Am I An Alcoholic?

And other fun drinking games.

Photo by Louis Hansel on Unsplash

I guess I figured Google would know the correct answer. I ask it so many things, why not ask it the most terrifying question I could think of and get it over with? How do I know if I am an alcoholic? Well, GOOGLE? Third Eye Oracle of all of cyberspace wisdom. What’s it gonna be? Am I safe inside my own body prison or am I a walking time bomb? I mean I can handle whatever it is, but just can I drink tonight, though, Google? How much? Can I have a glass of wine? Or two, I mean one is like nothing so two is like twice nothing which is basically also nothing, yeah? Find a study that says two glasses a night is fine. Ok, Google? Just find me an answer that I can reasonably live with. Be reasonable. I’m normal. Right? I’m just like everybody else and everybody drinks an insane amount all the time. Just tell me I’m okay and I’m not sick and I do not have to be sent away someplace I am absolutely frantic I might need to go. Tell me I can stay. Here. In my little life. Just like this. Normal. Drinking a bunch of wine every night has to be normal because… I normally do it.

Thinking back on those days when I used to try to find- on the vast diabolical interwebs no less- answers to my increasingly growing fears that I might actually be the dreaded, elusive, maladapted, failure freak that I invented in my mind and labeled ‘alcoholic’ brings up feelings in me now of equal parts sadness and grief. All that time I spent trapped in my looping, splitting, screaming, scratching mind worried if I was killing myself and then reaching for the only thing I thought would quiet my fear of the truth: wine. Worried about drinking too much wine? Drink more wine, that’ll fix you. I’m almost certain I read that on some stupid cheap ass dish towel for sale in yuppieville somewhere (is yuppie still a thing?).

I know it’s cute (no it isn’t) to respond to what I am sharing here with: “People who don’t have a drinking problem aren’t asking Google if they have a drinking problem.” And while that’s a confusing double negative, I get it. I know. Now. Now I get it. But back then, when I was actively addicted to my precious wine, I really did not have a mind that was able to process factual information around my alcohol consumption. It was like every time I got close to a breakthrough and almost accepted that I might maybe need to stop drinking, the logical side of me would spook the addicted side of me and I would drink more to get away from both of them.

The thing I think we are missing about all of this fear of being an alcoholic or not is that we are not as scared of the label alcoholic as we are that somehow if we are an alcoholic that makes us abnormal in the worst possible way. It means something is wrong with us. We can’t party with the big kids because we ruin a good time for everybody. If I drink too much and I know it but I can’t stop, or won’t stop, or don’t want to stop (wait is this a Miley Cyrus video wtf)- what kind of messed up lost cause misfit loser am I? When did I fall outside the normal range? When did I slide from wanting a drink to needing a drink (or seven)? Why am I all alone on the wrong side of the tracks? When did I become such an unspeakable problem? Weren’t we all just having fun? How did I not see for so damn long that the sick joke of my own secret disease was on me?

In a culture obsessed with so much- booze, clothes, image, wealth, status, fame, competition, judgment, kombucha- the reason we become obsessed with this shit in the first place is because we just want to fit in, chase the right things, collect the right trophies, be one of the crowd, do or be or sell or own the flashy, trendy, cool shit. We want to somehow know, or at least be able to tell ourselves with some reasonable amount of confidence, that we are not freaks. That we can stay. That we belong.

But all this worry about being ‘normal’ is costing us our health and our freedom. We tell ourselves we can’t be alcoholics because we have to keep drinking because everybody drinks and we are just like everybody and everybody loves us like this. If we aren’t like everybody else, where do we go? What do we do? If we can’t look around and see that we are just like them, who are we? That’s the question we really want to be able to ask (and answer) for ourselves. But we will never be able to answer it while we are still drinking.

When I got sober thirteen months ago, it was incredible how quickly it became glaringly apparent to me that drinking had me locked inside an invisible prison for decades. I thought drinking loosened me up, lightened me up, helped me relax and laugh with everybody else. Not be so uptight. I thought I spent all day trapped in a cage somebody else threw me inside and opening that bottle of wine at night was the key that set me free to… what? Free to go numb-slurry, pick fights, sink into depression, and blackout mostly. Sometimes with inexplicable injuries. Fuck asking if I’m an alcoholic. How in the fucking fuck did I think I was free?

True freedom is a clear head. True freedom is being able to lead yourself with strength, respect, tenderness, bravery and love. Being able to properly assess and take a necessary amount of risk is freedom. Freedom to grow, to be curious without being ignorant, that is freedom. To have a mind that isn’t obsessed with whether or not I am drinking too much booze, that is freedom. Because I am finally at peace about all of it.

I have no issue with calling myself an alcoholic, for whatever that’s worth. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t, but mostly I just have a deep unshakable self-respect around the fact that I finally called myself out on the drinking bullshit and cleaned up my act. I quit booze and came home to myself. And now I can finally answer that question I was so afraid to ask. Not ‘Am I an alcoholic?’ but even beyond that: ‘Who am I when I strip away all the labels?’ The truth is it doesn’t matter anymore if I am normal or not. It only matters that I know I am someone who answers to nobody but myself. And normal means nothing if you aren’t free.

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Author’s note: This post was inspired by my answering the deeply poignant question the incredible author Laura McKowen asks in chapter 13 of her bestselling book We Are the Luckiest. The question Laura asks is not ‘Am I an alcoholic?’ but rather ‘Am I free?’ This post is my answer. I am and will always be eternally grateful to be learning from teachers like Ms. McKowen to be less obsessed with finding answers and more concerned with asking the deeper questions.