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What Happened to Me After Giving Up Booze for a Year
I’ve had a wild, whirlwind romance with alcohol since I was about 15 years old. At first, my drinking didn’t seem any different than that of my peers; when you’re in high school, your limited access to the stuff means that when you do have occasion to get together with friends in a gravel pit, or in the woods behind someone’s grandfather’s shed, you binge drink like a monster. College isn’t much different, except suddenly, you can all pile into someone’s car and drive to the liquor store yourself. And even in my early 20s, the after-work all-night social drinking I was doing seemed in line with what my friends and colleagues were doing.
Somewhere along the line, however, my drinking began to change. Less and less of it was happening outside of the home. More often than not, I would wait until my wife and two children would go to bed, and I would sit up, alone, late into the early morning, pouring glass after glass of bourbon into a rocks, and then a pint glass, until I blacked out (which at the time, I thought was “sleeping”), only to wake up the next day, feel terrible, and do it all again.
I spent about 15 years on this cycle. Work, drink, sleep, hangover, repeat. When friends would visit, I would always be the last person to go to bed. I was the person that was bringing twice as much alcohol to a dinner party as everyone…