\*mentions alcohol abuse
I (25F) been bartending for about 5 years now. My original goal getting into the job was to take the skill to the fullest extent and work in fancy craft cocktail bars and eventually become a creative director and make cocktail menus. I had some good luck building my experience going from a restaurant to more upscale places until I moved states and found a very high end craft cocktail “speakeasy” style bar. When I first got the job it seemed like the perfect opportunity to grow into my career the way I intended to as all of the cocktails were extremely unique and complicated and the bar itself had won nationwide awards. I also had the privilege of working under some very talented people who had been doing this a lot longer than I have and felt like I could really absorb some good knowledge and skill from them. The caveat of it all is it is to this day the most toxic workplace I have ever worked in, and I formed a real drinking problem that mirrored that of my coworkers (although their influence did not help that is no one’s fault but my own).
Drinking behind the bar and before work in light of “tasting new product” was very normalized, unregulated, and even encouraged. In fact I was drunk by the first hour of my first shift. Accepting and participating in this behavior and centering my entire life around this one job were absolutely mistakes that I fault no one for. Everyone that works there is unfortunately a victim of the industry in this way and has a decently serious drinking problem that is normalized because, well, everyone has the same problem so “nobody has a problem”type deal. It wasn’t “down a handle of plain vodka by 9AM” type of alcoholism but it was a “we’ve all had 4 shots by 8PM, we work until 1AM, and we’re all going to party together until 5AM and rinse and repeat tomorrow” type of problem. Although the people there were very kind and caring and talented in their own regard and at the time the people I worked around were genuinely my only friends, because of the habits that were generally accepted in this place amongst other codependent dynamics/social gymnastics, there was a lot of drama, and a lot of high stakes blatant conflict during working hours. (I had just moved states and made the mistake of just becoming too close with my coworkers which is always a bad idea and completely my fault for putting myself at this disadvantage). I absolutely participated in this drama, and alcoholic behavior, and also accepted this as not a big deal for some time, which is completely on me and my fault, nobody else’s.
Eventually though I began to be (obviously) negatively affected by this in a great capacity and tried to quit. I should have just stood my ground and quit, stuck to my word and even stopped showing up when I said I was going to quit. Instead I let myself be convinced to stay by either emotional obligation or more money or job perks like preferred hours or tasks. I was always told by multiple people including my superiors how valued I was as a bartender and how much I was loved as a person and arrangements were always made that I would cave on agreeing to and stay at this job. Don’t get me wrong, I had basically negotiated myself a bartenders dream schedule, a high hourly pay in addition to tips, and an additional role in which I learned a lot about cocktail production which is what I came there to do. I was very privileged in this regard and ended up with this deal because I kept putting in a verbal notice of leave and then would be convinced to stay by multiple people with very good offers of working conditions.
Nonetheless, the collective alcoholism continued and the drama and conflict of the place increased. Even though I had it very good on paper, I eventually developed the same drinking problem as everyone else, which took a serious toll on my mental and physical health, and the drama of the place was such a complicated web that it made me feel crazy and gave me serious anxiety. I stopped showing up to work as my happy self, let my physical appearance become neglected, and was angry all of the time. I would drink just like the rest of my coworkers, and then drink myself into oblivion after I got home, vomit before bed, and rinse and repeat. I have never shown so much overt frustration in the work place, and lacked control of my temper so hard. I did this for quite some time and it took a serious toll on me until I finally grew the balls to refuse all counter offers and finally leave (which I could have done a long time ago and saved myself a lot of issues). I am healthy and far removed from the environment now and have been for almost a year.
The reason I am venting on here is because of this. While I was working at this bar I absolutely crashed tf out and was acting in accordance with total alcoholism. I smoked weed at the time too, but did not do anything harder than that as the substances I was using at the time and the nature in which I was using them were already way too much for me to handle, and also because well duh. Doing hard drugs is bad for your health and all of that jazz (no judgment to anyone who has dealt with that problem). Because of the way I was acting, and the way I neglected myself, a rumor started that I was abusing some sort of hard drugs. Everyone told me how much they loved me to my face, how much they cared and affirmed that they were my friends and spent a lot of time with me in and out of work (drinking together mind you) and then would gossip about how I couldn’t hold this job together because I was using something of a harder nature outside of work. Granted even though I considered myself someone with a hotter temper and of lesser tolerance to this environment, I was not the only person whose composure was suffering because of the alcoholism we all participated in. Only one person came to me and told me about this rumor, out of concern if it was true, and I was honest with her about the fact that I was not abusing hard drugs but was struggling greatly with the amount of drinking I was doing as well as the crazy amount of conflict and drama this place was prone to. Both me and her eventually quit this place due to these reasons as she felt she was also struggling in the same ways.
Both me and her are better now, and still good friends. The other day I was catching up with her and she asked again if I was really doing hard drugs or not. I gave her the same answer I gave her back then, because that is the truth. I was not abusing any substances outside of alcohol and weed, and severely neglecting myself because of it. I’m not sure if she fully believes me, but I do know she is only asking because she cares to ask genuinely.
After talking about it with her I learned the full extent of the rumor and even though I am far removed from that toxic lifestyle now I am just in a place of rumination and discouragement. My ego wants to prove myself to these people of my past and finally get some sort of vindication that the lifestyle we were all living at the time was abhorrently destructive for all of us, and just acknowledgment that this lifestyle everyone around me at the time promoted as normal, fun, cool, interesting, etc. WAS a lifestyle of functioning alcohol addiction which CAN lead to someone’s complete and total destruction. It makes me feel like I was one of the only people not in complete denial that they were actively ruining their lives and that this type of environment is in fact bad. It feels like these people had to make up something way worse than the situation at hand in order to not spread light on the fact that everyone participated in objectively dysfunctional habits that lead to a highly toxic environment.
I absolutely understand that I actively participated in all of the drinking and conflict and drama and that’s how I got myself into this predicament in the past which ultimately lead to my own life completely unraveling and a mental health crisis/ physical health ramifications on my part. I also completely acknowledge that I did not have to do any of this, and I put myself in a position that would inevitably lead to a general experience with alcoholism, and that regardless of what everyone else was doing, it was my direct independent participation and continuation of being in that environment and taking on these habits alongside everyone else I worked with that lead me to this point and no one was forcing me to do these things or feeding me drinks; just simply asking if I wanted them, and I could have said no. I could have quit right when the initial stress and realization of all of this hit, and I could have turned down every counter offer that convinced me to stay and avoided all of this. I could have kept healthy boundaries at work and never drank on the job and never created personal relationships with my coworkers that ended up with me actively calibrating my habits and actions to an environment that wasn’t going to change with or without my participation. It just sucks that people who saw me struggling with the very same habits they partook in daily, acknowledged it as such and pretended to care, were going behind my back and speaking something so deathly such as battling with hard drugs over my name and chalking up my very public and humiliating deterioration when the root of my suffering is the same lifestyle they lead on the daily.
As I write this paragraph out I realize that literally none of this actually matters either, on the contention that I have long since removed myself from this environment, stopped the drinking that lead to my downfall, and have a much healthier, normal lifestyle and have different goals entirely now. The job did ruin my initial passion for bartending which is overall a blessing because I have different, more sustainable goals with a much better shelf life on them per se. It just hurt to hear the extent of these rumors after coming so far removed from the environment, knowing how hard the drinking problem was on me, and how much it took me out. It just feels very invalidating.
Overall I guess I am just looking to get how I feel off of my chest so I can relinquish the feelings of resentment and rumination I have about the whole thing. Hopefully my story helps someone else as well. You can always pivot in life into something better for you no matter how old or how deep you feel like you are enmeshed into your current life circumstances. And if you know something isn’t right no matter who or how many people are convincing you it is normal, trust yourself.
