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I had an insane workload, and the drinking was partly an attempt to make it tolerable. I brought my laptop to the bar, and drank pints while I wrote stories.
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In the evenings, I kept a bottle of wine by my side. By my thirties, I had developed some red-flag habits. You see this spirit at many companies with lots of employees in their twenties: Get the work done, and we don't ask questions.įor a long time, I was getting the work done, which is probably why none of my bosses ever confronted me about my drinking.
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I spent my early career at alternative newsweeklies, where beer was sometimes kept in the fridge, and anyone walking in with sunglasses and a hangover got a high-five. What I can do is show you how I answered these questions for myself. These are complicated questions you must answer on your own. I really can't tell anyone else if they have a drinking problem, or if they're an alcoholic, or if they need to quit.
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What alcoholism looked like for me may not be what it looked like for someone else, and how I define alcoholism may be different from a medical professional (they use the phrase "alcohol use disorder") or another problem drinker. It is not an authoritative list it's simply one person's experience. The following is a list of aha moments for me. The more I heard other people's struggles, the more I found words for my own. Listening to other people's stories may have helped me more than anything else. I read the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous (the bible of AA) and many alcoholism memoirs: Drinking: A Love Story, and Lit, and Smashed, and A Drinking Life, and The Tender Bar, all of which offer compelling and varied tales of people who put the cap back on the bottle for good. I had to sift through data, gather bits of knowledge. Some people do have a lightning flash of recognition, but for me it was more of a slow dawning.
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How did I know it was time? I arrived at a preponderance of the evidence. There is a saying among former drunks: "At first drinking is fun, then fun with problems, then just problems." By my mid-thirties, I had found myself in the "problems" portion of the evening. I had a good job, I never crashed my car. See that guy over there? He's at the bar every night. I continued to build the case that my drinking was normal, totally normal. Over the following decade, I kept wondering about my drinking, as my bar bills grew steeper - Patron instead of Jose Cuervo - and my taste more refined. Do you ever drink to get drunk? Have you ever gone to work with a hangover? They might as well ask: Have you ever been 25? The problem with checklists for alcoholism is that they look a lot like, well, being young. I had a tendency to black out - to forget episodes from a night of drinking, even though I remained surprisingly functional (well, "functional" may not be the word for someone pouring beer on her own head) - and every pamphlet, doctor's questionnaire, and glossy magazine quiz I took listed blackouts as a risk factor for alcoholism. The bars opened their pearly gates to me, and I sank into those velvet banquettes and ripped vinyl couches. I had always assumed my drinking would calm down after I graduated college. Margaritas with a crust of salt on the rim, a frosty pint spilling foam, and the always regrettable "Who wants shots?" My twentysomething social life was one long drink special.