For years, alcohol did exactly what I wanted it to do.
It quieted the noise in my head. It made me feel comfortable in my own skin. It helped me feel connected to other people. It took away the self-consciousness and anxiety that had followed me around for as long as I could remember.
At least that’s how it felt.
When I look back on my drinking today, one of the biggest misconceptions I had was believing alcohol was the answer. I thought I had found something that worked. Whenever I felt uncomfortable, alcohol could change the way I felt. Whenever I felt disconnected, alcohol could make me feel like I belonged.
For a long time, that seemed true.
That’s what made the next phase of my drinking so confusing.
Somewhere along the way, alcohol started changing.
Or maybe a better way to say it is that the effect started changing.
The relief wasn’t as easy to find. The confidence wasn’t as automatic. The comfort didn’t last as long. The feeling that had captured my attention all those years earlier became harder and harder to recreate.
At first, I didn’t think much about it.
I assumed I simply needed more.
If a few drinks didn’t produce the effect I wanted, maybe I needed six. If six didn’t work, maybe I needed twelve. If twelve didn’t work, maybe I needed even more.
That seemed logical to me at the time.
What I didn’t realize was that I was trying to force alcohol to recreate an experience that was slowly slipping away.
As my drinking progressed, things became increasingly unpredictable.
There were times when I could drink an entire case of beer and barely feel anything. Other times, a few beers would affect me much more than I expected. The consistency that I had come to depend on simply wasn’t there anymore.
Nothing made sense.
Alcohol had once felt reliable. Now it felt unpredictable.
Looking back, that was one of the scariest parts of my drinking.
Most people think the problem is needing more alcohol to get drunk. That was certainly part of it. But for me, the bigger problem was that alcohol wasn’t providing what I was actually looking for anymore.
The confidence wasn’t the same.
The comfort wasn’t the same.
The connection wasn’t the same.
The relief wasn’t the same.
That’s what terrified me.
For years, alcohol had been my solution. It may not have been a healthy solution, but it was the one I relied on. When life became uncomfortable, alcohol had always offered an escape.
Now even that escape was beginning to fail.
You would think that would have been enough to make me stop drinking.
It wasn’t.
In fact, I did the opposite.
I drank more.
I drank harder.
I became more desperate.
The strange thing about alcoholism is that logic often stops applying. If a medication stops working, most people stop taking it. If a restaurant consistently serves bad food, most people stop eating there.
But I wasn’t dealing with logic.
I was dealing with alcoholism.
Instead of accepting that alcohol wasn’t delivering what it once promised, I doubled down. Every time I drank, there was a part of me that believed this would be the night I got the feeling back.
This would be the night everything clicked again.
This would be the night I felt comfortable.
This would be the night I felt connected.
Most of the time, it wasn’t.
Looking back now, I can see that I wasn’t really chasing alcohol anymore.
I was chasing a memory.
I was chasing the feeling I experienced when alcohol first entered my life. I was chasing the relief that seemed so powerful when I was a teenager. I was chasing an experience that had become increasingly difficult to find and impossible to hold onto.
The more I chased it, the farther away it seemed to get.
Recovery eventually helped me understand something I couldn’t see while I was drinking.
Alcohol never truly solved my problem.
It temporarily covered it.
For years, I confused relief with a solution. As long as alcohol could change the way I felt, I believed it was working. What I didn’t realize was that the underlying discomfort was still there waiting for me every time the effect wore off.
Eventually, even the temporary relief began disappearing.
By the end of my drinking, very little of it was enjoyable. It wasn’t exciting. It wasn’t fun. It wasn’t even particularly effective.
It was desperate.
I kept drinking because I didn’t know what else to do. The thing I depended on wasn’t working anymore, but I couldn’t imagine living without it either.
That left me trapped.
When I think about the difference between my early drinking and my final drinking, the contrast couldn’t be more dramatic.
The first years felt like discovering the answer.
The last years felt like desperately searching for something I had already lost.
For a long time, I thought I was chasing alcohol.
Today, I understand that I was chasing a feeling that no longer existed.
Related Video
Alcohol had once quieted my head so reliably that I built more and more of my life around getting that effect. This video tells what happened when it stopped working that way—when I could no longer predict what drinking would do for me and the solution I depended on became part of the desperation.
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