About two years into my drinking career, I realized something unsettling. I could not remember a single time I had poured myself two glasses of wine at home, neatly put the bottle away, and gone to bed. I couldn’t remember having two cocktails at happy hour on a Friday evening and simply heading home afterward.
Because for me, happy hour was never just happy hour. It usually turned into drinks at dinner, then more drinks at the club, and eventually drinking until whatever ungodly hour we went back home. Saturday mornings often began the same way, trying to recollect what I said or did and reaching for whatever alcohol was left in the house or making a trip to the liquor store to continue the cycle.
Drinking was never a once-a-week, one-hour event for me. But it seemed to be for everyone else. My friends would stop early in the night. They could leave drinks unfinished. They drank less in an entire evening than I did in a few hours. Some genuinely seemed satisfied after just one or two drinks.
I could not understand it.
Why did alcohol feel so different for me? For a long time, I thought maybe it had something to do with how I was introduced to drinking. I convinced myself that because I had not learned healthy drinking habits from the adults around me, maybe that explained why I drank the way I did.
Abnormally.
It troubled me deeply, how I drank.
Society tends to divide drinkers into two neat categories: the “normal drinkers” and the “alcoholics.” There are people who can “handle their liquor,” and then there are those who seemingly cannot.
Some people can have two beers and call it a night for their entire lives. Others experience what feels like an insatiable thirst once they start drinking.
I started wondering which group I belonged to. The more I compared myself to other people, the more aware I became of how little control I seemed to have once I started drinking. It wasn’t necessarily that I drank every day in the beginning – I did not do that for several years. It was that when I did drink, stopping felt almost impossible.
One drink rarely stayed one drink.
And what troubled me most was not even the drinking itself, but the question underneath it all.
Why couldn’t I just drink normally?
At the time, I thought the answer was simple. I believed there was just something fundamentally wrong with me.
Now, I think the conversation is far more complicated than that.