Before and after a drinking problem
The head of a renowned rehab clinic explains alcohol — plus a story about self care and self sabotage.
At the start of a new year it’s always the same: servers of fitness- and health-apps break down, people swear to really change their lives this time and almost everyone tries to curb the alcohol streak after and because of the merry holidays.
On January 2nd 2019 I challenged myself with the flashy Hashtag #100DaysNoAlcohol. This numeric figurehead empowered psychologically and plainly showed the goal at the same time. For me it was less about detox, too much eggnog or the bad aftertaste of throw up. I wouldn’t have called myself an alcoholic back then, but I definitely had a drinking problem.
I was born and live in Austria, that’s in Central Western Europe. Here the fact, that I have been drinking alcohol since I was 15, is not very uncommon. In a very rough estimate, going by an average alcohol consumption once or twice a week, I drank alcohol 2.500 times. About 30% of those times I was heavily intoxicated, to the point of drunken stupors. These assessments might actually be too low.
…talk to a professional.
I always tended to react strongly to alcohol and almost immediately — call me a lightweight. A little sip is enough to change my “mode”. But that still didn’t stop me from consuming large quantities of beer, white wine, gin and other hard liquor. Because of the pursuing euphoria of alcohol inebriation and a general tendency towards addictive behaviour, I almost always drank exponentially more, the drunker I was getting. Starting in my late teens, through uni, up to the end of 2018, I literally used to keep drinking until I dropped.
End of last year I started having slight neural problems and anxieties. Those details and reasons I quit alcohol will become clearer later on. First off, I wanted to know more about what exactly I had been doing to myself all those years and what I was starting to experience after quitting. I decided to talk to a professional.
I contacted the head director of the Anton Proksch addiction clinic, Doctor Professor Michael Musalek. This facility and their research in drug rehabilitation as well treatment are leading in Europe and beyond. We talked about aspects of alcohol, that were incredibly new to me, and might be for others too. There is this drug with its foothold on many modern civilisations for hundreds and partly thousands of years, and I have been pouring it into my body without even adequately knowing about it.
There is no way to sugarcoat it.
Musalek explains, that alcohol is a substance damaging each and every system in your body; foremost the gastro-intestinal, but also the central nervous system as well as the peripheral. The cardiovascular system suffers, the skin and let’s not forget alcohol can lead to toxic bone marrow oedema. There is practically no part of the body, which is not at least collaterally harmed by alcohol.
First, what is methyl alcohol?
Dr. Musalek, chief of the aforementioned Viennese rehab institute, is also teaching at universities and gave me this crash course in alcohol.
When we drink an alcoholic beverage, we normally consume ethyl alcohol, “Speisealkohol”, meaning consumable. But every alcoholic beverage also contains methyl alcohol (or methanol) to some degree, which is commonly used to denature alcohol. Denaturing is achieved by adding high amounts of methanol to alcohol, so it becomes undrinkable; that’s how industrial alcohol is made.
Industrial alcohol is cheap, it costs almost nothing, because alcohol is so easy to produce. And to keep prices of consumable alcohol high, industrial ones are denatured — meaning, it’s basically turned into a chemical by adding methanol. That component is what’s so harmful to nerve cells, colloquially called “Blindmacher” because of the danger of too much of it striking you blind.
Beer contains around 5 to 10 milligrams of methyl alcohol per litre, a relatively low dosage. White wine has around 5 to 20, also low. But red wines already contain 40 to 80 milligrams per litre. Irish whiskies go around 60 to 80, Scottish ones up to 150, whisky from the US already contains around 300 milligrams of methyl alcohol per litre, and moonshine and DIY-distilled spirits go up to 3.000, 7.000.
Second, what are long-chained alcohols?
It’s not always just how much you drink — although that’s mostly the primary issue –, but also what you drink. Musalek explains further, that the more long-chained alcohols are in an alcoholic beverage, the more dangerous it is.
Long-chained alcohols are made of more than three carbon atoms, that are linked together like a chain. So after consuming these long-chained alcohols, they are broken down into so-called radicals within the body. And radicals are extraordinary damaging to your cells.
Beer and wine contain alcohol with maybe two linked carbon atoms. Harmless. But impure distilling and industrialised processing can have long-chained alcohols as a side product in alcoholic beverages. Watch out for those!
Third, what the hell is an hangover?
If there are high amounts of methyl alcohol in the alcoholic beverage you have been drinking, it becomes apparent the next day. You will have a hangover, which is nothing more than a neural dysfunction of the central nervous system. The others, long-chained alcohols, will actually even more negatively affect the body after a night of heavy drinking.
A hangover is medically defined as an hyperaesthetic-emotional weakness state, as first described by Dr. Karl Bonhoeffer, and basically a light form of brain dysfunction. No matter if it is alcohol, a blow to the head or inflammation, the brain can only really react but one way: noise sensitivity, concentration disorder and affective lability (simply put “moodiness”). If a child for example should suffer from a high fever infection, they also show this hyperaesthetic-emotional weakness state.
How a hangover manifests, obviously depends on dosage and on the before described composition of the alcoholic beverage. Home-made schnapps, Sliwowitz and all kinds of moonshine — home-made equals not well-made— the values of both, methyl and long-chained alcohols, increase immensely. The risk of poisoning oneself thereby becomes substantially higher.
So if I drink cheap booze, that contains high amounts of methyl alcohol and long-chained alcohols, I will regret it the next day. Drinking it continuously, I will regret it the rest of my probably short life.
While I was talking to Dr. Musalek, cold showers ran down my spine. I had nervous twitches and even auspices of an panic attack. Why that happened, will become clearer as we now dive into my diary of #100DaysNoAlcohol and my story of sobriety. The expectations I wanted to meet were really not that high.
I would like to remember things
After a Christmas party at work (you didn’t expect a regretful alcohol essay without one of those being mentioned), the boss’s wife accused me of having knocked out part of her tooth. She acted kind of cool about it, but still I felt horrified. I wasn’t able to remember anything and in complete desperation just pleaded for forgiveness a thousand times. It turned out somebody else was the culprit and I hadn’t even be involved. Neither her nor my own powers of recollection were able to give me that important piece of information.
What the Hangover movies base their whole sentiment on, is “the less I remember from last night’s party, the more of the hook and fun it must have been”. I have nothing against those films — expect maybe the lazy unsatisfying narrative devices — and like many I can identify with the notion of being black out drunk. It had happened to me, a lot. To glorify it and making it a cool pop cultural reference with a baby strapped to it is a little problematic. Brain damage overall very quickly stopped being funny to me.
My point is, I started to worry, when I read text messages on my phone like “where did you go?!”, “did you get home save!?! “ or “were you okay yesterday!?!” and I did not know an answer to them. Memory loss is not necessarily something I should take pride in. The true kings and queens of a party don’t pass out in the corner, like I often did.
Brain damage overall very quickly stopped being funny to me.
We drink to celebrate and loosen up, to have fun, right? What is it all for, the excess and the dancing topless on tables, if you can’t remember any of it!? Dr. Musalek explained to me, what happens in a drunk black out. In German they are also called “Filmriss” meaning a rupture in the film roll of your mind.
Black outs are medically known as palimpsests and occur, if high doses of alcohol are consumed. How they truly come about, no one really knows. But we know, the longer somebody drinks high doses of alcohol, the more of these palimpsests will accumulate.
I then asked about something called the Korsakoff syndrome, I once heard about. Dr. Musalek scoffed and told me, with that we are talking about late states of a heavy clinical alcohol addiction.
The “Korsakow-Syndrom”, Korsakoff syndrome in English, is a serious kind of brain damage, one of brain degradation. Alcohol destroys brain cells and when a great extent of them are gone, especially in the frontal lobe area, the forebrain, we speak of the Korsakoff syndrome. Characteristically a patient in such a state shows immense learning capacity disorder and high suggestibility. You’d be able to make somebody suffering from this syndrome believe in anything. You meet them the first time and say “we’ve known each other for years” and they’d buy it.
I never felt like an alcoholic or like having a serious drinking problem — not until I stopped. This interview with Dr. Musalek happened in January 2019 and around that time I started experiencing the effects of going cold turkey.
Until then I would have described myself as an excessive but still average drinker, I consumed alcohol frequently but not chronically. Nonetheless those first days of my sobriety confronted me with something I would call light to moderate withdrawal symptoms, physically and mentally. The latter were the nastier to get through.
I really had not expected those aspects of alcohol use, at least not to such an extent. It felt like getting over an actual addiction.
I would like the fear to go away
Around autumn, maybe winter of 2018, I drank an entire bottle of Stolichnaya vodka — over the span of about 10 hours, still utterly thoughtless. When I woke up the next day I had a sensation I never had before. It was a deep routed feeling of terror, that I had unrepairably broken something in my brain. The fear that I had drunken myself mentally retarded.
I had experienced panic attacks before and would describe that particular moment as a version of such an episode, only more mentally secluded and lingering. If that makes sense. In the months around that incident hangover days had been becoming more and more intense. The poor circulation, wooziness and memory loss I had been kind of used to, but now this deepening fear kept returning. The fear of having destroyed something important up there, in the thinking machine. And then came confusion and crippling anxiety.
Once after going for a run and listening to a podcast, in which Jonah Hill was remembering psychological problems in his youth, I had something like a nervous breakdown in front of the shower. Uneasiness crept up my spine, while Hill reflected upon his life decisions. Under the hot water I was freaking out, motionlessly. I psychosomatically worked myself up into a frenzy, shallow breathing and I was sure something was suddenly wrong in my head. I called my girlfriend to please come home quickly, but I couldn’t explain what the problem was.
The fear of having destroyed something important up there, in the thinking machine.
Sitting on the toilet shaking, I reacted to that episode, like I would during a panic attack. I stared at one point at the wall until I calmed down. The fear had come out of nothing.
The first weeks of quitting alcohol came with kind of similar sensations, which I then suspected to be light psychological withdrawal symptoms. I felt on edge and as if a tiny nudge could tip me over from a state of light discomfort into… I don’t know. I panicked over the fact, that nobody could predict, how the moment before you have a stroke presents, or the second before you go insane. Those states of horrified anticipation of something unknown were extremely distressing.
Another time in bed after I had been woken up, I was unbelievably disoriented and in terror, because the confusion didn’t seem to fade away, even after walking through the apartment half an hour. Of course it eventually did.
After week 2 of no drinking and those weird mental states — most of the time happing in bed, when I couldn’t handle the silence — , I started reading up a lot online. Yes, big mistake, but regardless I found an article on Very Well Mind that peaked my interest. It offered possible explanations for the irritability and anxiousness I was feeling.
I felt on edge and as if a tiny nudge could tip me over from a state of light discomfort into… I don’t know.
The article says, alcohol has depressing effects on the body’s perception and senses, it’s slowing down your brain. To counteract that effect certain stimulating chemicals are endogenously overproduced. And that becomes the new normal. If I, even as a average alcohol consumer, cut out drinking completely, the body’s overstimulation remains for a while. Sadly the article also states the possibility of those symptoms persisting weeks, even months.
The Anton Proksch institute informs on their site, that anxiety states and depressive distress can be part of psychological withdrawal symptoms. So I asked Musalek, head of said institute, psychotherapist and psychiatrist, about my issues with fear. He reacted appropriately by saying, he couldn’t just diagnose me after having heard some stories.
Generally speaking fear and anxiety like this could originate from two things: It might be a light withdrawal syndrome, which should be looked into. Or it could simply mean, that you are overall inclined to have fears, kept compensating those with alcohol and now you are simply missing that part, that “crutch”, that way to deal with fear. If those symptoms endure, it would certainly be sensible to seek counsel. (If you, the reader, seek help, please look down at the bottom of the essay, there’s list of contacts.)
Also alcohol is an anaesthetic, that means it reduces sensation in every area of human perception. It curbs sense of smell, taste, all of it. A little bit of alcohol can lead to euphoria, disinhibition and the feeling of experiencing things “better”. But even in low doses, it remains an anaesthetic. If alcohol is taken out of the picture, we start to feel significantly more.
Looking up facts and figures in articles was actually helping sometimes to calm me down. But writing about the fear, doing research on it and, as I mentioned, the interview with Dr. Musalek itself, made me extremely distressed— even right now I slightly relive those attacks of anxiety.
I have gotten way better since then, the beginning of 2019, and those episodes are as good as gone. Overstimulation would explain many of the things I experienced back then, maybe in combination with slight withdrawal symptoms. My notes about the first weeks of sobriety are full of food tasting too salty or too sweet. I was overly sensitive to noises, especially people chewing their food loudly — not only strangers, also family, friends, my girlfriend. I also got distracted by smells more.
The Very Well Mind-article states that after quitting drinking this uncomfortable overstimulation and heightened sensitivity can be a reason, why people who quit go back to drinking — to take the edge off. I remember how moody, grumpy and antisocial I behaved at times. But I decided to keep going and pull through.
I would like my feeling of self-worth back
One time a few years ago, when the dam was breached and I had drank way too much — as it happened often through my 20s and 30s — , I turned into an crazy person. I partly remember, but most of it I had to be retold. In a bar I threw bottles against the wall and started grabbing people’s butts. Guys, women, I got smacked in the face for it, I think, and rightfully so. My girlfriend stood next to me, stunned. She didn’t leave, she maybe should have (she’s great, I am very lucky). She got steaming angry, understandably, and threw me in a taxi, which I repeatedly tried to exit on the way home.
This little tidbit is just supposed to frame the scope of stupid behaviour I was liable to get into, drinking alcohol. Intoxicated I turned off my mind and threw myself into a crowd of people. Why did I do that? Professionals say, harmless alcohol consumption turns into an abusive one, when it starts to fulfil a function like “to relieve stress”, “to relax oneself” or “lighten the mood”. I would add “to have a sense of belonging” to that list.
A friend I had in my teens chain-smoked and was very shy. As soon he was drunk, he changed personality and became this rambling party clown, a laughingstock, swinging beer crates over his red head and screaming. Everybody knows one of those still waters — maybe because of being one — , who are replaced with complete opposite characteristics because of alcohol. And I know some stuff about shame and self hatred, the insecurity, the pretending, the notion to be the sucker everyone’s laughing at.
…harmless alcohol consumption turns into an abusive one, when it starts to fulfil a function…
We all want to belong, to a group, to the big tribe. More about the sociology of getting drunk in the second last chapter, but for some of us the attempts to not be the outsider become excessive boozing with others. Record drinking, obnoxious behaviour and breaking stuff will always end in headaches and a feeling of worthlessness.
Thinking back on my entire life, I was definitely told more often how wasted I looked than I was given some sort of compliment. After drinking through a night out or an entire party, I tended to feel depressed and ashamed. The feeling might sound familiar.
Dr. Musalek described alcohol as a depressogenic substance. Even if enjoyable at first, eventually its effects will always be depressogenic. This condition can linger and outlast the pure inebriation up to the following days. The feelings of shame or issues with self-worth are more connected to the individual value system. There are people getting depressed after drinking, but not at all ashamed. And you don’t need depressogenic substances to feel ashamed.
Well, but maybe a girlfriend watching you grope others and make a fool of yourself will do the trick.
After one month of no alcohol I still felt shaky psychologically. I craved and drank tons of coffee, but that only made the restlessness and anxieties in the evenings worse. Naturally a stimulant won’t help with overstimulation. When I cut back on coffee I slept better, but the mood swings were still out of hand. I remember regularly dreaming of accidentally drinking alcohol and feeling really bad about it. So the whole thing seemed to also subconsciously preoccupy me.
I would like to have a functioning mind and body
In medical handbooks on addiction 13 different categories of diseases are associated with alcohol abuse. The negative mental impact of alcoholism is as diverse: Psychosis, delusional jealousy, alcoholic hallucinosis or dementia. And the list goes on with terrifyingly absurd sounding syndromes.
Hey, I have forgotten the name of one of my favourite actresses that one time. No biggie. Then once I walked into a room and stood there with no idea why I had went in there in the first place. Oh, you scatterbrain. That happens to everyone, right? I got worried though, when I wasn’t able to remember the names of longtime colleagues and even a family member, not blood and a little removed, but still.
So the question bothering me was, how regular are those “senior moments”? Hungover, even days after a bender I noticed an increase of absentmindedness, of difficulties to concentrate. In conversations, when I think back, I sometimes couldn’t put sentences together right, phrase words correctly and express what I was trying to say. I got angry. No way I was going to turn senile in my mid 30s.
The more I thought about it and took inventory of my life, the more a pattern started taking shape. At times being hungover or stupid drunk actions have cost me friendships, jobs, job interviews, respect, relationships, potential relationships and lastly a good time. I did compensate a lot through heavy drinking: my insecurity, fears of being an outcast, awkwardness and lost love — which then again turned me into a boozy loud creep, nobody would want to fall in love with. A vicious cycle kind of.
Throughout 20 years there weren’t many times, I did not get drunk at least once a week. An ex-girlfriend asked me to quit once, which I maybe did for two weeks. And there was a hospitalisation period after a surgery I maybe also didn’t drink for a month. But I am not entirely sure and loosely remember something about a school friend visiting me with a can of beer.
Other than bruises and the odd party injury I had messed up my stomach quite a bit with all the drinking. The alcohol was also notably bad for my digestion. To feel comfortable and confident with my body, it’d help not to be bloated and constantly sweating. That gross belly staring back at me, while I laid sprawled out on the couch was haunting me.
No way I was going to turn senile in my mid 30s.
The big devilry is, that alcohol not only has a lot of calories and is making me lust for horribly fatty and unhealthy food, it actively hinders the body’s metabolism to burn them. So when I think of it, I more or less decided it then and there looking at my gut. I would stop slowly dismantling my mind and body with alcohol.
I kind of sabotaged my life for a long time with alcohol. I abused it, it could have been another drug just as well. The alcohol itself isn’t really to blame, but my disposition. My perspective on this is not at all negative. I started to think of my “true potential”, so cheesy that might sound. If I discarded those restraints on my brain and body, there’s no knowing of what I could do.
And truly, after two months and more than half of my (first) 100 days of sobriety, things got easier — a lot. I dropped weight like crazy I and felt more mentally able.
Interestingly I got scared of the 100 days being over soon, time went by pretty fast. What if I fell back into old habits after the last day. I actually considered stopping to drink alcohol for good out of that fear. Is fear a good motivation? I don’t know. A fundamental change of how I thought about alcohol were in order. To make the rush and exhilaration of being intoxicated the new exception, not the norm.
We are all addicts — it’s a part of being human
Let’s not romanticise it. Me personally, I never drank alcoholic beverages, because I liked the taste. I had never really relished a good wine or talked hours about the differences in craft beer. It’s the buzz, the high, I like the inebriety. It’s as simple as that. Of course it shouldn’t taste like ayahuasca or repulsive, but I find connoisseurs of alcohol redundant — even conceited sometimes.
So the intoxication is the fun part, but the more it happens, the less fun it is. Why had drinking become such a daily business? There is the general and rigid attitude, the person not partaking in alcohol consumption within a group doing it, is the exception. That’s the way people think, especially in my home country of Austria, in Europe commonly and probably in many regions with a socially ingrown peer pressure. Drinking alcohol is the base setting. My father will order a small beer in a gastronomic establishment with others, no matter what time it is.
There are a lot of social obstacles and sensitivities I ran into with me trying to go out and not to drink alcohol. Somebody orders a round of Tequila shots and suddenly I’m pressed to give an explanation, why I don’t drink. I cheated sometimes by saying “I don’t feel like it today”. But always, as soon as a conversation about my sobriety started, I had to kind of justify that decision. So I then have to come up with a quick summary of quite personal motivations, that may be unpleasant and burdened — maybe even while confronted with people I don’t know that well.
…as soon as a conversation about my sobriety started, I had to kind of justify that decision.
And of course I keep myself short and subordinate, because I don’t want to spoil the fun, everyone’s cocktails and seem like a preachy life coach. I deep down feel awkward and abnormal about not drinking alcohol.
I have to justify my decision not to drink more than a decision to get completely plastered. If I wanted my peace, I’d just order a Gin & Tonic and nobody would even think about it twice. All of that creates a social climate, people’d rather drink in, just to be left alone. “I can’t decide what I want from the menu, uhm, I will just have a beer, thank you.”
That norm is strongly conveyed in language, when we say things like “let’s meet for drinks” or “up for a glass of something?”. During a family meal, when an aunt or grandfather asks “what will you have, beer, wine?”, they react with a befuddled intensity after they hear “I’ll just have some orange juice”. As if I was converting to a religion they didn’t like. And there is a deeply rooted social compulsion and an anthropomorphic reason, why we want to get intoxicated with our fellow humans.
In an article in Die Zeit called “Elixier der Menschwerdung”, roughly translated “Elixir of Human Incarnation”, alcohol is framed as a primordial social cohesive. Early humans were getting together in gatherings, as soon as concepts like societies developed, and drank fermented juices — alcohol — and got high in any possible way. Those group festivities and rituals were precursors to religion and spiritualism. The article subsequently explains, that’s why humans feel save, when they are drunk in company.
“My tribe is here, we are all communing with the spirits and I am part of this group. I am accepted and stable. I belong.” So much of my own — and my before mentioned shy friend’s — behaviour makes sense now. Humans define themselves over their gang, their troop. We are social creatures. And communal ritualistic intoxication was a survival trick of early primates.
It is still in all of us, this social urge and comfort to get fucked up together. And that’s basically why it feels weird, even today, when I am not having drinks with the others. Luckily there are more than one way to have a sense of communal fun and euphoria.
On a side note, all of the times I had gotten drunk alone, playing video games feel even more unhealthy now, after learning all of that information. But not only in me this social practice, this human glue of inebriation, has gone awry.
A local handbook on alcohol writes about its own surveys the following, which I found apt and funny. It pointed out first, that many of the people questioned for the survey, could not quite remember the details of their alcohol use. Others would intentionally understate or exaggerate their alcohol consumption. That doesn’t sound like in the spirit of the good old ritualistic binge.
It is still in all of us, this social urge and comfort to get fucked up together.
It seems as if the modern communities drinking alcohol on this planet have all signed an odd social contract: Things people do while drunk will be indulged. Objectively incredible. If a sober person would act even half as destructive and intrusive towards others — grope, scream, vandalize, vomit — , nobody would tolerate it with a shrug of the shoulders.
Why is being drunk an excuse for anything? And I don’t mean legally, I am talking about the public mindset. Even police just sigh and tend to give the irritating drunk a free pass. Maybe we are all so scared, others might judge us on our own drunken actions and bullshit, so we don’t judge other people on theirs.
I start to sound moralising, I know. As described I react quite particular to alcohol, others may not. It works differently for different people. What I was doing isn’t necessary the solution for anybody else. That said, I still think we should take better care of ourselves and each other. Part of that might be curbing the sauce. Dr. Musalek put it like this.
It’s always a great idea to drink less or no alcohol at all. There are people, who can tolerate a lot of it and there the ones, who can’t. That’s genetically determined. Those who can put away great amounts of liquor without any problems are actually more likely to become addicted. But there is no “addiction gene”!
People who have a high tolerance to alcohol will simply drink more of it. And if they for instance suffer from anxiety disorders, insomnia and realise, alcohol helps with that and makes them feel better, they start using it as medication. Such behaviour could lead to consumption of even more alcohol.
Those who can put aways a lot of liquor without any problems are actually more likely to become addicted.
That leads us to a second phenomena. Nerve cells try to protect themselves from alcohol. There is the blood-brain-barrier, which means, not all of the alcohol in the blood reaches the nerve cell. The body is built in such a fashion, that it could keep strengthening this barrier the more alcohol we drink. So the tolerance can go up and up, making people brag they are invincible and cool. “Check out how much I can drink!” That is actually one of the first signs of addiction, the body tries to massively counter regulate.
At some point, after drinking too much too often, this barrier can break down. And suddenly a little bit of alcohol is enough to make that person drunk.
This kind of reminded me of those people proudly listing how much and exactly what they drank last night. “My resolution is less drunken stupors!” That is one of my favourite comments by a female coworker around New Year’s before 2019. Anyway, there is an individual point for everyone to ask oneself, am I behaving in a harmful or self-harming manner.
Then my project of #100DaysNoAlcohol was over and I kept going with the sobriety. I was used to it and liked it. I didn’t miss drinking nor think too much about it anymore, even when people asked “to go for a beer”. I just said “alright, let’s go” and drank fruit juices or tonic water. I didn’t feel like having to justify myself anymore. All things kind of got a little easier.
Except one. I realised I worked way more, also on weekends and started to feel kind of burnt out. Suddenly it came to me: I was missing all those lazy hangover days on the couch and in bed, doing absolutely nothing, with my own permission. Being out of order. A female friend then had the great idea to just introduce “honorary hangover days” every two weeks or so.
A female friend then had the great idea to just have “honorary hangover days” every two weeks or so.
A day I would just sleep till noon, allow myself to watch stupid shows and order horrible food. It’s great, because I can enjoy all the upsides of procrastination without the shame and feeling like dying.
Serving people their drinks has gotten really fun for me as well, I can follow conversations and a fun night out right until the end. And I remember things the next day.
There’s a weird thing happening to a group of drunken people, I call it the “beyond language”-stage. (I feel like a scientific researcher of party animals.) At some point there’s a shift and the group, after steadily getting drunker, suddenly will turn incomprehensible, to me and to each other. Then everyone just mutters to oneself, sings along to music and may scream words in each other’s faces, but nobody actually communicates anymore. Usually that’s when the party becomes really annoying for sober people.
But until that point and in general, I love being in bands of merrily drunken people. I get something like a contact high and the euphoria is wonderfully contagious. Of course I still love heightened states of my perception and even without alcohol, I become just as loud and high-spirited, when going out.
A lot of things stayed the same, while being so very different.
After all this — am I better now?
Yes.
But, I am still the person I was before. Like Dr. Musalek said, a lot of feelings and fears, that are being compensating for, are already part of a individual personality and value system. I still have my moods, my quirks and mental instabilities. My bad sides weren’t made of alcohol. A big difference is, that now I don’t have a scapegoat or an excuse for bad behaviour anymore.
There are problems, that don’t go away, no matter if you’re drinking or not. When you’re sober more, you start to see yourself a little more clearly. Also things of the past come back in perspective. I started recalling people I felt like I mistreated and relationships that went wrong. I wrote to women and apologised for bad behaviour.
After I did all that, I realised this being an essential part of the 12-step program for addiction recovery. To me it came organically and it felt like a confirmation of my sober intuitions. (Don’t worry, I won’t start talking about a “higher power” now. Although, there are a lot of definitions you can find for such a concept, that aren’t religion.)
Today I weigh 10 kilograms less than at the end of 2018, that’s about 22 pounds, but I have been watching what I eat more as well. I know, self care is on fleek these days and always comes across a little show-offy. But there are some poor sides too: I do seemingly suffer more from little aches and pains now. I caught different kinds of colds, which I almost never had before. The whole business with “alcohol toughens up your cells and body so you don’t get sick that easy” comes to mind — I don’t know, if I want to believe in that.
I still have slight stomach problems sometimes. Certain areas of my body seem to have lost some tactile perception. Then, when I stutter or fail to be able to communicate a certain complex point, a thought pops up in the back of my mind: Is all that what is generally known as long term damages?
But my addictive behaviour shifted and dispersed. Now I love to eat — even more than before. I also suddenly was on my phone constantly, which I had to find a way to scotch. My sex drive went up and I go through short phases of obsessive video gaming, but that always runs it’s course. I get high now and then, listen to podcasts constantly and my coffee intake is also something I should keep an eye on.
By the way, I drank alcohol again. “What?! You fool, you damn hypocrite!” Yeah well, when I startet my 100 days, I always figured, I’d try alcohol again after it at some point, and maybe even moderately consume it. So when I had my first drink after the time-out, it was premium vodka, which to quote Dr. Musalek contains relatively low amounts of methyl alcohol and no long-chained alcohols.
I measured off a small specific amount and drank it — even though I had this experience with the whole bottle of Stoli, vodka remained my preferred version of this drug called alcohol. My worries of falling back into old ways did not prove true. After my taste, which was okay but not at all special, I stopped drinking all together again for months. Not drinking has become my new normal. Mission accomplished!
Not drinking has become my new normal. Mission accomplished!
I might make very rare exceptions for alcohol. But I do not yearn for them at all. Twice this year I drank again. I play drums in a band and after a great concert, we celebrated with drinks and it was a lot of fun. Like it was, back in some seemingly fantastic version of my youth. Still, I lost a expensive piece of drumming equipment that night. The second time was this month. I had some vodka again, we had a laugh and went home early. The days following, I felt pretty low and sad though. It was like some light depressive state. So to sum it up, the good really does not outweigh the bad here.
Back to life without booze, back to work and thinking straight — most of the time. For now I am just happy to be rid of black outs, self doubt, shame, a brain full of holes and fears, that used to control me.
This text was very important to me and helped me through this whole ordeal. Reflecting on this year I go back and forth in my head between a cynical “quit acting like a pretentious health guru, you’re embarrassing yourself” and the inspirational “I am finally free after decades of physical and intellectual numbness, my life can finally start as intended”. I hope somebody can find solace, said inspiration or maybe a helpful point of reference in this.
Take care.
***
If you need medical help or counselling because of addiction, here is a list of international facilities and institutes you can contact. In case you are looking for help in Austria, you can turn to the Anton Proksch Institut, Therapiezentrum und Suchtberatung, or alkoholhilfe.at.
International rehab clinics are sometimes privatised and only for rich people. If you suffer from addiction and seek support, maybe go to your nearest hospital or medical institution first, you will surely be pointed in the right direction. All the best.
