The Myth of the "High-Functioning" Alcoholic

Alternately titled "Why I Started Drinking and Why I Quit."

Let's clear something right up; there is no such thing as a high functioning alcoholic.

I will repeat this, for emphasis (and because I like semi-colons); There. Is. No. Such. Thing. As. A. High. Functioning. Alcoholic.

Full stop.

I started drinking at the age of 22, after I joined the Army. The reasons for this are pretty simple. First, I wanted to fit in with the people around me. Second, having grown up extremely sheltered (hello, homeschooling), I discovered that alcohol helped to mask my general unease and anxiety in social situations.

Honestly, when I drank, I thought I was an absolute delight.The people who knew me back then can tell you that I was not, in fact, always delightful.

It wasn't long before I began drinking for other reasons. I drank when I was bored. I drank before I did any homework because I hated learning Korean. I drank for attention.

I drank because I truly enjoyed it. After a lifetime (up to that point) of rigid self control, it felt like freedom. In fact, before I left Korea, I wrote that on the wall of the bar I frequented. (Everyone signed the wall. The name of the bar was, in fact, The Wall.) So if you ever go there, if the wall still exists, you will see this: "Alcohol=Freedom. Ben Potter"

Don't believe that bullshit.

Drinking stopped being fun in Korea. It became something I thought I had to do to function. I drank to distract myself from the fact I hated my life, and the person I had become. I drank after I got sick, after I gained 100 pounds, after I broke up with my then fiancee. I drank when I was horribly depressed. I drank even though I was taking multiple blood pressure medications, Valium, Paxil, Effexor, and other random drugs the Army gave me to mitigate the symptoms of my illness.

I blacked out more times than I count. I did ignorant and ridiculous things.

I justified it by telling myself that I never missed a day of work. And that I was good at my job. That was true for as long as I drank.

 I justified it by telling myself that I was the only one that I was hurting.

That last part is the lie that all addicts tell themselves. That their addiction and their actions as a result of that addiction are all contained within a vacuum of self harm. Or that their actions are merely a consequence of their addiction and not the other way around.

I could tell you that I largely quit after Korea, but that would be a lie. There would be more blackouts, more bad decisions, more terrible behavior. I tried to quit the month before I left the Army, because at that point I had been drinking every single day for almost two years. I spent that entire month on my couch, shaking, sweating, puking.

It took another five years after that to completely stop. I realized how few healthy coping mechanisms I had developed to effectively deal with stress. I was still using alcohol as a crutch and I desperately needed to make a change.

And lest we make excuses, I did not have a disease. I made choices, with full knowledge of the consequences. I made those choices. It was not my mental illness, not my physical illness, not peer pressure. It was me, refusing to look at myself in the mirror and question the wisdom of my actions.

So what, you ask, is the point of all of this?

If you use alcohol as a mask for a lack of effective coping mechanisms, that is problematic. There's a whole new acceptance of day drinking among the parent crowd that is unbelievably toxic. A reliance on alcohol to relax or relieve stress is not a sign of someone who is high functioning, no matter how well they do what is required of them. 

It's a sign of someone who is an addict.