One Drink Leads to Lost Weeks

I’m 29 years old and I’ve been struggling with alcohol since I was 16. I’ll spend a week, two weeks, three weeks sober, and they’ll feel like the best moments of my life, and then SOMETHING puts the itch in me to drink. Usually, it’s me rationalizing my desire to have a single drink, and then it’s two, and then three, and so on. I know that I need to just stop, forever, but it doesn’t feel very easy.

My friends, my brothers, everyone I know and love can just “have a drink”, but when I try to play on that hill, one drink becomes two, three, four, five, suddenly I’m digging for booze in the freezer, sneaking to the corner store while others are asleep. Then, in the snap of a finger, it’s day five of me lying to my loved ones, functioning but not functioning; being inadequate with my partner, not calling my family, not pursuing the things that I wanted to, because one drink became a week of drinking and negotiating with my body, instead of driving myself forward. It becomes “okay, well I need to stop shaking if I’m going to make it through this, so one drink should set me right.” Many days, it takes me an entire day of slowly drinking to start to feel “normal,” and then by the time I do, it’s time for me to get to sleep and restart the cycle.

Everything around me… advertisements, friends, society… screams “hey, let’s just have a beer, it’s easy, fun, casual.” I keep trying to conquer it, and sometimes it’s working. I often will have a drink and then just go to bed, and that makes me feel in control. Then three days later, I’m hugging the toilet bowl, shaking, wishing I’d never had the first drink, and swearing I’ll never do it again. Spending entire days in bed, sweating liquor into my bedsheets, pumping the air conditioner past it’s natural limit, and I somehow always find myself back there, no matter how many times I say it’s the last.

I wish I had a recovery story to share. For now, I just have an addiction story.