Alcohol

I think - I have no stats - I think a lot of us who have dealt with undiagnosed mental illness have also dealt with some sort of chemical abuse.

I’ve known I needed to write this for quite a while; it was postponed because I really had no idea how to approach it. (It was also delayed by knee surgery, and some old baggage I had to work through.)

This is not a tell-all about how I lost jobs, houses, or relationships because of alcohol abuse, because those things never happened. Nor will I be detailing the stupid events and decisions I made due to alcohol. They are in the past, and by the grace of the universe, I don’t think I ever caused anyone more pain than I caused to myself.

My mother once said of a man in our extended family, “he’s not an alcoholic; he’s a drunk.” I never really understood the difference between the two. As I started to write this article, I think I came up with a possible distinction: alcoholics have an illness, a compulsion. Drunks really can “stop if they want to” - they just don’t want to. I could have stopped (I know, because I eventually did); I didn’t want to.

For much of my life before diagnosis - and for a while after - I was a drunk, and a semi-professional barfly.

My story is neither original nor unusual. I started drinking before I graduated high school, to loosen inhibitions and hid the stirrings of what became mental illness. In college, I drank through entire semesters. At 20, I drank my way into, and then out of, a two-year “serious marital accident” (as described by my kind ex-husband), but alcohol wasn’t the only contributing factor.

I didn’t know about chronic depression; I didn’t know alcohol made it worse. I only knew that alcohol gave me a personality other than my own. It allowed me to be with people without letting them into my hidden life.

So, I drank. In neighborhood bars. At happy hour, with co-workers. At home, eating pizza and watching movies. For about thirty years.

Alcohol never really controlled me. It made me stupid, yes, but most importantly, it blurred my life to a level I could handle.

And there are parts of that life I remember fondly. I remember walking around a small mountain town late at night, in the cold, in near silence, sipping from a pint of cheap brandy, just letting my mind unload. I loved spending a rainy Saturday afternoon in a deserted bar, reading a book and drinking Frangelica in my coffee. But those were rare occasions. I spent far too much of my life - and my income - dulled, in trash bars, drinking cheap beer. Even now, hearing Led Zeppelin or the Eagles makes me thirsty.

I really only remember the pain relief. And I’m only now realizing how much of my life I simply drank away.

My drinking habits had one other major effect on my life: I had a definite “type” when it came to men. The two longest relationships I ever had were with alcoholic men. They were older than me; they passed midlife long before I did, and I saw the effect a lifetime of drinking had on each of them. Alcohol slowly ate away two brilliant minds, and that makes me angry.

Years later, I met my second husband on a scotch-soaked trip to Great Britain, a story I don’t feel like telling right now. I’ll only say I brought him to the States and married him before I realized he was an alcoholic, and a mean one.

That experience seriously reduced my own drinking. It helped that I changed jobs, from a near-daily happy hour culture to a job where, for a number of reasons, the happy hour culture simply didn’t exist. As my alcohol intake decreased, my psych drugs became more effective. I found a good doctor, one I trusted. He recommended a safe limit to my alcohol intake, and because I trusted him, I followed his advice.

My drinking was almost always an escape - from a difficult work situation, from a relationship, from life itself - from the difficulties of living with a self that was confused by illness, by poor judgment, by the pain of depression.

I no longer need to hide my “real self” behind alcohol. As Mavis Staple sings, “I like the things about me that I once despised.” (God love her.) These days, I have an occasional beer when I’m at lunch with friends. My cupboard holds a bottle of good scotch, and another of bourbon, both dusty. I still “indulge” - but at a rate of one or two drinks every few months.

My drinking years are in the past, and if you’ve read any of my articles, you know how I feel about wasting time and energy on things that can’t be changed. That doesn’t mean I haven’t been carrying some old baggage I didn’t know I had.

I was carrying an old sense of shame, based in part on my mother’s anger about alcohol abuse. More importantly, I found my own anger about alcohol, about what it did to me in the guise of protecting me from the world.

Surviving undiagnosed mental illness, and “treating” it with alcohol, stole time from me, and achievement. The advanced degrees I never attempted, the skills I wasn’t able to develop, the travel for which I had neither money nor courage, the world of knowledge I didn’t have it in me to explore. And the people I loved.

I thought that drinking was just a bad habit I eventually broke. It’s only now that I’ve found anger I didn’t realize I had. I knew that drinking - and undiagnosed mental illness - stole time and opportunity. I just never realized, until now, how much was lost. I have to tell myself: it’s done, it’s over, it can’t be changed. Anger and shame are useless at this point.

But still - what a goddamned waste.