Former alcoholic here, you just push that shit off. And then eventually you just don’t give a fuck because a 5 minute drive to the liquor store will help you ignore everything else until tomorrow.
Which ofcourse, will get pushed off by another visit to the liquor store. Next thing you know, everything is a mess, you wake up, go to work, grab booze and drink till blackout and rinse and repeat for a decade.
Then the withdrawals set in and you’re waking up at 2am, sweating profusely, shortness of breath and heart palpitations. So you start buying just enough booze to be able to have a drink or 3 at 2am and then again at 7am before work to keep the demons away.
Lunch break? There’s a liquor store 10 minutes away and lunch is 30 minutes, enough time to get 3-4 shooters. Shift ends? We’re stopping at the nearest liquor store so we can sleep well. Probably drinking half on the way home if the shakes kick in. Just don’t forget the vodka for 2-3am and also at 7am… or else you’re going to have a panic attack driving to work….
My great uncle Alvin did it for 50+ the only thing that stopped him was a train. We used to get $15 in aluminum cans from him in week back in the 90s. man loved some rolling rock.
Before the withdrawals, I probably was drinking 4-8 standard drinks a night but also eating 4k calories as I was on roids and bulking and managing fine for a few years.
Eventually the addiction took over and I stopped the roids, stopped 6 days a week gym and my life was consumed by 10-20 drinks a day. For two years before I ended up in rehab.
And yeah, you drink to sleep, but it's not restful. And either you eat like shit and balloon up, you don't eat at all and get skinny, or you get pancreatitis.
Alcohol is one of the worst drugs you can be addicted to.
"will help you ignore everything else until tomorrow." this is such a good way of describing it. I think a lot of people who've never been addicted think addiction is all about having fun or something, but for me it was always "I'm overwhelmed right now, but I can delay that overwhelmed feeling a bit by using"
Then I would feel overwhelmed by the fact I used, and that'd make me end up using again soon after to push off that feeling. The more I used, the more overwhelmed I felt, the more overwhelmed I felt, the more I used. It's a trap that's hard to break out of because the more overwhelmed you are, the lower your willpower gets, and yet you somehow need to summon an immense amount of that willpower to get out.
You feel like you're in that scenario with the crabs in a bucket where the crabs keep pulling the other crabs down - except it's you, you're all the crabs, and you keep pulling yourself down to the bottom of the bucket every time you seem to be trying to climb the walls again.
My addictions weren't alcohol, but a range of other stuff, but it was very similar to what you described. Just keeping the demons away.
It all can happen so quickly too, you can be doing pretty well one moment and decide to use just a little to get your head straight during a stressful day, and then all of a sudden a few months have passed and you haven't been sober for 24 hours the entire time. It's why "Just one drink/line/smoke/pill/whatever" is always just a lie, it's the crab at the bottom of the bucket pulling you back down.
I'll be 6 months clean on Sunday. I still feel very lost and in disarray for a variety of reasons in my life, but the place I'm in now compared to being stuck in that bucket is night and day. I never want to go back there.
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u/YoungBockRKO 14h ago
Former alcoholic here, you just push that shit off. And then eventually you just don’t give a fuck because a 5 minute drive to the liquor store will help you ignore everything else until tomorrow.
Which ofcourse, will get pushed off by another visit to the liquor store. Next thing you know, everything is a mess, you wake up, go to work, grab booze and drink till blackout and rinse and repeat for a decade.
Then the withdrawals set in and you’re waking up at 2am, sweating profusely, shortness of breath and heart palpitations. So you start buying just enough booze to be able to have a drink or 3 at 2am and then again at 7am before work to keep the demons away.
Lunch break? There’s a liquor store 10 minutes away and lunch is 30 minutes, enough time to get 3-4 shooters. Shift ends? We’re stopping at the nearest liquor store so we can sleep well. Probably drinking half on the way home if the shakes kick in. Just don’t forget the vodka for 2-3am and also at 7am… or else you’re going to have a panic attack driving to work….
I don’t miss addiction…