I’m 25, and I started drinking when I was 15. My best friend Jenny and I would steal 4 shots each of her mom’s Jim Beam, drink them as fast as possible, and then consume no more for the night. This continued throughout high school, with forays into mixed drinks, beer, basically whatever I could lay my hands on. I got arrested for under aged drinking a few times, but once I blew a 0.06 (under the legal limit) so my parents weren’t upset. The other time, I was quite drunk and deserved to be arrested.
Then in my first ill fated semester of college, I got a fake ID. That was when alcohol started to interfere with my school work and personal relationships. I can function without slurring in a black out, and I embarrassed myself on countless occasions, missed class, and basically withdrew from classes before the college could expel me.I moved in with my boyfriend, and we loved drinking to excess. Soon enough we found a store that would sell to underage kids (I had since lost my fake ID), and we started getting drunk whenever we could. I nearly lost a job due to coming in hungover every day, but I cleaned up my act during the week. Eventually, the boyfriend started drinking until he got sick nearly every day, and we broke up. At this point he’d consume an entire fifth of Jim Beam, then spend the night puking and cursing god. During this period, he got into a fatal drunk driving accident.
A few days before he died, I was arrested for drunk and disorderly, as well as under aged drinking. I was in a total blackout and had no clue where I was when I woke up, though I figured it out pretty quickly. The jail staff was very kind to me, they let me drink as much water as I wanted and take a 45 minute high pressure shower so I could look semi presentable for the judge.
A normal person would look at those events and decide that alcohol was not for them. I was not one of those people. I continued to drink, mostly without ill effects, sometimes to vast excess, for four years. The tipping point was getting thrown out of my favorite bar for arguing ten days ago. I haven’t had a drink since.
Most of my experiances with alcohol have been fun. However, I’ve had horrendous shaking, puking hangovers, and lately, even a few drinks blunts my mind the next day. Also, alcohol consumption seems to trigger anxiety and shame even when I’ve done nothing wrong.
Obviously, I have a complicated relationship to alcohol that I think falls somewhere between abuse and addiction. Most of the time, I can drink responsibly, but when I don’t, it ends in crying jags, jail, physical fights, and once, death. I think I will remain sober for the immediate future, but as Scarlett O’Hara says, ‘Tomorrow is another day.’
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