Alcoholism

[mrpupkin]

I fear The Fear will do for my drinking eventually, can't get pissed anymore without a few days of solid dread tagging along uninvited. Lying awake all night pure hating myself. Load of old shite.

[ArtParrott]

Is it alcoholism if you got drunk with friends and the next day you feel dread and guilt that you said/did something embarrassing you can't remember but you cannot tell if you're feeling this guilt because you actually did say/do something embarrassing or because you just think you did because you're an anxious wreck on the verge of a mental breakdown at the moment and therefore your anxious over-thinking brain's logic is "you got drunk, you must have embarrassed yourself somehow" and you know you could put your mind to rest by just messaging your mates if you did embarrass yourself last night but will be worried that that would just make you look weird if they say "err... no... you were fine, mate."?

This was how too many of my weekends ended and yep, it's alcaholism. Cut it out.

I don't know if that's quite fair, but then I would say that because it happens to me from time to time. It's fucking horrible but its just your exhausted mind intensely focusing on your night on the booze because thats the reason why you feel like shit. A friend of mine who's a mental health professional explained it to me far more eloquently. Unfortunately knowing this doesn't make a blind bit of difference and you will still feel like shit for two days (ymmv) and then forget whatever it was you were worried about. Unless you did make a cunt of yourself in which case, who cares, you were ratted.

[MoonDust]

I don't know if that's quite fair, but then I would say that because it happens to me from time to time. It's fucking horrible but its just your exhausted mind intensely focusing on your night on the booze because thats the reason why you feel like shit. A friend of mine who's a mental health professional explained it to me far more eloquently. Unfortunately knowing this doesn't make a blind bit of difference and you will still feel like shit for two days (ymmv) and then forget whatever it was you were worried about. Unless you did make a cunt of yourself in which case, who cares, you were ratted.

I wasn't that ratted, and one person said I was fine and actually pretty funny.

Also, what does ymmv mean?

[ArtParrott]

I wasn't that ratted, and one person said I was fine and actually pretty funny.

Yeah sorry, I didn't mean to imply anything, I was talking to myself there by the end.

Also, what does ymmv mean?

YMMV = "Your mileage may vary" By which I mean, I'm in my 30's and a two day recovery time is standard for a heavy night, but I know some folks have it better and others much worse. 

[ASFTSN]

Day 11 with no booze.  Turns out you can still feel like a depressed emotionless human slug even without drinkinininge.  Onward for science.

[Fry]

I fear The Fear will do for my drinking eventually, can't get pissed anymore without a few days of solid dread tagging along uninvited. Lying awake all night pure hating myself. Load of old shite.

Yeah.

[Sebastian Cobb]

I fear The Fear will do for my drinking eventually, can't get pissed anymore without a few days of solid dread tagging along uninvited. Lying awake all night pure hating myself. Load of old shite.

It takes a couple of days for me to get the fear but I'm a fucker for going for hair of the dog if I'm hungover.

I've taken to toning it down by staying in grabbing a bottle of wine and getting stoned as well.

[DukeDeMondo]

I wanted to add a couple (dozen) things to this thread because it will do me good and it might do someone else good, maybe, if they recognise themselves in any of it. This is a long fucking post. Long as canaries. Sorry. All it comes down to really is if you think you need help then please go and get it. If you can't stop and you want to stop, get help. There's plenty of it about.

People on here have expressed concerns about their drinking, and the amount they're drinking, and the way they're drinking, and have wondered if they might be alcoholic. That's something you have to figure out for yourself, I'd say. But I would also say that if you are, you probably know you are.

I'm an alcoholic. I don't know if I always was, or if it's something that developed in me over time, or something that could have been patched up if I'd gotten to it quick enough, or... who knows? Whatever the case, that's what I am. My relationship with alcohol hasn't changed since I first got proper blackout waking up in an ambulance drunk when I was thirteen years old. I drink to get completely obliterated as quickly as possible every time. I've drank my way out of jobs, relationships, any semblance of sanity. I'm incapable of having "a few drinks," or of "cutting down." Swapping this sort of booze for that has no effect whatsoever. As soon as the first one is in me, I will not stop until I'm unable to speak. If I'm lucky I'll be on my own and I'll pass out fairly quickly, but I haven't been very lucky the past few years.

Times when I'm not so lucky, I'll wake up to find that I'm in hospital, or that I've spent the night hurting myself with something other than booze, or that I've shaved my head or half of it, or that I've said the most horrific things to friends and family, or that I've paraded naked about the avenue shouting and screaming and waving my fists, or that I've tried to throw myself off a bridge and someone's pulled me from it and sat on me till help arrived, or that I've been sending inappropriate messages to people, or that I've posted pages and pages of the most pathetic, attention seeking "Look at me!! Look at how fucking drunk and wild I am!!!! Fucking check me out, I am the bastards of young!" shit on here or on Facebook or both, and friends I have here or there just fucking sigh, like. For it's a big thing for me, when I'm away like that, it seems. Attention seeking. Some alcoholics try to hide it when they're drunk, I hide away afterwards. When I'm pissed, I seem to want the fucking world and her tit rash to know all about it. A performance nobody asked for and nobody wants to be fucking bothered with. And why?

I wonder about that. Why. The attention seeking, the relentless Legend Garying on, it's obviously a symptom of something, but of what? Self esteem issues are partly to blame, I suppose, even though I'm as full of myself as a dozen of fuck as often as I'm not. Proving myself to everyone. I might not be as pretty as you are, or as smart, or as sharp, but I can get fucked up better than you, believe you me, I can get fucked up and I can fuck things up more spectacularly than anyone else in the room. Believe it now.

Walking cliché. But. You can only write "fuck up" so many ways.

But that's not the whole of it. The alcoholism that lumbers about in me and rages as the notion takes it has many limbs and many things sticking to it and bits falling off and bits spawning. The most fundamental of these bits and the simplest to explain is probably the all-consuming obsession with alcohol and drunkenness that I've had since I was old enough to recognise the transformations in people brought about by a few cans of Tennents, even. Magical stuff. Holy. A dear friend of mine told me I'm in love, deeply in love, with getting fucked up, and it's true, I am. And I am in love with alcohol, and always have been. And what else? I am selfish and narcissistic and desperate for approval and attention and I fucking detest myself as much as I fucking love myself. And I have a raging martyr complex. And all of those things combine in my alcoholism. What I know about it is that if I want to turn things around, and I do, I honestly fucking do, it's not enough to "stop drinking," or anywhere near enough. There's a lot to be put right there, once the fugg of the last drunk recedes.

I was sober – no, dry - for two months there and fucked up spectacularly yet again on Tuesday night. I was in a hotel with my parents, supposed to be there for a couple of nights. I knew I was going to drink, and I knew I was going to have to work to get it, and I did work. Put a lot of effort into manipulating them. Sighing at the bar. Refusing to eat. Looking all sorrowful. Making them feel guilty for getting drinks of their own. Then it came out of me: "I'm on holiday, like, I've done well, two months off, few pints wouldn't hurt." Worked. I had a pint in front of me before my tongue had ever half settled. Drank as much as I could between then and the bar closing before going to my room and ordering the first of the bottles of wine I staggered out to collect from reception. I blacked out shortly after 1am and woke up in my own bedroom at home the next day, an hour and a half's drive from the hotel, without a clue how I got there or what happened or how it happened. I knew I'd done something terrible, but that's all. I still don't know all that I did, but I've had bits and pieces revealed to me. My mum stood over me on Thursday night and recounted events while I sat on the edge of the bed coughing and crying over my fists and begging her to stop, but she wouldn't. And she has video recordings and audio recordings. I was thrown out of the hotel, that much I had guessed already. I didn't know why, and now I do. I could have been arrested for what I did. If any of the other residents had stepped out and witnessed what I was doing in the hallway... Well. The rest of the time my parents worked hard to keep me contained in one room and I spat and barked and writhed and said vile, unrepeatable things to them, some of the worst things I've ever said to or about anyone. At one point I was lying on the floor trying to wank while they looked on with I can't even begin to think what kinds of expressions. And that's only the worst of what I know. There's worse in the videos, my mum says.

I don't know why those things happened or why I said what I said, I wasn't there. I was far away from any of it. But it was me, there, regardless.

It's like this every single time for me. If I drink I can't stop drinking, and it always, always leads to humiliation and hurt and guilt and anger and sadness and hopelessness and wanting to kill myself and begging my friends and family to forgive me. Every single time. And you might say "Well don't fucking drink, then?" but I've tried to not fucking drink and I can't do it. Not on my own. "Why does he behave like this?," it asks in the famous "Big Book" of Alcoholics Anonymous. "If hundreds of experiences have shown him that one drink means another debacle with all its attendant suffering and humiliation, why is it he takes that one drink? [...] What has become of the common sense and will power that he still sometimes displays with respect to other matters?"

I don't know the answer to that, yet, but I know that on my own this is how it's going to be for me. I can keep away for a week, a month, two months, but I'll be there again, at some point, downing everything I can get my hands on as quickly as I can stomach it, feral and raging for another few hours, and I'll be lying again in darkened rooms for two or three days with the skin bubbling on my back and my eyes streaming down my face and a head and heart full of regret and guilt and shame.

But I am done. Done. I'm crying typing this, but I'm overjoyed, really, for I know, I know it in my bones that that did it, that last drunk. I don't know if it was the worst I've ever been, I've maybe been worse when no-one was there to see it, I was probably worse two months prior, just before deciding to stop, but it's the last one I have in me, that I do know. I cannot do it again. I can't take what I'm doing to people I love. I can't take what I'm doing to myself. But I know also that that alone isn't enough, because that will fade, and I'll forget, and my brain will start curling around itself and cooing at me again, and I'll be in another position where the first drink is easier to drink than to turn down and that'll be it, another time. 

So I'm grateful for that fuck up, as hard as it's been to get over, and although I deeply regret the hurt it caused and continues to cause. I went back to AA on Friday night. I've been to meetings at various times over the past few years, but never because I wanted to be there. Always because I was trying to take the heat off myself, or make up for something, or apologise in some way, or even, I dunno, maybe to enable me to better get away with what I was doing. "Of course there's vodka hidden under the sink, did you not hear me tell you I was at AA one night?" "Of course I collapsed on the street and pulled my trousers and my pants down and pissed all over myself where I was lying, didn't I go to AA, didn't I tell you?" "Of course I'm unconscious and on the floor with the face battered off myself when you wake up in the morning, AA for fuck sake." Anyway that wasn't why I went on Friday.

I felt something there that I haven't felt in a long, long time. I feel like there is help for me there, that they can do for me what doctors couldn't and what hospitals couldn't, because nobody understands an alcoholic like another alcoholic. I know if I do what's asked of me this obsession will leave me and this cycle will be broken, and I'll can get on with being the person I want to be for the people I love and the people who love me, despite everything.

It worked for me before, years and years ago, but I stopped attending meetings, stopped talking with my sponsor, and the inevitable happened. Some people don't like the fact that AA asks you to admit you're powerless over alcohol, but I have no issue with that whatsoever. I am fucking powerless over it, it has been proven countless times. Other people object to the "higher power" business, but really, for me, that's just about humility, taking yourself back a bit, you're not all there is in the world so stop fucking acting like you are.

I'm sorry this is such a long, rambling post, but the point is if you're an alcoholic and you need help, help is out there. And also, it can't really be stressed enough, it's not about how much you drink or how often. I was drinking every day before I was hospitalised and eventually brought back home, but I'm no less of an alcoholic now than I was when I was sitting outside the off licence drinking K Cider at half six in the morning every morning. For the past year I've had to cut it down to twice a week, but I was counting the seconds between each binge, taking as many sleeping tablets as I could get to bring it closer to me, walking about with a raging white knuckle thirst on me 24/7, so on and so forth. And the binges were disastrous, every time. The very best ones were ones that I only had to apologise to maybe two people after. That's alcoholism, but it's not the only face of alcoholism. But really it comes down to this, again from the Big Book:

"The fact is that most alcoholics, for reasons yet obscure, have lost the power of choice in drink. Our so-called will power becomes practically non-existent. We are unable, at certain times, to bring into our consciousness with sufficient force the memory of the suffering and humiliation of even a week or a month ago. We are without defence against the first drink."

Without defence against the first drink. That's what it's about. It's about finding something, anything, that will guard you against it. It might be rehab, or it might be AA, or it might be whatever, but something will do it, eventually. Another cliché, but it's true: put the effort you put into getting drunk into getting sober, and you'll get there. But if you're like me, you'll need all the fucking help you can get.

I can't say I'm two months dry anymore, but I think I'm about three days sober, and I can't express how that feels. It's been a long, long, long fucking time since I was sober or anywhere near it.

[Vodka Margarine]

Duke, that's one post and a half and I wouldn't know where to begin but "the fucking world and her tit rash" made me lose it (in a good way).

[Pdine]

Pint?

[Avril Lavigne]

Thanks for posting that, Duke.

[non capisco]

Duke, that's one post and a half and I wouldn't know where to begin but "the fucking world and her tit rash" made me lose it (in a good way).

Yes, me too. What a wordsmith that man is.

Brilliant post, Duke. Keep on keeping on, pal.

[monolith]

Glad you're sober, Duke.

I don't have such a way with words but from the moment I admitted I was an alcoholic/addict and tried to get sober it took me a further 7 years of hammering myself with drink, drugs, lying, stealing, cheating, manipulating, lost jobs, lost relationships, lost friends, family hating me, homelessness, hostels, halfway houses, couple of months clean here and there, relapsing, meetings etc. until I sorted myself out.

Everyone's road is different and I hope yours isn't as rocky as mine but never give up hope if there are any further slips.

13 months since I've touched a drink or a drug and I've never been so fucking happy in my entire life. Have to pinch myself sometimes. Moved out of a halfway house a couple of months ago, now renting my own flat and have a full time job working for the drug services.

Obviously still have bad days and shitty feelings but they always pass.

I could ramble on forever about this shit but to the original question, I see it as if the cons are outweighing the pros and have been for a significant amount of time and you carry on drinking regardless, then there's a pretty good chance you're an alcoholic.

[Norton Canes]

As soon as the first one is in me, I will not stop until I'm unable to speak

I'm very much like that with cashews.

[Dr Syntax Head]

That was good reading. a lot of what a lot of you on here are saying really hits home. I'm not glad that I'm not the only one with serious problems with alcohol, I don't want anyone to experience and lose what I have but it's comforting to hear others be so open about it. Strength in numbers etc I guess.

I'm currently having a sober period. This will last until Thursday when I go up to Bristol to see a band and I have half a day to kill. I know full well I will buy some beers or some wine and find a high vantage point to drink and enjoy the view. I then have an overnight coach ride home where I know for certain that I will drink. My sober periods are great, I feel strong but just one drinking session can then send me on several months of continuous daily drinking. I'm going to do my best not to let it happen this time. I dunno. It's a fucking horrible addiction. One of the worst.

My thoughts go out to all here, it sucks to be this way but talking about it to people I don't know helps. All you tend to get from friends and family are either disbelief (I'm functioning alcoholic for sure) or contrived platitudes and stupid advice.

Good luck to you. Keep fighting it however you decide to fight it.

[RDRR]

Compelling read, Duke. The warmth with which those struggling with alcoholism describe sobriety is really something.

[Steven]

I had a very similar problem with alcohol, from being a life-long insomniac - I didn't drink until University and then discovered this wonderful drug would put me to sleep, so would binge in order to do so. Of course that developed into a repeating cycle of not being able to have "a couple" of drinks and would mean on the days I drank I usually drank until I blacked out which developed into drinking every day and night and ultimately alcoholism especially as my best friend and flatmate was also an alcoholic so normalised it all for me. I don't think the the motivation behind it is as pernicious as Duke's but I've caused a fair amount of drama with drinking into blackouts, most of the time putting myself in danger and have the physical scars to prove it, as well as waking up in hospital once with no clue how I got there.

I've had spells off it usually medicating with weed or sleeping pills but decent ones are very difficult to get these days. But after years and years of binge drinking into blackouts I stopped about 5 years back. I don't think there was any particular conscious effort to do so other than a getting very drunk and being beaten up by a bouncer. I'd snuck into a pub through a side-door after not being admitted in but the place I know now are renowned for having the most overly violent bouncers and he picked me up and threw me forcefully on the cobbles and fucked up my arm which I still have issues with to this day. I've not really caused any problems since and get embarrassed if I start to feel really drunk in public and go home and have become rather conservative with drink [to my standard] and usually only have enough to make me tired. But that insidious hungry monster that makes you want to keep drinking until you're no longer conscious seems to have died. So it can be done, not sure if that's true of everyone, especially Duke though.

[DukeDeMondo]

Thank you folks, and to those who've shared similar experiences and stories, thank you for that too, and the absolute best of fucking luck to you.

[pancreas]

A good read.

Plus what you just edited away, though I can see why you did: I can't imagine euphoria is a great idea right now. Try to stay on the level.

[nero]

Absolutely heart-wrenching, Duke (and others).

As a 38 year old lady I am sadly in the same boat.
I stayed with my mum while she was ill recently. She went out to visit a friend one night- 'my chance!' I thought.' I'll just have a couple of wines.'
A couple of bottles later I was wandering in a forest in New Zealand, shoeless, while a storm raged around me. Mum had come home to empty bottles and her front door swinging wide open. Police were called, and I staggered in at about 3 am after 5 hours wandering around the town causing damage. This included knocking on people's doors and climbing their fences.
Just to reiterate - I am 38 years old.
I went through the usual guilt, apologies...and I have just become more secretive.
I hate it.
This is just the latest in a long line of fuckery.
I hate it.

*Edit - I should add - I started the night in New Zealand, I didn't just end up there randomly.

[MikeShaft]

Hey D. As a man who is now six and a bit years booze free, I find it hard to write things like this. I've never been a sponsor or had one, so I'm conscious I don't know the best things to say. But firstly I wanted to say that is an incredibly brave post.
It sounds weird, but the pain is good. The pain is part of the healing. That's why it's so easy to head back to be numbed, because it fucking hurts to stop.
But most importantly, remember you know this to be true now. If you slip and slide again, you know there is a path you want to head for. I don't think I've seen you admit so clearly before that you want this to stop. And that the first drink may as well be a bottle of vodka, because we all know where it's heading.
Keep this in mind and you will do well. Good luck sir.

My method is simple. I don't drink alcohol. Of course, in practice, that's far harder with the triple pressures of peers, advertising and my addiction suggesting it's all fine now and of course I'll stop at the one. But the actual process is easy. Don't pour alcohol into yourself. You know you can do that because they are your hands and your mouth. I fucked up a couple of times of course. But I'm happy with my run at the moment.

[Gregory Torso]

Duke, that's a really amazing post - thanks for sharing. I've had friends like that and it really is hard to "help" other than trying to limit the damage control they can do. Part of the problem I think is there's a somewhat romanticism about being a drunk, especially for creative types, that is very damaging. It's in British culture from the day you first take a drink (go on lad, gerrit down yer! ), and even people who think they have a problem can always find someone who drinks way more than they do which can lessen their desire to get help. I love drinking, but it's frightening how fucking dangerous something that's seen as a part of most people's lives (and often if you don't drink people act like you're the weird one), how it can all slip out of control. I'm a drunk who's quite good at hiding it and still managing to function but I have a friend who behaves much in the way you described and it's really difficult to stand by someone if they aren't willing to change, I mean everyone's got their own shit to deal with.

[DukeDeMondo]

That's why it's so easy to head back to be numbed, because it fucking hurts to stop.

It fucking hurts to stop. Indeed. I feel that very much today. Last night I came out of a meeting with, fuck, I don't even know, I was on fire, laughing and crying and shaking my head to myself the whole way home, couldn't fucking believe what was going on in inside of me. I felt weightless, fucking, just gratitude and relief spilling out of me all over the fucking place. I spoke to my friend and I told her that I didn't know how the fuck it had happened, for I had done nothing but beg for it to leave me, didn't know how, but for the first time in maybe ten years there was absolutely nothing in me, nothing, of the desire to get fucked up. Nothing. It just wasn't there, and I stood in front of the mirror and gawked at myself and tried to see if I could see where it had been and what kinds of holes it was leaving in me and, oh, for fuck sake, like. Lay in my bed just crying and grinning and fucking I don't even know.

I woke up today with something else in my head. I didn't mention it in that post up there but for the first five years of the drinking that left me in the state I'm in now I was in a relationship with someone. My best friend in the world. I loved her deeply and still do. Marriage was the talk. Certainly we would live together until one of us died, there was no question about that. I probably wasn't as ready for that as I thought, well clearly I wasn't, I had a lot of fucking carrying on to do and a lot of things to find out about myself, but that was what we were bound for, nonetheless. I was sober when I met her, started drinking again about two years in without really talking to her about it, just did it, felt I had changed a lot in the past few years, I'd grown up a lot, so on and so forth. Won't affect me now like it did back then. Can't compare the steaming demented head of a teenage drunk with the head of a sober aspiring academic, like, sake. I knew what I was doing, I told her. Enough time had passed. Well. It was clear from the first night back on it that fuck all had changed. Took about 8 pints for the head of that teenage drunk to swell up again within my skull and before I knew where I was I was in the off licence buying drinks for myself and everyone else in the queue and I found myself in the bathroom the next morning with the face punched off myself and that was it, the obsession was rekindled and I was fucked. By that time there had been so much invested that it wasn't easy for her to walk away, and she didn't want to walk away. She just wanted me to stop again. And I swore I would. And realised I couldn't. And here we are.

Anyway. I remembered something she told me the morning she decided she just could not fucking take it any more. Three years ago now I'd say it was. The years have sort of bled over other this past while, I can't pick them apart like I used to. I'd woken up in hospital again, tubes and wires and things sticking to my chest and my legs and a catheter fitted and fuck knows what not else. As usual I didn't know why I was there or what had happened, but I'd been there for about 13 hours, and she'd been sitting beside me all the while, as always, having made the usual excuses to her boss and cancelled plans with friends and everything else. She had cried herself done by the time I woke up. She just looked at me and looked at her shoes and told me she couldn't take it any more, she had tried and tried and done absolutely everything to help me and had put me before anything else and still this continued to happen and she had had enough. And she said "do me a favour. If you fix this, if you finally sort yourself out, don't tell me. I don't want to fucking know."

I woke up with that crawling up the bed towards me and it's all I can hear now. So now the euphoria has fallen from around me and I'm just left with that, and nothing else. I did far, far worse than break her heart, I fucking strapped it down and shaved bits off it and stamped on it and fucking burned it and it and I made her life insufferable. She hated sleeping because she knew when she slept I'd get drunk on whatever I'd hidden away that evening and she didn't know what she'd wake up to. She hated working because she knew I would be out at the off licence ten minutes after she left the house and I could be in bed when she got home or I could be in the pub up the road or I could be lying on the front doorstep or I could be dead.

I imagine forgiving myself for that is going to be a big part of my recovery, but that's little comfort. So you're getting better, so the fucking chaos and abject misery and fucking destruction and hurt you brought to other people is serving you, in the end, is it, well fucking good for you, like. Fucking good for you.

Anyway, sorry. Didn't mean to go on. Again.

[Foggy Buntwhistle]

If I could karma you I would mate. You seem to have made my eyes start leaking for some reason with your digital words there. Have had my own "issues" with various substances but would rather not get into them here. Your posts are touching, and of course written with flair and humanity, as always.

Anyways, it's tough innit. All round, regardless of which piece of fractal meat you happen to inhabit. I wish you the best, may life unfurl before you like a beautiful carpet. One day at a, and all that.

[weekender]

Anyway, sorry. Didn't mean to go on. Again.

Please don't apologise.  Your posts are a) cathartic for yourself, b) amusing (in a tragic way, but you do have the gift of the gab) and c) likely to help others.  You should continue posting, it's part of your recovery.

[gib]

and you have an amazing a very rare ability to communicate what you actually think and feel.

[Repeater]

Yep, please keep posting.

[checkoutgirl]

Woke up some time last Saturday in bed with a bump on my forehead, a very sore neck and no memory of the last 10 hours. I have taken to drinking early on Saturday mornings after abstaining from drink on Friday and the preceding 5 days. It's only fun drinking on a Saturday morning when I'm not hungover so not drinking on the Friday is a sacrifice.

I must have got this one quite badly wrong though. Two and a half bottles of wine on an empty stomach is obviously my limit. I was told that I "faceplanted" some time in the afternoon which I presume means I hit the floor head first at some point, that I can't remember. So I'm taking this as a warning sign that boozing it up in the early hours of the morning after no breakfast is no longer advisable and could result in more serious injury.

My neck still hurts.

[checkoutgirl]

Apparently on this day in 1934 Bill Wilson, co-founder of Alchies Anonymous, took his last drink and entered rehab for the last time. A sobering reminder of the importance of moderation in the drinking season.

[checkoutgirl]

I'm seriously considering either going completely dry or cutting down significantly on the drink for Christmas.