Twelve: Understanding alcohol

Does my autism diagnosis help explain my relationship with drinking?

image © the author

I didn’t drink a single sip of alcohol until my 21st birthday. In the US, that is the first day one is allowed to drink legally, and although the law is widely ignored by high school kids across the country, I have always felt inextricably bound by rules and was adamant about not drinking before then. On the day I turned 21 I was in New York City for the summer doing an internship. I went to the liquor store on the corner from my apartment on East 86th Street. It was dingier than I expected. There was no friendly person to explain or recommend anything. It was like a convenience store but with alcohol instead of junk food. I looked around at all the bottles and quickly realized I had no idea what to buy. I decided to get a bottle of red wine, probably because I had some vague idea that red wine was what sophisticated New Yorkers drank. Having no clue how to choose a bottle, I focused mostly on price as the determining factor. The cashier looked at me skeptically. He asked for my ID. I showed him my license from back home and he scrutinized it carefully. He asked if I had a New York ID. I said no. He scrutinized my face, he scrutinized the ID, back and forth, until finally he asked for my money. 

Back in the apartment, alone in the tiny alcove that served as a kitchen, I figured out how to open the bottle with one of the several cheap corkscrews in the kitchen drawer, which was populated by random stuff accumulated over the years of many transient people who cycled through this place, some staying a month, some a year, until they could find a nicer place that was less crowded. I can’t remember if there was a wine glass or if I just used a water glass. It tasted disgusting, but I pretended it was good. I drank a few sips, didn’t feel much of anything, and couldn’t muster the desire to drink more of something that seemed so unpleasant. Later in the week I tried again, and still finding it unpalatable, decided to mix it with some coca cola. The thought of mixing red wine with coca cola, looking back on it, seems like a pretty weird thing to do. But at the moment it made perfect sense. I knew from watching movies that people commonly had drinks that consisted of alcohol and some kind of soda, and wine was alcohol, so I thought it was just another choice. If someone could order a “rum and coke”, couldn’t they just as easily order a “wine and coke”? This is how I navigated the world; always looking for the clues to help me understand what “normal” behavior was, to help me figure out what to do, how to behave, what to say. Mixing the wine with the coke reminded me of how my mom would try to make medicine more palatable when I was a kid by mixing it with something sweet. This is so gross, I thought. Why would anybody drink this stuff? 

Back on my New England college campus that fall, where I had become alienated from the general population and spent most of my time alone, usually in the library, or with one particular young woman, who I had developed a close and confusing attachment to because she was the only person I had met who seemed to tolerate me, I moved into a new dorm, hoping for another new beginning, imagining that my senior year might be the year that I make friends. It turns out that I had finally found a place to live where the people I met didn’t reject me out of hand - in the French dorm, populated mostly by foreign students, and a few Americans, who, like me, didn’t really fit in with their domestic classmates. These foreign students, from Romania, Estonia, Germany, France, and other countries that, I imagined, must be much nicer places to live than America, invited me in, seemed curious about who I was, and offered me vodka. They took me to house parties where the guests, if you could call them something so formal, were all of the creative looking artsy people that I had seen around campus but never been in proximity to. The people I didn’t know but who looked familiar because they would appear in campus theater productions, or because they, too, spend inordinate amounts of time alone in the library, where I would notice them but not say hello. Vodka and gin were available from giant plastic jugs that were procured from the discount beverage store on the highway heading out of town. I drank from large plastic cups, filled with pungent gin and the sweet dryness of tonic water, with several lime wedges squeezed over and dropped in.

Gin with tonic, or vodka with cranberry juice, tasted much better than red wine and coke. It didn't take me long to learn how to get drunk. Alcohol eased the constant challenge and anxiety of being around other people, of not knowing what to say that people would find amusing but not creepy or rude, of feeling like an interloper, tip toeing around with my words, always worried that I would say something stupid, or uncool. Alcohol enabled me to relax, to smile, to feel like someone whom other people didn’t mind being around. It never made me truly “fit in”, but it did make me feel like I was really there, really participating with the group, rather than just watching from the periphery. I knew that I was a “late bloomer” when it came to drinking (and most other things), and my sense, once I discovered the power of alcohol, was that this must be the thing everyone else had been making use of the whole time. “This is why I’ve never had fun at parties and never felt like I fit in,” I thought, “Because I didn’t know about alcohol!”

I don’t remember many specifics from that time. I remember vague scenes of parties, the small dimly lit rooms that contained them, the cold nights walking to and from. I remember a few specific nights, one where there was no alcohol and I felt I was “tagging along” with my new group of friends, and they didn’t feel like humoring me. Another where I got incredibly drunk, asked a woman to dance (she said no), and then walked home with a friend who listened patiently while I sputtered out the emotional confusion of a kid going through puberty and discovering the world of human interaction (at age 22). I also remember the vague feeling that would creep into my consciousness when I walked into one of these house parties, that I didn’t really want to be there, and that the other people didn’t want me to be there, either. That feeling would disappear after a few sips of a strong plastic-cup cocktail.

By October of that year, less than two months after meeting this group, I wrote in my journal: “Things happen but I don’t ever know what. Looking in the mirror I can see all the filth and ugly that goes so well with the shitty glass. Been drinking vodka on my own from lack of anyone to drink it with.” So much had happened in the first two months of my senior year in college. I had made a new group of friends, started drinking heavily, and was already realizing that the group I was hanging out with had much more going on than I knew. I was aware that I didn’t really understand the dynamics of this group (which is my lifelong struggle that I now understand is because I’m autistic), but I knew that life seemed easier with alcohol. And, apparently, I had also started drinking alone (I don’t remember doing that, and perhaps I was being dramatic in my journal, but I tend to trust the written record more than my memory).

In January I wrote, “L told me that I did not understand many things. Maybe he’s right, but who’s fault is that? What does that mean? Who is angry and what about? Where does anger come from? I can only be myself - I don’t know who I am around most [people]. I need someone around whom I can be myself.” I had now been hanging out with my new drinking friends for a whole semester. And one of them, L, the one I was closest to, was explaining to me that I had no clue what was really happening between the others, that I wasn’t privy to the drama playing out between them. I knew it was true before he said it. As always, my interactions with others were proving illusory. Although I was spending a lot of time with these people and felt like I was part of their group, on some level I was not really one of them, but a guest in their space. I’m also struck by my acknowledgement that I didn’t know myself any better than I knew the others, but that I would always return to being myself after pretending to be someone else. This knowledge - that I wasn’t fully aware of what happened between the others, that I wasn’t truly a member of the group - this knowledge could be made less painful and acute by drinking. At least, the alcohol could help me pretend for an evening that there were no caveats or asterisks to my friendships with these people. 

A couple days later, I wrote, “4:00 AM - half drunk. Why am I awake? Was it fun? Am I killing myself - literally or symbolically? God knows, but I need help. I don’t have to drink. Why can’t I believe it? What is the attraction? Why? Have I lost control? It’s past 4:00 AM, have I lost control?”

In reading these journal entries more than twenty years after I wrote them, I can feel myself struggling to understand my behavior. I don’t know how consciously I realized that I was turning to alcohol to help me cope with the pain and confusion of trying to be with others. I think I preferred the person I was before I started drinking - spending hours alone, reading and writing in the evenings, exploring my imagination and thoughts. But I constantly felt (or was made to feel?) that the way I was behaving, when left to my own devices, was wrong, inappropriate, weird, or unhealthy. Ironically, binge drinking and staying up until 4:00 AM with other people was considered more “healthy” than going to bed at 9:00 and waking up at 5:00 to go for a walk and watch the sunrise. 

I don’t recall craving alcohol for the sake of it, but I felt that if I drank people seemed to like me more. The drunk version of me was more tolerable than the sober version. I don’t know if that was really true - it’s just what I thought. Perhaps in reality the drunk version of me was repulsive and annoying. Or perhaps the drunk version of me was more attractive to me. In anycase, my goal when drinking became to drink a lot. I remember a sort of pride in taking a shot, or in refilling my drink quickly, or in taking a drink prepared by one of the Russian students whose pours were especially generous. If other people noticed, or commented, on my excessive consumption, I took that as a compliment, or a sign that I must be “cool” in some way. It wasn’t that I liked the taste or the feeling of alcohol, but I thought it made me somehow better in the eyes of others.

Reflecting on my life over the 25 years since I turned 21, there have been periods where I was completely alone and isolated. And there have been periods where I was intensely social, spending large amounts of my free time and my working days surrounded by others, interacting, and participating in the social arena. I would tend to go from one extreme to the other, never seeing anyone, or being around people all the time. The times that I was around others were times of heavy drinking. Drinking to get drunk, to be drunk, to be the person I was when drunk. The times when I was alone, looking back on it, were quite pleasant. The times of being with others were marked by powerful headaches, close calls from reckless behavior, obnoxious comments, and a constant feeling that I had to play the role that was more fun to be around than the person I really was. The times that I was alone, an external observer might label as “periods of depression and loneliness”, while the times I was with others I appeared to be “socializing in appropriate ways”.

As I re-examine this pattern of my life with the new knowledge that I am, and have always been, autistic, it helps me understand why I felt so “different” from others. It also helps explain why I would turn to getting drunk as a tool to help me try to do the things that seemed to be what “normal” people did. Without drinking, participating in the world of typical people felt difficult and just unpleasant. It still felt that way when drinking, but the drinking added a dimension that I could work with. 

This pattern continued for most of my life. Only in recent years, since meeting my wife and having a child, have I found a balance that feels good. I still drink, and I still wonder if I drink too much, or if my drinking is an addiction that I can’t control, but I no longer get drunk. Perhaps more significantly, I no longer try to participate in situations that make me inclined to drink excessively. The pandemic has made this much easier - I don’t have to decline invitations because there have not been any invitations to decline. I do wonder how I will cope as people return to gathering. Will I be more comfortable not participating in the social arena because I have a new awareness of my needs? Or will I feel pressured to go, and refill my glass frequently to cope? Or will I find another way to manage? Perhaps by being open about my needs, setting time limits, or finding ways to take breaks from the social interaction? (at my daughter’s 5th birthday party, I disappeared for 30 minutes to sit quietly in my office while my wife remained with the guests). 

I haven’t figured it out yet, but writing through these thoughts helps me navigate the choices that lie ahead.