It’s difficult to write about being a drunkard for the majority of your life. To be honest I’ve delayed this blog because it is extremely hard to take a look backwards and see what decisions I made in error. The one decision to keep drinking instead of addressing issues head on.
This tale will eventually lead up to the day that I stopped getting drunk. Being able to just stop drinking is one of my crowning moments. Ruling out the birth and love of my two children, putting down the bottle is my biggest achievement in life. Isn’t that a sorry thing to say? As I type this I find myself starting to sink down just because of how bad that sounds.
Kyd, is that the best you can do? Stop something you shouldn’t have started in the first place? It just eats at me in a bad way.
But yeah, that’s my crowning moment. You can put it on my tombstone, or urn, “He managed to quit. RIP”
Do I completely abstain now? No, to be truthful. I’m not a card carrying member of AA with a jar full of tokens signifying milestones of years without alcohol. I went from 10 drinks a night to 10 drinks a year. I can’t claim to be clean and sober, but I can claim I don’t need alcohol in my life. It no longer rules me or destroys what I have worked hard to obtain.
I’ve written about the first drink I ever had, at the ripe old age of 14. This blog focuses on the time I decided enough was enough. In order to understand my “quitting” you need a bit of information on my habit, my alcohol use.
Little did I know that the first time getting drunk, at my brother’s college keg party, was going to be repeated every other night for the next 37 years. Except for a court ordered drying out period in my 30’s . Read on loyal fans to see how low alcohol can drive a person. Drive you straight off the cliff.
How did I start? You can read the story from my previous post Just one more….the beginning.
My older brother was supposed to look out for me that weekend, babysit. A 20 year old with big plans for the weekend, all with his 14 year old brother in tow. I learned a lot about life from my brothers, but they weren’t always good lessons to learn.
It seemed like every time my two brothers were to look after me something bad would happen. A severe dog bite, having my leg flayed in bicycle spokes, nearly drowning when I fell off a ski boat and sank to the bottom of the lake. Or being scalped chasing his Honda motorbike down a hill on my hand-me-down Schwinn 3 speed bike. I still cringe remembering the doctor peeling my hair back and picking out gravel and dirt out of my head.
Their method of babysitting was to take me along on whatever adventure (read: party) they had already planned.
“Seriously,” they’d say to their girlfriend du jour. “What can happen?”
Besides winding up in numerous emergency rooms, stitches and rabies vaccines? Not much.
Taking that first drink of beer, me being the jester for the young college girls who laughed at the cute little brother filling their glasses. Hours and hours, drinking enough to pass out in some co-eds apartment. Yeah, it was cute alright.
Let’s take a step back though and learn a bit about being an alcoholic. I thought I was an expert with all my years of experience, but it turns out not so. The more I read the more I understand the “why”, which is still no excuse for my behavior. Or is it?
It’s important to flip back to our trusty DSM-5-TR to look up a definition of alcoholism and what makes an alcoholic tick. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5-TR), the “bible” of psychiatric disorders and prescribed treatment.
Below is the link for what used to be called alcoholism but is now labelled in the DSM as Alcohol Use Disorder.
https://www.psychiatry.org/patients-families/alcohol-use-disorder
I never knew the official name for it, I always thought it was just alcoholism. Boy was I wrong. See, even an old drunk can learn something new. It used to be said you were an alcoholic, just a plain drunk, now I can claim another disorder to add to my list! Lucky me. One more disorder and I get free parking.
Drinking was the answer to several of my problems, or so I thought. My introversion, dealing with being raped a 7, and my misguided desire to hide from being trans. I used alcohol to run from my pain as well as a recurring traumatic nightmare which you can read more about here. It was liquid courage, especially in times of argument or conflict. My aide to gloss over my fears for the time.
Turns out alcohol was an answer, albeit the wrong one, to dealing with the traumatic experience. PTSD. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Or in my case CPTSD, the C standing for complex.
The complexities in my situation included my health being to “blame” for the incident. I grew up feeling it was the cause behind the rape. Guilt. If it hadn’t been for my body this never would have happened. Then the feeling of abandonment as my parents dropped me off at the hospital and left. Disassociation as my mind left the scene entirely as a form of survival. Complete loss of any memories for 6 months. Nightmares so bad that 61 years later I still fight going to sleep every night.
I would classify myself as a functioning alcoholic. “Self-medicating” was the polite way my shrinks have described it. Maybe that is a good way to put it. Drowning out bad memories, trite but valid. Again over-used but overly true.
I found out early that if I drank enough and passed out I could sleep through The Nightmare without knowing it. Unless of course I woke up to a wet bed, then I knew what must have happened. One method of coping with another symptom of PTSD. One of my best features, going from one bad coping mechanism to another.
The drinking didn’t really kick in until I reached 18. Old enough to buy beer, but not alcohol. You had to be 21 to buy hard liquor. Kansas was a nearly dry state, meaning the rules and restrictions around where and when you could get a drink was more stringent than most. Some counties were completely dry, meaning no sales of any alcoholic beverage were allowed.
Except in my case, where I had been going into the same liquor store and beer joint with my brother since I was 14. I guess being tall, Mel the owner just grew to accept me as older than I was . By the time I was 17, I was going into his store every weekend, buying beer and hard stuff for the rest of the high school senior class. With someone’s parents away for the weekend, there was always a party to go to and a house to trash.
Once I moved out of the house and had to fend for myself, buying beer came right after paying rent in my list of budget items. It was pretty common to knock off a six pack at night, maybe a few shots afterwards just in case that wasn’t enough. I wrote it off as the age, the group I hung out with (musicians in the band), and the fact that nearly everyone I knew was doing the same thing.
Even when I got married and moved to another little city this lifestyle continued, mostly because all of our friends were laid back beer drinkers like us. Although my wife wasn’t much of a drinker, it didn’t deter my overuse of the drug.
We were all young and full of ourselves, and grabbed life to the fullest. It was pretty common for a group of the same folks to be together at one house or another. Selling alcohol wasn’t allowed on Sundays in Kansas, unless you were a member of a private supper club or the American Legion. So a couple of us would always jump in someone’s pickup and head across country roads to the liquor store in Oklahoma. It was 500 yards outside the Kansas border, a jumble of pickups with Kansas tags in the parking lot.
You had to take the back roads because the Kansas Highway Patrol sat just inside the Kansas border. If you were dumb enough to drive right past them leaving the state line and 5 minutes go back the other way you’d get pulled over for transporting alcohol across the border.
As if I needed yet another reason to drink, I always kept my being transsexual from everyone as I hadn’t fully accepted the fact. Drinking helped mask it, or so I thought. I came out to my wife as best I could after a year of marriage. You need to remember 50 years ago the whole concept of differing genders, besides your “god” given one, was really in its infancy. Especially when you lived in a place like Kansas.
My drinking escalated when I took the wrong pathway in life, the proverbial fork in the road. I had 2 options when I finally got my first Bachelor of Science degree. I could stay with my heart’s desire and manage the largest greenhouse complex in the state, or go with my brother’s suggestion of entering his field of agricultural chemicals. At the best intended guidance of my brother and parents, I took the left branch when I should have stayed to the right.
This was the oldest brother, who had gone to work with Shell Chemical as a Technical Sales Rep. The ag chem business was growing as more and more compounds and chemicals were discovered. Many of the large pharmaceutical companies were entering the market, along with petrochemical firms.
I said what the hell, I can at least interview. So I jumped in an airplane for the first time in my life and went off to meet with managers or HR folks who were looking for someone with an ag or agronomy background to sell a variety of products to the farmers of America.
Three interviews, three job offers. So what drove my decision? Money, frigging money. I sold out my own happiness for a bigger paycheck.
You see, the greenhouse job started off at $18,000. Doesn’t sound like much nowadays, but it was a $6000 a year increase over what I was earning as a head groundskeeper at the local college. The three big chemical and pharma companies made offers around $28,000 a year. Man that was a lot of money for a young kid to pull down. Plus benefits, a company vehicle, and a big fat expense account.
So I sold out.
The job I finally settled on required moving to Minnesota. Packing up and leaving a lot of friends. Again. Since my wife was teaching, the move would be on my own for the first 5 or 6 months. I was allowed trips back home every couple of weeks and she came up househunting once or twice. But really I was in a strange town and on my own again.
So a young man, introverted and suffering from CPTSD and gender dysphoria, takes a job that forces him to be someone he isn’t. In an industry that was about as right wing and redneck as they come. I gave up my ideal job and lifestyle, working with plants instead of people. The greenhouse job would have taken me into an industry that was more relaxed and accepting of folks who walk a different path.
So here I was, a supposed reformed hippie playing businessman, living in a strange town and calling on strangers.
The whiskey poured down, like a deluge.
I had gone the wrong way.
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