My Story - colagirl (part 1, before)

Old 11-23-2014, 08:11 PM
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My Story - colagirl (part 1, before)

I grew up in a very typical middle-class family. My parents never had alcohol at home except for the occasional glass of wine at a holiday meal. I had a wonderful childhood full of friends and family.

In high school, I got straight As and hung out with all the “smart people”. A lot of other kids around us would party on the weekends and brag about it at school. I thought they were total losers and had no idea why anyone would want to spend their free time drinking.

I have a very clear memory of my first drink and my reaction to it. I was 17 and on a trip to France with my high school French group. We had been walking around Paris for days and was in a lot of pain from all the walking. On our last night, our chaperone had arranged for us to have a several-course meal at a Paris restaurant, which included a glass of wine with dinner (legal drinking age is lower there). I drank the glass of wine, feeling like I was out completely out of my element. As we started walking back to the hotel, the alcohol hit me, and I distinctly remember bounding down some stairs near Sacre Coeur, having no more pain from all the walking and feeling totally free and happy. I remember thinking “oh, so this is why people like drinking”.

Fast forward a couple of years to my freshman year in college. One night a new friend had encouraged some of us to come to her room and drink Zima. This was the first time I got drunk (on Zima, yuck!), and I loved the drunk part, but wanted to die with the hangover the next morning. I decided I would never do that again (ha ha).

By sophomore year, I had made more drinking friends and went to a lot of parties. I found ways to make the hangovers more bearable and reveled in the fun and party atmosphere of it all, and in the ability to forget about everything while I was drinking. By the end of that year, I found myself “pre-funking” alone in my room, drinking straight shots of flavored vodka so I could be drunk before I got somewhere and had anyone question how much I was drinking.

Around this time, I learned that my mom, after going through a divorce a few years prior, had also started drinking, and was a 24/7 lone drunk that was about to lose everything. I spent most of the rest of college paying bills for her, begging our landlord to not evict her, and staying at her apartment in order to make sure she was still alive. Once I even slept in front of the door so she couldn’t go out and get more alcohol. It was a total nightmare to be so worried about her all the time. I would call and when she wouldn’t answer I would have a panic attack. I laid awake every night dreading phone calls from my family that something terrible had happened. I started to wonder whether my drinking wasn’t following the same pattern, but I ignored it, thinking that I was still young, that’s what young people do, and it was way too early for me to decide I had a problem. I kept drinking throughout college at the same pace.

In my early 20s, I got my first job and lived in a couple of different places with various friends. We would get drunk sometimes, but I was able to keep it reasonably in check for a couple of years. When I was about 24, I moved into my first apartment by myself. I remember writing in my journal on my first night there that I was lonely, then taking a shot of Jagermeister, followed by several more. This began a dangerous pattern of drinking heavily, alone, and hiding it from everyone. Later I switched to beer, and then wine, thinking that it wasn’t as bad as hard liquor, but I still knew I had a problem because I could never stop until I was wasted and passed out. I hated the constant cycle of waking up hungover, trying to remember what I had done the night before, feeling like crap and having to go to work anyway, then deciding to repeat the whole thing over again the next night.

I did this for about 15 years, gradually going from less than a bottle of wine a night to a whole bottle, then a bottle and a half, and finally two bottles a night, and drunk for entire weekends. No one in my life knew I had a problem. I came to work every day, feeling like crap but able to still be a superstar at my job. I got several promotions. When I would drink with friends, I would keep it to just a couple, all the while being impatient for the evening to end so that I could go home and drink the way I wanted to.

In 2008, I found SR. I finally had a group of people where I could be anonymous but talk about my problem for the first time. I made a lot of friends here, some of whom I still keep in touch with on and off the boards. When I was seriously working on it after I joined, I managed a few stretches of 30 days or 60 days, but I always went back to drinking. I learned way too late that one of my earliest and closest friends from this place had died from drinking in 2011. I owe a lot to her, and she still helps me stay on the right path.

In the last couple of years, I was constantly worried about my health. I would wake up with terrible heart palpitations, or realize I had thrown up while I was passed out, each time wondering how I didn’t choke and die. My liver hurt every single day. I set my hair on fire while lighting a candle once, and thank god my friend was there to put it out for me. One time I (apparently) put a pot of water on the stove to boil and passed out. I woke up to an empty pot, smoking on the stove, having no memory of what happened. I was barely eating. And I was driving drunk, a lot, to get more alcohol. I am very lucky I never hurt anyone, or ended up in jail.

On the weekend of November 15-17th, 2013, I came home early on that Friday, primarily because I wanted to drink. I remember getting text messages from my best friend, asking if I wanted to go out with her, and I sort of remember the phone ringing and messages being left a few times, but I ignored them or didn’t notice them. On that Saturday evening, I was drunk on the couch and heard my answering machine come on. It was my friend again, saying that she was worried that she hadn’t heard from me, was outside my house, and was going to come in. There were bottles and glasses strewn everywhere, so I raced to throw as many of them as possible into cabinets, and then ran upstairs to my bedroom to pretend I was asleep. I heard her come in and wander around downstairs for awhile. When she started coming up the stairs, she was calling my name and I could hear the tears in her voice. In that moment, I flashed back to everything that had happened with my mom and how scared I always was that she was going to kill herself with booze. I remember walking into her apartment with the same fear in my voice, not knowing what I would find. When my friend came into my bedroom, I laid there pretending to sleep. She saw me and seemed relieved that I was alive, and so she left again. That moment was my turning point. I knew I couldn’t do it anymore, knew I was going to die, but had absolutely no idea what to do.

I continued drinking that night, and the next morning went and bought several bottles of wine from the convenience store down the street. There was a clerk there who sold me a lot of alcohol over the years, named Riad. I’ll never forget the look on his face that morning. Like he was so sad for me, and wished he could refuse to sell to me but it was early enough that I wasn’t visibly drunk. I just knew that it was probably my last drinking day and I was going to need a lot of courage to tell my friend what was going on.

I went home and drank about a bottle of wine in a half hour, then started texting my friend everything. I was way too scared to pick up the phone and call her, I had no idea what her reaction was going to be and I was really drunk. She was shocked, but understanding and supportive. She immediately started helping me figure out what to do – rehab, AA, etc. I kept drinking throughout the day and ran out of wine around 8pm. Not wanting to have more alcohol in the house, I got desperate and drank mouthwash for the first time. MOUTHWASH. If I needed any confirmation about the insanity my life had become, that was it.

(I will post my recovery story separately - thanks for reading)
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