You have to want it

What would make you want to not drink?

photo CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 DEED, source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/lwr/17259476589

I knew that I needed to stop drinking, or at least that I probably should stop drinking, years before I decided to do it. There were plenty of signs. I occasionally googled alcoholism to find descriptions and checklists and questions to try and self-assess. I wrote about my drinking and whether it was a problem in my journal. I felt shame and disgust with myself when I woke up hungover. I was self-conscious about my drinking, and often worried someone would say something. Nobody ever did, except for my former girlfriend, whose concerns I tried to rationalize as being overblown. I would say things like, “I’m not an alcoholic, I just really like alcohol.” There were nights I drove drunk, knowing I was too drunk to drive, but doing it anyway. After having a kid, there were times I felt I couldn’t trust myself enough to be a parent. I wasn’t sure I would be able to be fully present. Thinking back on it now, I don’t think I knew what it meant to be “fully present”. 

When my daughter was not quite two and learning how to walk, we were staying in Europe over a summer for my work. One evening we were hanging out in an old cobblestone square where food trucks and little stalls would open up. My daughter wanted to ride up the outdoor escalator of a pavilion. Normally I would carry her, or put her in the stroller, but she wanted to stand on her own two feet. At least, I think she did. I was awkwardly holding the stroller in one hand, and my daughter was behind me. After a few seconds she lost her balance and fell backward. It looked like a bad fall. She slid down the escalator a few steps on her back, crying in a way that I had never heard her cry. My heart jumped, my stomach dropped, and I watched, unable to reach her with the stroller in my hand, while another dad who saw what happened ran up the escalator, picked up my daughter, and carried her to the top. He handed her to me with a look that said, “Dude, WTF is wrong with you?” We didn’t speak the same language, so I don’t know what he was thinking, but I knew I had messed up. I held my daughter as she cried, examining her head. There was no blood, no immediate sign of damage. She calmed down pretty quickly. My heart rate returned to normal, though my gut was still telling me that everything was not OK. Then I saw the sign posted at the escalator entrance - a little stick figure picture of a parent riding the escalator up with a stroller in front and a child behind them. There was a red circle with a line through it over the image. Another image, without the red line through it, showed the child standing in front of the parent while they rode up the escalator. I should have read the signs. 

That night, I wrote about the incident in a journal we keep for my daughter to read when she’s older. In the journal, I describe it the same way I am writing about it now (albeit with a bit more nervous energy and raw emotion as I was writing just an hour after it happened). In the journal I wrote that it was the scariest day of my life so far, and I think that’s true. But I left out an important detail in the journal, which I also left out of any subsequent retelling of the event. I had the stroller in one hand, and I was carrying a glass of wine in the other. I wasn’t drunk, or even tipsy, but I was holding a glass of wine that I had bought from one of the stalls in the square. I couldn’t carry my daughter up the escalator because I had a glass of wine. I couldn’t hold her hand, or reach for her when she fell, because I was holding a glass of wine. In the excruciating seconds after she fell and before I reached the top of the escalator, where I could put the wine glass down, I stared at her helplessly as she cried and the other dad came to her rescue. I was helpless because I was holding a glass of wine. It was a real glass, not a plastic cup. If I had dropped it to pick up my daughter, I would have added broken glass into the mix of problems. That was my rationalization, anyway. My instinct was not to drop everything and lunge for my daughter. My instinct was to wait until I got to the top of the escalator and could set down my glass of wine safely before attending to my daughter. 

I was terrified for two reasons that evening as I stood at the top of the escalator holding my daughter and trying to comfort her. I was of course terrified that she might be hurt, that the fall was worse than it seemed, that she might have brain damage or some other horrible outcome and that it was all my fault. But I was also terrified because this was the surest sign yet that I shouldn’t drink and that I needed to stop. I wasn’t drunk, I kept repeating in my head. It was only my second glass of the evening - the wine had nothing to do with it. But I knew deep down that the wine had everything to do with it. I knew that I needed the wine, I knew that the wine impacted my decision making, I knew that I had chosen to hold onto the wine glass instead of carrying my daughter properly up the escalator, and I knew that I didn’t put the wine glass down when I saw her fall. I knew that I prioritized the wine. I knew that the glass of wine was the most important thing. And I knew that the only choice that made any kind of sense was to stop drinking. And that thought terrified me. It terrified me so deeply that all I could do was ignore it, suppress it, avoid it in any way I could. I tried to erase the wine glass from the memory of that evening, and chalk it up to a new dad moment of learning the hard way how to ride an escalator with a toddler. It was easy enough to rationalize - accidents happen and I wasn’t a neglectful parent. It was just a moment where I should have thought through the situation a little more. 

That evening was one of several where I knew that my drinking was a problem. But, I didn’t want to stop. It seems obvious now, but the thing about drinking is that I couldn’t stop until I wanted to. Really wanted to. I had to want to stop more than I wanted to drink. I had to want life without alcohol more than I wanted to drink. I loved to drink. Drinking was the primary tool I used to navigate existence - even thought I wasn’t drunk all day, even though I wasn’t losing my job, or my family, or getting arrested, or suffering any of the other consequences that are the signs of “real” alcoholism - all of that was true but I just couldn’t imagine not drinking. The idea of wanting to stop drinking seemed like the most outlandish and unimaginable fantasy I could ever dream up. Maybe if my wife said she would leave if I didn’t stop? Maybe if I got so many DWIs that I went to jail? Maybe if the doctor told me I had to stop or something horrible would happen? Maybe those things could have made me want to stop drinking? Those things never happened to me, but I don’t think they would have done the trick. That evening when my daughter fell on the escalator - that should have done it. That should have made me want to stop. But it didn’t. 

Years went by after that incident before I stopped drinking. Years in which I drank moderately most days, and heavily some days. Years when I continually told myself that I was OK, that my drinking was not a problem, and that I didn’t have to stop. Years in which the signs were small enough and subtle enough that I could ignore them. Years in which my daughter didn’t get hurt, my job was not at risk, and I was never in trouble with the law. And then one day, I got tired of lying to myself. It wasn’t the morning after a bad night, it wasn't a moment of post drinking misery, it wasn’t because anything at all related to alcohol had happened. It was a couple months after I had been diagnosed with autism, of all things, that I started to be honest with myself. It was a change in my thinking that I can’t quite explain - suddenly instead of trying to convince myself that I wasn’t an alcoholic, I finally let myself acknowledge - just silently in my head - that I used alcohol as a tool to cope with life, and that it was a problem, and I needed to stop. As soon as I did that, I felt a sense of relief.  If I stopped, I would no longer have to rationalize my drinking, I wouldn’t have to anticipate it, I wouldn’t have to constantly resist having too much, I wouldn’t feel the shame and disappointment in myself of waking up hungover, I wouldn’t need to worry about taking an Uber instead of driving, I wouldn’t have to go through the pretense of wine snobbery, I wouldn’t have to do any of that. As soon as I told myself the truth, I started to feel like there was a light at the end of the tunnel. I still had to reach the light, but I knew it was there.

There was an open bottle of wine on the counter the day I told myself the truth. I had consumed half of it the previous night, measuring each ounce on a kitchen scale as usual. I took a picture of the half-empty bottle, wanting, for some reason, to document the last wine that I would drink. That evening I drank the rest of that bottle, savoring the sips, and coming to terms with the idea that this would be the last evening I partook in this ritual. Another year and half would go by before I realized that not drinking was just the first step in living happily while sober. That was a hard year and a half, white knuckling my way through each day. But one thing remained true the whole time - I wanted to not drink more than I wanted to drink.