Discovering my relationship with alcohol
When I volunteered to write about my relationship with alcohol, I intended to make the case that I don’t need a reason not to drink. After all, I had a standard relationship with alcohol by contemporary cultural standards. My family’s drinking behaviours always seemed normal and I followed the herd at university and in my early professional life.
I stopped drinking two-and-a-half years ago almost on a whim. But while I didn’t stop for any big reason at the time, I’ve learnt a lot about myself in the ensuing years. This is an account of my “normal” and the culture I’ve only started to question with time.
Normal drinking was defined at home
I had a fortunate childhood; my family was financially stable and caring. As for many people from similar backgrounds, alcohol was a normalised daily feature in our lives. It wasn’t consumed at a level that was ever portrayed as problematic in pop culture. My parents would drink to wind down in front of TV news broadcasts at the end of every day, a habit considered so standard that I quickly internalised this as a good way to use alcohol.
Because of the comfortable home environment that my parents provided and the trips they could take my brother and I on, it was easy for us to see the argument that you should work hard every day and use this wonderful tool to wind down later. It never stopped them getting to the office at 6 AM, it was genuinely helpful for building business and personal connections, and, more than anything, it did seem to give them joy.
I took to alcohol in this apparently positive way as soon as I was old enough. I’d shout friends a drink, with no expectation of the favour being returned, as a mechanism for social bonding. I’d exclaim, exasperated, that it’d been a long week and I couldn’t wait for a beer. For dinner parties I’d find nice wines that I could hardly afford so that I could prompt shared interest and debate. All this while I was still finishing high school.
But guidelines change as we learn more: in only a few short years, what I considered “normal” would be reclassified as high-risk. In fact, several standards would define it as binge drinking, a far-cry from the images we were all taught to associate with this term.
University drinking was intense
This environment says a lot about power structures and how they relate to our drinking culture. The painful truth is that I was trained to see these experiences, which I can hardly believe in hindsight, as a badge of honour and a signifier of belonging in a community.
I was a typically rebellious young adult, so I chose to study away from home at the University of Otago in Dunedin. It’s the closest we get in New Zealand to a classic US-style campus culture and parents joke that they’re sending their kids there to learn how to drink. Otago’s residential colleges resemble the frat houses most of us had only seen in films. And I went to one of the most notorious: Knox College*. Never mind that it was operated by the church.
Signs of an intense drinking culture were there from the outset, but I should call myself out here and acknowledge that this felt exciting at the time. Before the term started, the second-year residents did a tour of the country to host the incoming ‘freshers’ at a barbecue, typically at a family home. The host parents would even invite their own mates around to look on fondly and chuckle as we were made to do beer funnels and keg stands.
This only intensified as we were confronted by first-week initiations. I hazily remember a slew of extreme drinking events that were either endorsed or knowingly ignored by the college administration. One particular experience is very intense, but telling. There is a video of me, unconscious from drinking at an initiation event, having the crap hit out of me by one of the older kids who had organised the event. It’s hard to watch. Astonishingly, this felt completely normal in that particular environment, and I’m sure that many others will have had similar experiences. It took me until now, seven years later, to realise that what I experienced is called assault.
This environment says a lot about power structures and how they relate to our drinking culture. The painful truth is that I was trained to see these experiences, which I can hardly believe in hindsight, as a badge of honour and a signifier of belonging in a community.
The new normal
It is remarkably difficult to notice these behaviours, let alone change them, when you have barely a minute to yourself each day.
The extreme nature of my first-year college experience almost certainly cemented my concept of how to drink well. Whilst most people stayed for a second year, I chose to escape after the summer break gave me enough distance to realise how messed up everything was. Instead, I recreated the environment I had grown up in. I worked near-full time whilst studying and had a couple of drinks most nights to wind down. I further normalised it by buying local craft beer, justifying that I was supporting the local economy, experimenting with taste, and joining a movement for quality over quantity. I hardly even noticed that my flatmates seldom joined in.
I experienced a big pitfall of this “moderate drinking as a balancing mechanism” two years later when I took on an intense, creative full-time management role whilst finishing my degree. To manage the stress, my nightly alcohol consumption almost instantly jumped up a few notches — and stayed there. It is remarkably difficult to notice these behaviours, let along change them, when you have barely a minute to yourself each day.
What I did notice was that I used alcohol to help with the challenges of leadership — my usually quiet temperament could be put aside for an evening and I’d lead from the front, celebrating life with a team as young as I was.
An unexpected change
I chose to remove alcohol from my life at a symbolic time. Having read my experience up to now, it may come as a surprise that I will always remember my last drink with fondness and without any desire for another: a glass of port with a cigar, sitting on the balcony of the now-sold family home on the waterfront in Wellington. My partner, Ruby, and I were moving to Sydney the next morning: jobless, with only a week booked in an Airbnb and money for three months’ living if we tightened our belts.
Going sober was an experiment to save money until we both had jobs. What complicated things was how quickly we started to love the lifestyle, free from the burden of habits and social environments back in New Zealand where alcohol felt like an expectation. It really is true that you reclaim your weekends when you don’t have the fuzzy head that (moderate) drinking can leave you with. We moved to a new country to make the most of our lives, and it felt like the possibilities and experiences doubled as soon as alcohol was removed from the equation.
Soon, normal began to change around us. Friends ask about our choice with an audible hint of jealousy, a shift demonstrated by the 20% of our generation who choose to live without alcohol. Back at home, my mum had to stop drinking temporarily for health reasons but similarly realised that she loved life without it, and my dad now only has a drink on the weekend. They inspire the hell out of me by showing that it’s possible to improve our drinking culture: if you’d told me a few years ago that we’d all change our relationships with alcohol by so much, I would have laughed at you.
I’m still learning, three years later
I like to say that I don’t have any particular reason for not drinking: that I just don’t like it. But the more I reflect on it, I don’t think that statement is entirely true. We all drink for one reason or another, and in a different context I’d likely still be using alcohol to help with a bunch of challenges.
When I stopped drinking, I learnt that I had some things to address. I wasn’t consciously using alcohol to blanket them, but it was certainly making it hard to see. Most importantly, I never realized that the anxiety I always experienced was a louder, more consistent challenge for me than for others. Honestly, it’s been empowering to learn that anxiety is a well-researched mental health issue that you can take steps to work with.
I’ve also realised that if you look close enough, there are little indicators that shine a light into how we really feel about alcohol. For example, I have always been mad keen on music — going to as many dad-rock gigs as possible as a youngster. And I always declined alcohol so that I could make the most of the experience. Set against the backdrop of a culture that tells us it’s the drinking that helps us enjoy an experience, I think this automatic reasoning says a hell of a lot. If only I had an opportunity to pause and reflect on it.
Finally, as a non-drinker, I am constantly confronted by the stigma associated with this choice. While I have made a conscious effort to surround myself by supportive, empathetic people, not everyone can count on this. Many people will stop drinking because alcohol became something that they needed to address, and stigmatising it only makes a difficult change harder. This insight really drives me in my work at Hello Sunday Morning: we need to do everything we can do as a culture to remove the stigma around alcohol and bring conversations out into the open. Parts of my story are probably very common, and we need to give people a space to hear more of them.
* The events described happened seven years ago; I’ve been told by people whom I trust that the College is very different now.
