How my cancer picked a fight with my alcoholism, but ultimately paid the tab
Guest post by Bree Stilwell
I was once a professional alcoholic. Meaning, I was paid to drink alcohol.
I spent my 30s working in the upper echelon of California winemaking, gulping the rarified air that is the cult/luxury wine industry. It was a natural career progression, having slowly developed my skill, talent, and capacity for drinking over the decade prior.
I never considered myself an alcoholic. My stage IV cancer diagnosis in 2020 showed me the truth.
The backstory
Though I had taken plenty of nips as a kid around the Italians in my family and had choked down tens of ounces at a time of the malt liquor 40s circulating at every high school rager, I was 16 when I got undeniably drunk for the first time — later than most of my friends, earlier than it seems most teenagers do these days.
A boy handed me a tumbler of Captain Morgan’s at a party, an obligatory float of ice and coke at the rim. It tasted like Christmas cookies and I loved it. Another boy handed me a bottled Alizé mimosa, which tasted even better. I had two.
I was always the driver and was that night — until one girlfriend poured me into my own passenger’s seat and another drove as I coached her on stick-shifting. I couldn’t decide which was worse as I slipped deeper into the spins: eyes closed, eyes open, or some combination of the two.
I was nastily sick that night, “sleeping” on my girlfriend’s roll-out couch in the living room of her parents’ pristine Victorian, and even sicker the next morning when stumbling into my own bed.
I couldn’t wait to do it again, though I couldn’t yet tell you why.
Over the following years, into my teens and then 20s, drinking became a secret skill to cultivate and a talent to share — proudly, but also quietly. I took my drinking seriously, as if for ultimate inclusion on my life’s resume.
I took great satisfaction not only in the drinking itself, but maybe even more so in my seemingly natural ability to keep my shit together. In that way, alcohol was The Great Moderator.
It stimulated a confidence that eluded me until that first true flooding of drink and brought a sense of permission — permission to relax, to open the pressure valve of perfectionism, to lose track of myself from the inside out.
I drank not to forget, but to forgive.
Growing up the only sibling to a younger sister with an advanced physical disability, I had a natural predilection for “doing the right thing.” I leaned hard into performative goodness and into being of service to my sister, my parents, my friends, and, ultimately, my intimate partners.
My sister was born — premature and with questionable odds of survival — when I was five. The pressure to subvert my own needs began at the same time it did for my parents, though I reckon those formative years may have done a slightly different number on me.
Drinking was a balm, sure. But it was also something I could be good at without the pressure of having to produce anything of actual value.
Most things came easy for me, appearing even easier in comparison to how supremely difficult those same things were for my sister. It helped that I was a big (smart, creative, loving) fish in a small, economically challenged pond — until the time came for me to walk on land.
The transition was an ugly one.
I couldn’t fail, so I avoided the opportunity. I desperately needed to succeed, so I aimed low. I became a groupie, both figuratively and literally — hitching to the white-hot comet trails of artists, musicians, rogues, and dropouts. And, of course, other drinkers.
I took big risks vicariously, from a relatively safe and softly inebriated distance. I paid for the gear, drove to the gigs, fed the crew, dressed the scenes.
With occasional exception (though not without struggle), I played the role of support staff through the entirety of my 20s.
And as my job was to assist, alcohol (and hard drugs for a time) was my uniform. Wearing it readied me for the work in body and mind. Wearing it eliminated the need to decide how to present myself — the choice was out of my hands and my otherwise tight control.
An unpaid amateur for 15 years, I turned pro in 2006 when I moved to California’s Napa Valley, where the booze really does grow on trees…and a star alcoholic was born.
I didn’t intentionally make the move to the wine industry to enable my drinking, but it couldn’t not have played a part.
What had been drinking in musicians’ bars during college turned into drinking in restaurant folks’ bars in grad school. And my throw-away job hostessing at a trendy spot in Chicago’s early 2000s dining scene sent me on a direct route through Michelin-level fine dining and into cult California winemaking. (1)
Admittedly, it was a quick trip. My writing skills, which I covertly cultivated in and out of college, caught the attention of the marketing director of an internationally renowned (and ridiculously exclusive) wine brand.
Turns out, I was a natural. I could charm, appeal to, and sell to the best and brightest. By best, I mean the most obviously and externally successful. By brightest, I mean the most gold-fucking-plated. It didn’t hurt that I could drink every single one of them under the table.
I drank with movie stars, television stars, professional athletes, politicians, musicians, tech bros, entrepreneurs, CEOs, Fortune 500’ers, all the assholes. (2)
Just when I thought I had reached the pinnacle of skill — in those long nights at 4 a.m. bars in Chicago, drinking Maker’s rocks with a Maker’s back, sleeping for four hours then restarting the clock with bloodies and shots — Napa reset the goal posts.
My after-hours hobby, as innocuous as it seemed in the grand scope of life, was now my full-time job. (3) And when I wasn’t drinking with the rich and famous, I was drinking with my colleagues, friends, and networking targets. It was part of the job and the culture. And I was so, so good at it.
My limitless tolerance, built painstakingly over decades, was my greatest asset.
Then I got my first diagnosis.
My first breast cancer diagnosis in 2013 slowed my drinking down for all of three months. If there was a doctor — any of the many involved in my diagnosis or the subsequent removal of both breasts — who advised me to curb my alcohol intake, seeing as it was a proven risk factor in my exact make and model of disease, I ignored them completely.
The science seeped in somehow/somewhere though, lodging in the deeper folds of my brain and smoldering there like a clumsily snubbed cigarette. It took my second diagnosis, this time stage IV metastatic breast cancer in 2020, to shake the connections free.
It’s likely this covert knowing may have been whispering to me all along: With each twist-off cap of NZ sauv blanc, opened daily during the pandemic at exactly 2:30 p.m. With all the tequila cocktails mixed at dusk and continued through our three kids’ bedtimes. With the weekend day-drinking and vacation wake-to-sleep drinking.
Quiet but vigilant, the knowing of it came immediately upon receiving the “good” prognosis — that I likely had years, not months, to live. “You’re probably going to tell me to stop drinking alcohol, right?” He didn’t, but that’s another story.
Disease of the body, and of the self.
It’s a common refrain, even in the more experimental/alternative circles of cancer medicine, that you’ll likely never know what caused your cancer. And while I believe that to be true, I also believe drinking was my star quarterback.
There’s an entire team at play here, not unlike the myriad factors affecting the earth’s changing climate. But just as gas-powered vehicles both contribute in their own way and are indicative of a larger and deeply problematic reliance on fossil fuels, alcohol permits and encourages other imbalances in the body — imbalances that lead to disease.
When I was working through my diagnosis and prognosis, I got into some pretty heavy dealmaking. If this all comes back negative, I’ll never drink again.
I felt, in the darkest corners of my gut, that many of the factors contributing to such an advanced level of disease at such a relatively young age could be traced back to alcohol.
My stress and stress avoidance, constant inflammation, gut dysbiosis, inconsistent exercise and overall fitness level, sleep quality, nutrition, hormone irregularities…all the stuff. Like spokes on a wheel, everything radiated from my love of and reliance on a known carcinogen.
Up until this point, I had never once thought of myself as an alcoholic. But such is the nature of addiction. It’s a comfort that we have no interest in removing ourselves from, until we do.
My cancer walked me to the mirror and gave me the ultimatum I couldn’t give myself.
This is what is, and this is what needs to be.
I had my last drink in November 2020. Since then, I’ve been living a different life in nearly every way.
A winemaker in Napa once admitted to me, in the vein of romantic disclosure, that he was a “functional alcoholic.” My answer: “Oh, man…me too. Isn’t everyone?”
All three of those statements were true, and the memory of that moment still haunts me. It felt disingenuous, tragic, overly dramatic, mortifying, and savagely honest all at once. And I wish it hadn’t taken a potentially fatal disease to show me how ignorant to my own life I had become.
I am sober as I type this. And, I am forgiven.
I forgave myself for struggling when and how I struggled. With grace, forgiveness hatched like a chrysalis into freedom.
I’m now free of the physical proof of addiction and the psychological weight of upholding that addiction. I’m free to move about my life with nimble autonomy, never again moving through the hours with only the eventuality of a drink to reward my efforts.
I’m also free of cancer — perhaps for now, perhaps forever. My deal with myself stands, and I absolutely got the better end.
Your turn!
We’d love for you to share in the comments:
- Did a particular “wake-up call” help you get sober?
- What’s your relationship to taking care of your body in sobriety?
- Where and how have you found forgiveness and freedom in sobriety?
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Bree Stilwell is a personal development coach, mentor, and writer. Having survived and transformed through intimate partner abuse and two cancer diagnoses, Bree is dedicated to sharing what she’s learned and is still learning in ways that inform, activate, and inspire others. Bree lives with her husband, son, and stepsons in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in a home filled with her family’s music, art, and sport detritus. You can find her newsletter at Caravan by Bree Stilwell.
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Notes
- I’m condensing here in the interest of brevity, so anyone curious about what’s between these bookends, please, don’t keep it to yourself. Let me know!
- There were more than a few gems, to be fair. I’ll never forget, nor will I surrender my gratitude for, the supremely magical Judge Judy. (What??!!) Hear me, you just never know who’s got it figured out, and guess who does.
- And it did indeed. I had two degrees at this point, had married a doctor (and divorced him, for what felt like unrelated reasons at the time), had traveled a fair bit, had made some smart career moves, and had a long-term boyfriend my parents had come to love. I was, for all intents, making it happen.
