problem, its overall effect on my life was a overwhelmingly negative.
It's been seven and a half years since my last drink, and the contrast between my life then and now is crystal clear: Life without alcohol has far fewer problems and is far easier than my life as a drunk.