On Addiction

Addictions. We all have them. 

Coffee. Television. Soda. Video games. Working. Self-deprivation. Sports. Gambling.

And of course, drugs and alcohol. 

To discuss this important and sensitive subject, I figured it would be useful to relate some of my own experiences. 

I majored in psychology in college. One reason I did this was because I didn’t know what I wanted to do for my career, and psychology seemed universally useful. But a big reason I pursued this was because I wanted to understand why people did the things that they do in life. Why I did the things that I did in my own life. 

I started drinking and smoking weed early in life. My first cigarette was quickly followed by my first joint and my first 12-pack of Icehouse at the ripe old age of 14. Or was it Red Dog? Who knows. It was some god-awful swill, that’s for sure. Whatever was cheapest at the White Hen down the street that the homeless guy could buy for us with our $13 so that he could keep the maximum amount of change. 

I remember stealing my mom’s box wine by emptying coke cans and filling them with wine when she drank (so she wouldn’t notice some of it missing). Stealing Gordon’s vodka, a few shots here and a few shots there, again whenever she was drinking so she didn’t notice. God all of that booze was so disgusting. But I didn’t care. I was unhappy and I wanted a reprieve from having to think about life. About my life. 

The thing is, my life really wasn’t that bad. Sure, my parents got divorced when I was 9, my mom was never home after that (working second shift), my dad disappeared for about a decade starting a few years after the divorce. I had acne and few friends, and I didn’t have a girlfriend until I was 21 years old. But I had my health, I had a roof over my head, I had access to food, and I went to a college-prep high school and a decent public university. I knew about children in low-income countries who struggled to meet their very basic needs. So why did I feel such a compulsion to escape? And why did it continue for so long?

I wanted to understand why I felt the need to self-medicate with drugs and alcohol. Internally I knew that it wasn’t about having fun, it was about escaping my mental anguish. So I took psychology classes. I learned about things like depression, which I was sure that I suffered from but which I was also afraid to seek treatment for. Both because we didn’t have money for it, and because that would be admitting that I was broken. And having seen friends take medication for their own mental challenges, I was petrified of taking prescription medication. I saw that sometimes it changed them, in some good ways and some bad, to the point where it seemed like they were a different person. 

So I drank. And I smoked weed. A lot. A whole lot. OK, so I need to explain, because simply saying “a lot” doesn’t convey the extreme. I drank on weekends in high school, and smoked weed almost every day, but that was just the preamble to the oncoming storm. 

In college, I fell into a bottle of alcohol, hard. I drank like there was no tomorrow. I would, literally, drink to excess every night for a full two years of my time there. A fairly normal night would be a fifth of vodka, a 24 case of beer, a six-pack of craft brew, and one or two 22/24 oz bottles of beer, split between me and a friend. It would all be gone in the morning. More standard during school nights would be a full twelve pack and maybe 3-4 rum/cokes. A 1.75L of rum would last about 4 or 5 days as a supplement to beer. 

You might wonder how I could afford all of that. Well, I had a friend who worked at a local liquor store, and I could get large quantities of weed for cheap. Via bartering, we’d have a $50 alcohol tab ring up as $12 at the register. It was more complicated than that, but suffice to say that we got a lot for a little. And we also drank cheap stuff, it was all Budweiser and Captain Morgan for me. 

Still, how the hell did I drink so much in a single sitting in the first place? It still boggles my mind today to think about it. You develop a tolerance to alcohol, allowing you to drink more and more the more frequently you indulge. That’s how I got to that point. Somehow I still got straight A’s, again because of tolerance. I always selected 8 or 9am classes (that helped you finish earlier, so that I could finish my homework immediately after class and start drinking and smoking earlier in the day)…I’d get up at 5 or 6, pop some advil, study or do homework, and go to class. I remember being embarrassed when told by my peers that I reeked of alcohol, despite having just showered and definitely wearing clean clothes. It was my pores. I literally had alcohol coming out of my pores. 

My drinking calmed down after college, but it didn’t go away. Not by a long shot. I had challenges for a long time. Scratch that, I have challenges, even today. It had become such a habit that it was a part of my identity. I was a drinker and a smoker. Going for a walk? Taking a thermos with rum and coke. Going to see a local band? Bringing a flask. Going to a friend’s house? Bringing at least a 12-pack. How about a bar? Sneaking in some beers and a flask to fill up empty cups for cheap. Buying groceries? Smoking a joint on the way to the store. Playing video games? Pulling bongs and beers. I could go on. Pretty much any activity required drinking and/or smoking. 

How did it get to that point? Well, you make excuses. I’m an introvert. I do not enjoy parties, at most I like hanging with 2-4 friends. So it’s a social lubricant. Weed, with its shortcomings, stimulates creativity. Playing guitar? Better smoke some herb to help out those jams. Bad day at school or the office? Drink to forget. It becomes a habit. It becomes your identity. 

In case you can’t tell, majoring in psychology did not provide me with the answers I sought. I was still unhappy. I still felt alone. I still wanted to escape. I just wanted happiness. And, in the words of Dan Millman, happiness was always just around the corner, a corner that I never turned. Though it was not for lack of effort. 

Coming back to the original question, why do we drink? Why do we smoke? Why do we become enslaved to our addictions? 

Of course there is no easy, universal answer. I’ve come to think that a significant component is your friend circle, or your associate circle, whatever you want to call them. If your friends drink, you drink. If your friends smoke, you smoke. Toxicity breeds quickly. Those who drink or smoke often know, in their hearts, that the drinking and smoking is bad. So they recruit others to drink and smoke, which in turn makes them feel better about their own decisions to drink and smoke. You cultivate friends that are in a similar boat, and you all reinforce each other’s behaviors, assuring each of us that what we were doing was acceptable and normal. Misery loves company. And humans hate change.

I also think that we tell ourselves a story to justify our decisions. I did have a rough day, it’s ok to use drugs and alcohol to relax. I am going out with friends, it’s ok to have a night out drinking. I don’t want to go to this gathering, so it’s ok to drink to make it fun. I read an interesting article about addiction in GQ where musician Ben Harper explained the correct way that I should have been viewing the situation—he said “Don’t tell yourself a story that only you would believe.” That’s exactly what I was doing. And that’s what many of us do when we drink. Any normal, sober person would hear the stories and excuses that we make, and call bullshit. But we see past the holes. We see what we want to believe. We see what enables us to continue our harmful behavior. 

So what can be done to deal with addiction? A helpful piece of advice from that GQ article came from Phish frontman Trey Anastasio. He said, simply, “Surrender, and ask for help.” It really does come down to that. When you’re addicted, you can’t see things clearly. You have brief moments of clarity, but they disappear as the hangover dissipates and you approach the time for your next fix. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve woken up, felt like shit, swore off drinking forever, and then completely come around to my old way of thinking come 5pm.

This looks like different things for different people. Even recently, as my struggle has persisted now for over 20 years, I came to my wife asking for help. But she didn’t really understand what I was going through, and since she enjoys drinking in a much more responsible way, she just couldn’t be the support that I needed. I had to look elsewhere. I don’t have many close friends anymore, and the few that I do have don’t have problems with alcohol, or don’t even drink at all. I ended up coming to my mother, who has also struggled with alcohol for over 20 years. We were able to talk openly about our struggles. It was useful.

First of all, it helped just to have someone to talk to about it all. Someone who understood. And the more we talked, the more we decided we both wanted desperately to stop. So we set up an accountability system, where we’d confess to each other each time we drank. This worked for a bit, but soon the embarrassment and shame led to us failing to report our, well, failings. But we didn’t give up, we kept talking, and we kept trying different “rules” to help keep us off the hooch. Again, these failed. But it was in talking about these failures that we came to revelations about the reasons why we drank. About how we would drink just because we had a window to do so, and that’s what we had done for so many years, and if we didn’t take that window, then we wouldn’t be able to drink for a few days. The old “fear of missing out” drove much of our drinking. And we talked about how just incredibly stupid that was, how we would view someone else who used that excuse. 

Again, this didn’t solve anything, but it was progress. We were being more mindful about our drinking, which led to less drinking. It led to setting goals we could actually achieve. I decided at one point to stop all drinking and smoking for two weeks, because, in the words of myself, “I can do anything for two weeks.” I thought about indulging dozens of times during those two weeks. But I made it. And when I made it, I set a new goal. And that’s where I am today. Setting goals, bit by bit. Adding success to success, and building my new identity, one where I no longer feel that compulsion. I haven’t completely kicked either of them, at least mentally. Maybe I will someday, maybe I won’t. I’ve abstained from alcohol all through 2020 so far (6 months and counting), but I still think about it. I still use weed more than would be ideal. I’d like to think I can casually indulge without compulsion. We’ll see. But I won’t ever let it control me the way that it did for so many years, the way it dominated my thinking. By being more mindful, we can see these trends developing and stop them before they flourish. 

It ultimately comes down to having support. To having an open, honest, earnest conversation about where you’re at and where you want to be. You can’t suffer in silence, or you’ll continue suffering in silence and nothing will get better. Find someone who understands and talk to them. Then take your first step towards your new life.

***You no doubt noticed that I always lumped weed and alcohol together. To be clear, weed is a hundred times less harmful than alcohol, for most people. But for those of us who have an addictive personality, we create habits fast, and that can include smoking/vaping/eating weed. So in that way it can still become an addiction, albeit without the physical compulsion that is driven by drinking alcohol. That addiction can still lead to all sorts of unhappiness, so I’ve included it in this post about addictions because we should be aware of that, as it’s been a compulsion for me for many years of my life. It’s a different kind of unhappiness than drinking, certainly. I don’t become a sloppy moron when I smoke weed, I don’t have the inability to walk straight, I don’t black out, and I don’t have a hangover the next day. But I might become complicit, I might veg out and play video games or spend all day playing with dogs and walking around the neighborhood. That might affect my view of myself. It might decrease my productivity and increase my self-loathing. So we should be mindful of smoking weed, just like we should be mindful of all types of addictions, including all of those that I mentioned at the beginning of this article, and all those that I failed to mention. Ultimately it’s up to us to be aware of our own behaviors, what we’re doing, where we’re at, and where we want to be. Awareness is the key. It’s never too late.***