People have been drinking for millennia and alcohol abuse has plagued mankind for just as long. Drugs and alcohol have a hand in the majority of traffic fatalities. Drugs and alcohol also destroy the health and quality of life for countless people. Addiction is a disease that comes in many forms. While some psychoactive substances are chemically addictive, the strongest component of most habits is psychological. That is why the symptoms of alcoholism, drug addiction, gambling addiction and eating disorders are often so similar. In addition, the support groups for sufferers of these afflictions teach very similar precepts in their quest to help people break their destructive habits. Alcohol has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. It has had a strong effect on my life and the lives of most of my family members. I don’t think my story is atypical, that is why I do feel it might do some people some good to hear about what I went through. Perhaps in reading this you might recognize something in your life or the lives of the one’s you love.
Alcoholism has taken a serious toll on my family. There is a serious pattern of addictive behavior present on both sides of my family. On my mother’s side both of my grandparents were heavy drinkers. My maternal grandmother was a schizophrenic. She was a housewife and mother to three children and while my grandfather, a motorcycle cop in Manhattan, was away at work, she slowly indulged her habit and sank further into madness. My grandfather in his own turn was also a heavy drinker. He drank socially and privately. Of course times were different then, take one look at the culture of middle aged America during the early to mid 1960’s and you can see that they were hard smoking and hard drinking people.
My grandparents drank steadily as their marriage began to dissolve. The two oldest children, my mother and aunt were out of the house with husbands and children of their own but my uncle Kenny was left home with his alcoholic parents. As a teenager, needless to say, he drank and experimented with drugs. No one noticed in that house. One night he went out with some friends and did not come back. No one bothered to monitor his behavior or his friends until a car full of them, drunk and stoned beyond recognition, tried to take a left turn doing 80 miles per hour and wrapped their car around a telephone pole, killing my uncle in the process.
After that night my grandparent’s marriage was finished. My grandmother was given a house and alimony with which to drink the rest of her life away, which she did over the course of twenty years, degenerating into a mad, drunken witch before dying of a cerebral hemorrhage in 2000. My grandfather, meanwhile, remarried and continued to drink, sinking into bitterness in his old age. He’s still alive but his liver is damaged beyond repair and he can’t seem to fully stop drinking.
Many other family members have shown dependency problems at one point or another. My father was a lifelong alcoholic, drug addict and smoker. He did quit his habits one by one in the past few years but 40 years of heavy use has taken a serious toll on his physical and mental health. My uncle Joe also had a problem with drugs and alcohol. He cleaned up fifteen years ago and became a wonderful person. He didn’t give up smoking, however, and lung cancer claimed his life in 2003. All of my cousins, including myself, are or were smokers. All of my aunts and uncles used drugs to a more or less serious degree in the past 30 years. There are eating disorders, obesity and gambling problems in my family. The list goes on and on as each new generation grows up experimenting with dangerous behaviors. Now many of us have managed to beat our bad habits and reclaim our lives. In part this is because America is much more health conscious than it was in the years following World War II. Certainly in Long Island, New York City and New Jersey, where we all lived, there was a strong culture for the development of such habits. Nonetheless, the overwhelming prevalence of addictive behaviors in a rather small population sample like my family, is compelling evidence of the degree to which genetics, culture and simple learned behavior from parents can predetermine a child’s future in a world that love’s its vices.
I believe that I was born to be an alcoholic. I mean the family history is evidence enough that I should never have picked up a drink to start with. But I was raised by two parents who did little to no drinking and absolutely no drugs. My mother was so repulsed by the behavior of her parents that she drank at most, three times a year and champagne at that. My stepfather had his run in with drugs as a teenager but by joining the army he made a clean break with the habits and lifestyle of his neighborhood in Long Island and never reverted to the old ways. I also grew up in the long cold shadow of my Uncle Kenny’s death. I learned, before I fully understood the concepts, that you always wear your seatbelt and never drink and drive. Once, as a toddler, I scolded my stepfather for drinking and driving when all he was drinking was a soda from Burger King.
My brother and I grew up in a part of New Jersey that was very different from Long Island. Middletown, New Jersey is a place tucked out of the way from the bustling lifestyle of New York. Middletown families have more money and the whole area is much cleaner and classier than the Long Island communities in which my cousins were being raised. The houses are larger with more open spaces, parks and the beach only miles away. The school system in Middletown is among the best public school systems in the nation. The culture of my high school was one that appreciated academic and athletic success. What drinking and drug use there was proved to be exceptional. My brother and I took to the environment in which we were raised. We both got decent grades in school and participated heavily in athletics. I was a star athlete on the track and cross country teams as well as an honor student. I drank only a handful of times throughout my tenure in high school. When it was time for me to go off to college I was fully armed with a strong awareness of what drugs and alcohol can do to a person. I was armed as an 18 year old can be against the pitfalls of peer pressure.
It all went out the window within months of the beginning of my freshman year. College was a clean slate. I wanted friends, I wanted to have fun and enjoy the freedom of being away from home. I went to parties and made friends. Before I knew it I was drinking 3-4 days a week. Within 9 months I was smoking cigarettes and marijuana as well. At first I was apprehensive about doing these things because of what I knew about them. But when I drank, I did not turn into some monster. When I smoked it relaxed me. I was meeting people and having fun and none of the awful things that I had learned over the years were coming true. I came to find that that phenomenon is one of the most insidious things about drinking. I grew up hearing so much propaganda in school and at home about the evils of drugs and alcohol but then I was witnessing first hand other people drinking and getting high. They weren’t turning into monsters; they appeared to be having a good time. I tried drinking and found that I didn’t explode or degenerate into madness. It felt good. I had energy and the courage to talk to people. I was having a good time. Drinking didn’t wreck my life; I still went to classes and did my work. Then I tried smoking cigarettes and weed and I found similar results. Each drink or drag that I took which didn’t kill me undermined years of what I was taught until I had no faith left in what I had learned from my family or my education. This was how alcohol got a hold of me-very gradually.
Each semester at school my grades got worse. I woke up very late every day. I drank socially or alone. I lived to go to parties or throw them myself. I spent every dollar I had on having a good time. I smoked heavily. I didn’t run anymore and I started gaining weight. I didn’t look good. I didn’t really care because there were plenty of other people around me who were just like that. I lived in a house of 8 guys my junior year. It was a mess. Empty beer cans, liquor bottles and pizza boxes were everywhere. Ashtrays were all over the house, filled with disgusting piles of cigarette butts. We lived in filth and we loved it. I tried not to notice, however, that some of my housemates were still getting good grades, going to bed early and going to the gym while I was doing none of these things. I did alright in English classes, which I found to be very easy, so I changed majors. This brought my GPA up to a 3.0 for awhile.
As a senior-or rather fourth year student since there was no way I was graduating on time-I abandoned any last attempts to do well. My priorities became fixated on girls, parties and booze. My behavior became erratic. I would do things that I had never dreamed of. I drank and drove regularly. I was actually proud of my ability to get home safely after nine or ten drinks. Sometimes I walked through the worst neighborhoods in town plastered. One night I walked home through the rain breaking car antennas as I went. When I woke in the morning my roommate informed me that the apartment was filled with mud and that I had dragged a handicapped parking sign up into the living room. All of these things happened but I didn’t get caught. Cops pulled me over but I had a way of convincing them that I had only had a beer or two and was perfectly capable of getting home. I could pass a field sobriety test no matter how wasted I was so I never got breathalyzed. I used to sit in our open third floor window leaning out. My roommate saved my life a few times from falling. Surprisingly none of these things alarmed me. I played with fire on a regular basis and I got away with it. It only egged me on more.
Still, my behavior worsened. I drank almost entirely alone. Friends started dropping out of my life. I started blacking out-losing whole nights of memory. Other times I would cry hysterically for no good reason. I combined my drinking with other drugs, especially painkillers. I was fat at this point. I had no physical endurance and I rarely woke up before 4 PM. I was sliding into a violent depression the symptoms of which veered between the languid inability to do anything for days on end and the eruption into a frenzy of nonsensical, hysterical and violent behavior. Strangely, I never hurt anyone, just myself and inanimate objects. I wrote terrible, maudlin poetry-I still have some of it. I walked around denying the existence of god and calling productive people slaves to the system. I was near the end.
My last drink was on the evening of December 7th, 2001-the 60th anniversary of Pearl Harbor. I was in love with a girl at that time and had been for a year or so. Sometimes we got drunk and hooked up but she didn’t really want me. Still I persisted. On the night in question we had not seen each other for a week so we decided to go buy a 30 pack of beer and make a night of it. We got the booze in question and started drinking at my place. I drank 20 cans while she had ten. She passed out. I kept drinking. I raided the freezer for the remnants of my roommate’s bottle of Grey Goose vodka. At this point my memory becomes patchy. I remember my crush, who was also one of my closest friends, and I screaming at each other in my room. I remember her walking out and my begging her, on my knees in the dirt, to come back at the top of my lungs. She did not come back. I never drank again. I spent the whole next day in a form of shivering and guilty withdrawal. Sometimes I slept feverishly for hours, sometimes I took incredibly long showers. Thinking back on it, that day seems like a montage of The Cure videos, but at the time I was suffering intensely. That evening, at my request, my roommate forced me into an AA meeting. I sat and listened for hours, clinging to the hope that this would make me feel better. I came back every night after that for two weeks. The semester ended and I went home. I took up with AA in my hometown, always listening, learning, and hanging on to that hope with very weak fingers.
I was learning about who I was for the first time. It had never occurred to me before, but there is a very real pattern to typical alcoholic behavior. I didn’t understand why people could drink moderately and safely their whole lives while I had gone from not drinking at all to a craven, suicidal mess in four and a half years. People got up to speak and I noticed recurring themes in what they would reveal about not just their drinking, but the temperaments and personal philosophies. I learned that most alcoholics exhibit certain lifelong behavioral patterns. Alcoholics tend to cut corners in life, always trying to find a faster and easier way to solve their problems. Alcoholics also tend to be cynical people who eschew most belief structures and institutions of their fellow man. Many alcoholics find the slow pace and mundaneness of everyday life to be a constant source of irritation. Alcoholics seek out the good life, the action, or the party. Many alcoholics use drinking as a means to self-anesthetize, or blank out reality for the times during which they drink. I did all of these things. I never really believed in anything for as long as I could remember. I had no heroes and no religion. I believed the rest of humanity to be a bunch of suckers or slaves who worked so hard for things of no real value. I was antisocial, a procrastinator and I constantly sought out the fastest and easiest way of doing anything. I took pride in dishonest things, like writing term papers for money or passing classes without attending lecture or even buying a book. I was always this way and, to some degree, I still am. That’s when it hit me harder than any realization ever has-I was born to become this way. I realized that, through no fault of my own, but rather a strong inherited predisposition, I could not drink alcohol the way other people could. I could not stop once I started, so I knew then that I would have to not drink at all-for life.
After that I felt something in myself that I had not felt in a lifetime-peace. I realized that I was actually very lucky. I had hit bottom, but it was a high bottom. I was young. There was no damage in my life that could not be undone. No one had died; I had not even failed out of school. If I could just regain my strength and work ethic, I could reclaim my life. I did not return to Rutgers that semester. I did not have the money and no one would give it to me so I stayed home and went to work. I worked a 9-5 job that mother got me. It was tedious work and I didn’t like it but I earned a wage and was forced to cope with a daily routine. I began to gain confidence in myself again. I spent more time in the sun. I smoked less and I didn’t drink at all. I continued to go to meetings but I also made time for my friends. My friends drink and I don’t judge them. To me alcohol is just liquid in a glass, it cannot be inherently evil. It is the person holding the glass can make drinking harmless or dangerous.
Eventually the girl that I was in love with came back into my life. We were friends but that quickly blossomed into something more and she became my girlfriend for a few years. My life came back on track. I treaded water for a few years, working and moving out of my parent’s house. I moved in with my girlfriend but it didn’t work out and we broke up in a few months. Still, I survived that heartbreak with a strength that I never knew I had. I put more effort into my own life. In 2004 I began taking classes online and completed the last 30 credits of my degree. I graduated in 2005, after which I went to Europe. I quit smoking. Also during that time I met my current girlfriend who has proved to be a much better match for me. We moved to Manhattan together and we have a fun and adventure filled life. We travel around the world and we do things. We enjoy life. Tomorrow will be December 7th, 2006-five years since I last drank any alcohol.
I attend meetings erratically, something that most alcoholics can ill afford to do. I don’t have a sponsor or a higher power-I am every bit as atheistic as I have always been. I do believe in the program however. I understand and accept the potential to return to what I was just by picking up a glass. I will never be able to drink like other people. I will never be cured. That’s okay with me. I don’t need to be intoxicated to appreciate life. Some people get to the point where they can’t imagine life without drinking alcohol but it’s actually really simple to do so. Think of being a child. Remember that once each of us spent between ten and twenty years almost entirely sober. There are many tradeoffs to being sober. I can always account for my behavior. I can always recall the events of last night and I never have to feel that ambiguous guilt wondering what I did the night before. My mind became much more sharp without drinking, especially my memory. My sense of taste and smell are more acute-both of which got even stronger after I stopped smoking. My mood swings are much less severe. In the end, I feel like it’s a good deal.
I have learned many things from my experience with drinking. Young people really do have to learn some things for themselves. It can break your heart but sometimes you can repeat the same warnings until you are blue in the face and monitor your children very carefully but sooner or later they will be out of your house and they will experiment. The best that you can do is instill in them self esteem, good judgment and a strong moral compass. Don’t pretend with your children that drugs and alcohol do not exist and don’t paint them in demonic unrealistic terms. Drugs and alcohol are subtle evils and when in the course of ordinary experimentation, your son or daughter finds out that they will not go instantly to hell if they take a drink or smoke pot, it will undermine their confidence in your teaching. If you live near the ocean you can tell your children about all of the dangers of diving into the water, but you should teach them to swim too.
If someone you love does turn out to have a problem with drinking or drugs, sometimes you have to reserve judgment. This can be equally hard, but alcoholics and addicts can not be helped until they realize that they have a problem. If you intervene too soon then you can wind up pushing away someone you love. Of course if someone you love starts to behave in ways that put their life or other people’s lives in danger, you may have to step in. If you’re not sure whether or not you or others should intervene then don’t. Instead learn all that you can about substance abuse problems. Talk to other people about it, read about it. If you feel like you are losing control over your own behavior then talk to someone. Alcoholics and Narcotics Anonymous holds open meetings in which you can sit and listen. You don’t have to share and you don’t have to tell anyone who you are. You can also obtain literature about alcoholism and drug addiction. You can, of course, always find information online as well.
