I woke up with my cheek pressed to my cold bathroom floor, partially cradling the even colder toilet. It was Jan. 1, 2010 and New Year’s Eve had gotten just a little too out of control. Who hasn’t been there, amirite? I was 26, familiar with the occasional night of binge drinking and a solid hangover.
You’d think I would have known my limits by that age, but it wasn’t until my then-boyfriend looked me straight in the eyes and broached the topic of my drinking while I sat there staring back, head pounding and stomach churning.
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“You’re just too smart and talented and have too much promise to throw it away on alcohol,” he said.
“Because I’m hung over?” I asked, stunned. “People have hangovers all the time. OK, so sometimes I go a little overboard with my friends, but I’m not throwing my life away.” What he saw, though, was me inching toward a dangerous path. As sharp as his statement was, it was clearly what I needed to hear.
I still find it odd to this day that I, myself, hadn’t yet thought about my own drinking, considering alcoholism runs rampant in my family and makes me more predisposed to develop a drinking problem. I grew up knowing my grandma had been a devoted member of Alcoholics Anonymous since before I was born, and my close immediate family member who is now 16 years sober would frequently talk about his recovery in AA. While talking about “the disease” made me aware of my heightened genetic risk of developing an addiction, it hadn’t yet caused me to question my own drinking habits. Hellooo, Kristin?
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In college, when I was out for the night, I never thought about how much I was drinking. I would get so entrenched in the social aspect of a party, I’d just down drink after drink, not thinking about how it was impairing my mind and body. That’s just what you do in college — or at least what has become the unhealthy “norm.” You play flip cup, do keg stands and chug jungle juice because it’s “funny” when you drunk-dial boys and tell stupid stories from the night before with your hung-over friends.
But then, if you’re anything like me, after you graduate from college, that style of drinking doesn’t naturally just end. You go to happy hours, have multiple social circles that want you to meet them for drinks on different nights of the week and reunite with high school friends on “Blackout Wednesday” and New Year’s Eve. So by the time I was 26, I hadn’t realized I had continued drinking like a college kid.
Binge drinking is defined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as five or more drinks for men and four or more drinks for women in about two hours. Show of hands if you haven’t seen that regularly? It is reported by one in six U.S. adults, according to a 2012 CDC study, and accounts for more than half of the alcohol consumed by adults and 90 percent consumed by youths, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. And although the CDC says, “Most people who binge drink are not alcohol dependent,” multiple studies have been published that say adolescent problem drinking is associated with problem drinking in early adulthood.
Luckily for me, I was able to avoid becoming part of those statistics, thanks to the epiphany I had five years ago. I consider that New Year’s Day my wake-up call to the rest of my healthy, adult life. To this day, when I order a beer or open a bottle of wine, I think about that morning and it helps me keep myself in check. Sure, I still go out and take part in the social aspect of drinking, but I’m now aware of how much I’m consuming. Shots are a rarity. I know my limits. Hell, for the first six months of 2010, I practically stopped drinking altogether. The thought of drinking actually scared me. “What does it mean to be an alcoholic?” I contemplated.
What I had learned about alcoholism was mostly based on what I was taught in childhood prevention programs like D.A.R.E.: If you drink alone, you’re an alcoholic; as long as you’re happy when you’re drunk, you don’t have a problem; as long as you can hold a job, you’re not an addict; as long as you don’t need a drink when you wake up or don’t drink at work, you’re not an addict. But are those true or just cliches we use to rationalize our bad behavior?
The more people I talk to about “problem drinking” versus “healthy drinking,” the more I realize I wasn’t alone to have questioned what’s “normal.” Turns out, a lot of people have a difficult time defining “addiction” as it pertains to their own lifestyles, which is why RedEye will be devoting our 2015 editorial initiative to delving into the many forms of addiction, from alcohol and drugs to sex, food, technology and more.
I realize that at RedEye, we’re responsible for telling readers what to drink and eat, and where they can find a good party or bar, so our goal with this coverage is not to preach, judge or condemn. We encourage fun. We’re all about the YOLO. But we also, like someone did for me in 2010, want to raise the awareness — and start a conversation — about addiction. Finding a way to define and achieve responsible behavior is something I think we can all get behind.
You can find our coverage online and in print every Wednesday this year. As ever, we’d like to hear your feedback. If you want us to consider sharing your stories related to addiction in our publication, please send them to [email protected] with “Addiction” in the subject line.
Kristin Samuelson is RedEye’s managing editor. [email protected] | @ksamredeye
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