(Image from Colette Baron-Reid)
Growing up I was aware that my dad drank. Vodka martini with a twist at fancy restaurants, Dos Equis at Mexican restaurants, sake at Japanese restaurants, I always knew what he was going to order. At home he bought vodka by the handle. Cheep if his business was struggling or nicer if the business was doing well. He would have a couple vodka martinis before he went to pick up my sister or I from a friends house. His ex girlfriend has a story about sitting in the living room with him and there was a pint glass on the coffee table. It was clear liquid in a pint glass so she reasonably assumed it was water. After taking a huge swig she discovered that it was in fact vodka. He’s a woodworker and someone who used to work with him told me that even at 8 am he would smell alcohol on his breath and wonder if he should he operating the wide belt sander.
This story isn’t going where so many stories like this do. He never hit me. I wasn’t molested. Despite everything I just described I can only count on one hand the number of times I saw him properly drunk. Most people would call him a functioning alcoholic. Though it did effect him. Later in life I learned about alcoholic rage. I don’t really remember him raging at me or my sister. But my mom and his girlfriends, he would get in scary fights with and yell and swear. When I was little it scared me and I would go hide in the garage with a teddy bear. He was also emotionally distant. I suspect (we’ve never talked about it) that he used alcohol to numb himself. As a child I just felt like my father was physically there but mentally and emotionally he was always somewhere else.
That side of my family of origin doesn’t discuss anything really meaningful. So I don’t know for sure when or why he stopped drinking. I have my suspicions though. I went to college in LA and I had my 18th birthday after I moved down there. I was feeling really homesick and was living with horrible roommates so for my birthday my dad flew me home. He picked me up from the airport 45 minutes late and visibly drunk. (I still have travel anxiety around airports because of this and hate having someone pick me up.) It was the first and only time in my life that I was afraid to be in the car with him driving. If I had been who I am today I would have made him pull over and let me drive but in the moment I was just young and scared. We made it back to the house and he said he wasn’t feeling well and went to lay down. My sister and I went to get dinner and then came home and went to bed. Sometime in the middle of the night my dad came in and woke my sister up and was asking a lot of questions. He had been completely blacked out and remembered non of the evening. It was pretty soon after that that I noticed he wasn’t drinking.
In typical fashion I had a string of partners and close friends who were alcoholics. I’m still embarrassed that years ago, maybe 15 years, I had been hanging out with a friend and drinking all afternoon and I went to a therapy appointment drunk. When I’m just by myself my drinking doesn’t concern me but when I’m around or in close relationship with someone who has a problem I start drinking more. From my understanding there are kind of layers of reasons for this. Sometimes when you’re around someone who is drinking heavily they’re super annoying unless you’re drinking too, then it’s fun. Sometimes, especially with my ex, I would drink so that there was less alcohol that he could get. Sometimes it was because there was something I got special and wanted (a nice wine, fancier than usual liquor) and if I didn’t keep up with the person in my life who was drinking too much I wouldn’t get to have any. When I was with my ex I was aware of his drinking but I wasn’t aware how bad it was and how bad my reaction to it was until I was examining it in hindsight. Before we split up someone came to visit us and after they went home they sent me a digital copy of the Al-Anon books with a note that said “you can’t fix him.” I never made it to a meeting but I read the first chapter of the book and knew I needed to get out. Even then it didn’t really hit me how bad it was until after we broke up and he was trying again to quit drinking. We were talking and he told me that “the first 12 hours are the hardest.” I did the math. If you’re at the bar drinking until 2 am that means you need another drink before 2 pm. That was just staggering to me.
The older I get and the more of the world I see the more I am bothered by alcohol culture. The funny signs about needing wine. The jokes about needing to drink because of your children (eek). If you have a good day, have a drink to celebrate. If you have a bad day, have a drink to recover. If you say you don’t drink you’re teased for being no fun. I’m sorry, what does it say about you if you can only have fun by drinking? It’s so normalized, pervasive, and accepted and harmful.
I had one therapist tell me that most alcoholics are extremally sensitive people who drink to numb themselves. These people drink just to be able to exist in our world. There has to be a better answer than that. Maybe we could all work together to make the world a less cruel place. Maybe if people who are sensitive we treated with kindness instead of like there’s something wrong with them. Maybe if we allowed men and boys to have emotions other than anger. Maybe we could stop treating people suffering with addiction like they are weak and their addiction is a moral failing. So many people with addictions of many kinds are just trying to self medicate and cope with the world around them. Rather than harming our bodies to be able to exist in a broken world, let’s all work together to fix what is broken and create a life we don’t need to escape from.
The science backs this. I could try to write about this but really if you are interested check out this Ted talk, Everything you think you know about addiction is wrong, it’s really worth the 15 minutes.
Screaming in the Dark 