The Invisible Line

With every addiction there is an invisible line that gets crossed…eventually.

~ Mystical Maya

At the start of my addiction, it wasn’t an addiction. It was pure enjoyment. I enjoyed drinking, how it lowered my inhibitions, helped me talk to girls, laugh and do funny things with my friends. All innocent fun. I also knew full well the dangers inherent with alcohol. Not so much the addictive side, things like, don’t drink and drive, don’t go to work drunk, don’t drink liquor before beer, don’t show up to church drunk. It was something that was done when all other commitments were met and a time was set aside to have fun.

In my story, that lasted for quite a long time, years even. I really started drinking and partying in college and responsibilities were pretty light back then. Two or three classes a day was the bulk of my responsibility load. Even back then there were small slips. Hooked up with someone I wished I hadn’t, said something stupid that I hoped I had forgotten by the morning, even spent a night or two in the drunk tank with a hundred other college kids.

Back then it was easy to brush those incidents aside and chalk it up to stupid college shit stupid college kids do. Never was there a thought that this was a problem or that it was something I needed to watch. In retrospect, I definitely drank back then for escape but I was too immature to even draw that conclusion. I drank simply because I wanted to get drunk. I loved the thought that almost anything could happen at a party where in sobriety things followed a very rigid set of social norms. I liked that we all could lower this formality society had placed on us and let our freak flags fly, so to speak.

Big Boy Land

This party lifestyle carried into my official entry into the working force. I learned quickly that as an adult people believed what you said. If I had drank too much during Sunday football and needed an extra day to recover, I’d call in sick. At this point it still didn’t dawn on me that this wasn’t normal behavior. Everyone who I hung around with did the same thing. We were all making money, had a place to live, a car, everything seemed otherwise normal.

This is where the invisible line was crossed.

Over the next 15 years drinking became a mix of enjoyment, escape, a coping mechanism, and a way to forget my problems. The balance scale was beginning to slant towards the negative. An invisible line was crossed between young gun partying, drinking like a gentleman, and the slow creep of addiction that would grow slowly over a very long time period.

The benders became longer, the hang overs became worse, and life began to trend down. I call this line invisible because it wasn’t straight to the bottom. It was a winding road mixed with positive experiences and negative ones. It was anything but straight forward.

I developed anxiety and depression that came and went but I never once attributed it to alcohol. I thought it could be adding to it but definitely not the cause. It was the stress of life, my relationships, the difficulty I was having as an adult handling adult things. Alcohol, in my head, was the thing to look forward to that removed all the difficulties I thought were insurmountable at the time.

The Line Became Visible

Out of nowhere I started to realize that this was problematic. For me, it was noticing that everyone else seemed to be getting married, buying homes, having kids and I was still renting a small one bedroom apartment spending every free moment I had at the bars. My friends group became younger and younger and while this wasn’t by design it’s what I gravitated towards because all of them had no problem with what any of us were doing.

My world was getting smaller and my health wasn’t getting any better. I pride myself on working out. Did it my whole life. It was one thing I could look at and say, you’re fine, you can still run x miles or lift x amount of weight. You are fine. You are fine. You are fine.

I started wishing I didn’t drink. I would look at young children playing in a park having the time of their lives and wishing I knew their secret. I associated fun with drinking and so anything else seemed boring or serious. I didn’t want either of those. My depression and anxiety were getting worse and small life problems were magnified. They were mountains I couldn’t climb over. I HAD TO drown them out with alcohol. This is where I did see that line and it was way the hell back in the distance. I have a problem, but I’ll mask it with everything I have because I can’t picture my life now without alcohol. The stigma of an alcoholic was very real in my mind. The acceptance of alcohol in American society was so apparent I felt I would be effectively turning in my social card for good.

The Paradox of Addiction

I could look in the mirror and see that I was not doing great. My health was declining rapidly, my drunken mishaps were causing real havoc, and my world was getting smaller. I knew alcohol was playing a primary role in my suffering but it was the last thing in the world I was going to address. How would I do anything without alcohol. It’s in every facet of my life. How could I give up something that was so much apart of me. This is like a cancer patient denying care because it’s a part of them. Doesn’t make sense logically but that’s what this disease does. It takes a hold of you and while this voice inside knows it’s time, the other voice overrides, reminds, taps your shoulder, wakes you up at night, whispering, “You need a drink, it’s ok, just have one”.

It took a massive amount of alcohol and one last trip to the ER to get me to finally raise my hand and accept a different way. It was purely out of desperation to save my life. My life was the only thing I didn’t want to lose and it was only after taking it to the brink that it won out, even for a brief moment, against alcohol.

That small window was enough to get the goodness of the AA program into my brain and the resounding support of a community I was previously unaware existed. Surrounding myself around others who had been through the same war was incredibly empowering.

Conclusion

Knowing what I know now, there’s still nothing I would change. It’s an invisible line for a reason. I had no idea I would become an alcoholic when I started. I drank for 15 years before the thought even occurred to me. How the hell do you anticipate something slow growing like that.

My message isn’t about how to spot that invisible line, it’s just to know that it exists. There is so much more to life than drugs and alcohol and when we as human beings are taught to understand who we really are it is crazy powerful.

Stop convincing yourself a behavior is good because you have a desire to continue it. That’s what addiction can do, no matter how much you swear in the morning you won’t drink, by mid afternoon you’ve justified it to yourself already. Regularly check-in and love yourself. I heard a quote from Jordan B Peterson that has really stuck with me.

“If you want to know something about yourself, sit on your bed one night and say, what’s one thing I am doing wrong? That I know I’m doing wrong. That I could fix. That I would fix. You meditate on that and you’ll get an answer. And it won’t be one you want. But it will be the necessary one.”

Jordan B Peterson