My Relationship with Alcohol - Part 1

The beginning: high school and college years

“Still Small,” is a newsletter and podcast exploring how to listen to your inner "still small" voice instead of staying "still small" within society's default rules.

Quick update: A new podcast episode can be found here!

---

I have always longed to be cool but have never felt cool. I am a highly sensitive person and I live mostly in my head. I have a hard time being present. At the crux of this longing is a desire to be accepted by others.

I thought that alcohol was the solution to my coolness problem. Alcohol is cool. Alcohol is fun. A lot of marketing dollars are spent to sell this belief to me.

Growing up, my parents didn’t really drink or have alcohol in the house, so I can’t say that my parents ever glamorized drinking.

I remember the first time I drank. It was the beginning of summer and I had just finished freshman year of high school. I was with a few friends having a sleepover at A’s house. Her brother was trouble and made my mom concerned about our friendship. Her mom was thrilled because I was a total square. We left A’s house and walked to the nearby trail. I can’t even remember what kind of alcohol it was, maybe it was gin? It was in a water bottle and we passed it around and took swigs.

This was when MySpace was all the rage. We snapped pictures of ourselves and I remember A said emphatically “Don’t post any of these pictures.” I went home the next day and immediately updated my profile picture. In it, I looked cool!! It was dark. I was wearing a friend’s sweatshirt with the hood on. My hair was blowing in the wind. I was laughing and not looking at the camera. I was holding a water bottle. The photo wasn’t particularly incriminating but one could guess that I was drinking. I’m sure A thought I was so desperate for attention. And I was! I was desperate to be seen as something I wasn’t: carefree and cool. I didn’t get drunk that night but I became enamored by the idea of drinking and what it represented.

I started stealing Stella Artois from the garage and drinking them in our hot tub at night alone. I felt like such a rebel! I didn’t particularly enjoy the taste of beer. But I enjoyed holding a beer bottle. I enjoyed what liking beer said about me: that I was a cool girl*.

Pretending to drink tequila during my first trip to Mexico

I didn’t get invited to parties in high school but whenever the option to drink presented itself, I was ALL IN. Every once in a while a friend’s parents would be out of town and a group of 4-5 of my friends and I would assemble. I would get absolutely wasted.

Looking back, alcohol ruined things pretty quickly for me but I never put two and two together. It was my best friend from middle school, C’s Sweet 16. We went to different high schools and everyone else at the party went to my rival high school. My friend had since become very close with a classic mean girl. She was popular, pretty, and loud. She had the alcohol hook-up since she was friends with older guys. We took a limo into San Francisco and went to a fancy dinner. I noticed how little this popular girl ate at dinner so I copied her. I wanted to be as thin as her, so I barely ate a thing.

During the ride home, we passed around a water bottle (probably full of vodka). I haven’t taken a shot in a long time but I can remember the feeling so clearly. After three shots is when everything started to click. The warm embrace of the liquid pulsing through my veins. Everything was hilarious. Anything was possible. I was a completely different person. I wanted to dance! I wanted to yell! I had come alive. I could not comprehend why most of the other girls were passing up this opportunity! The mean girl was suddenly the funniest person I had ever met. I was flying high. If three swigs made me feel this good, imagine what MORE would do!

As you can guess, eating like a baby bird at dinner + more vodka = vomit. At this point, we were congregated in my friend’s pool house (Yes, just like in the OC - I had friends with pool houses!) Since this was mostly everyone’s first foray into drinking (except for mean girl), no one really knew what to do with me once I started to throw up. So instead of putting me over the toilet, I was placed in the bathtub. This is when things get fuzzy for me (obviously). All I remember was mean girl yelling at me and saying “You ruined C’s birthday!” while the others hosed me down with the shower head.

One girl who was close with mean girl felt the need to film me. She ended up posting the video on Facebook the next day. I remember watching the video and all of the life drained out of my body. It was the opposite feeling of the alcohol washing over me. I asked her to take it down and (I think/hope to god) she did. This marked the end of my friendship with C. She didn’t speak to me after her party. Probably because she had to spend her birthday cleaning my vomit out of her pool house bathtub.

*wakes up and looks at phone* ah let's see what fresh horrors await me on the fresh horrors device - @missokistic

Except instead of worrying about what Trump did in the last 24 hours, I had to worry about what drunk Kendall did last night

I apologized for my behavior but I didn’t get why she was so mad. I thought vomiting was par for the course! To make matters more worse, I had made her a custom photo book for her birthday and it hadn’t come in time for her party. So I had this photo book, telling the story of our friendship, which ended with “I know we will be friends forever,” and now we were no longer friends.

I never blamed alcohol for the deterioration of this friendship. I blamed mean girl. She had stolen my best friend. If C wanted to hang out with her more than me, so be it. I wouldn’t reexamine this story for another 6 years.

Fast forward to college, where I joined a sorority. This is when my drinking really took off. My sorority’s entire identity was centered around drinking. You were not allowed to drink inside of any sorority, but some sororities take this rule more seriously than others. We did not take this rule seriously. We had pre-parties at our house all the time. In fact, when I joined, we were actually on probation for drinking in our house and we weren’t allowed to have any social events that semester. I didn’t know this until after I had joined since obviously this was not advertised during rush. So while all of the other girls in my dorm ran off to weekly “exchanges” (mixers) with frats, we just binge-drank at our sorority house and then crashed the frat parties once they were opened up to the public.

I am shy. I’ve never known how to flirt. Drinking was my solution. Drinking made otherwise painful social interactions with guys easier.

Quint was the party room, the largest room in my sorority which housed five girls. Getting invited to pregame in Quint meant you were cool! We would play catchphrase and if time ran out while you were describing a word, you had to drink. I learned all the drinking games. I took all the shots. I felt accepted! It was the best feeling. I was having so much fun.

A year later, when I had the opportunity to move out of the dorms and into the house, my friends and I chose Quint. We were now in the party room! I was now the one bullying freshman into taking shots and forcing them to drink beer. I chose a “little sister” and a year later she moved into Quint. The drinking cycle was alive and well!

My mom warned me about “binge drinking.” I rolled my eyes. Didn’t she know that college and binge drinking were synonymous!? What a wet blanket.

Fast forward to my senior year of college where I was living in a cute little cottage with four of my closest friends. I realized that I had enough credits to graduate a semester early. I toyed with taking classes just for fun in the spring but after a particularly un-fun econ midterm, I decided I had had enough! I went to my advisor and informed her that I’d be done with school in December. I knew I wanted to leave the Bay Area after my formal graduation ceremony in May, so in the meantime, I looked for a short-term job in Berkeley.

This was a strange time for me. I was done with school but all of my roommates were not. I started working full-time for a boutique financial services consulting firm. I would take the bus home from a long day of work, change out of my business casual clothes and try to get a run in while my friends were heading out to drink and play games like “Beat the Clock.” I felt left out and exhausted.

The second semester of senior year is filled with “last hurrah” celebrations. A big event is “Cal Day,” or prospective student day. All of the frats have day drinking events. I remember wanting to see the band that was performing on campus but I ended up getting too wasted. I came home alone, ate all of my roommates’ food, and passed out on my bed with my laptop blaring the music of the band I was too drunk to go see live.

This was the first time that I thought to myself, “Oh, this is unsustainable.” I had embarrassed myself plenty of times drinking but this one felt different. I sat each friend down and told them that I had eaten their food and went out and replaced their Ben and Jerry’s and jars of peanut butter. They didn’t really care but I did. I could see where this was heading. I didn’t like myself when I was drunk. I tended to exaggerate and even downright lie, mostly about small things but sometimes about really serious things. I didn’t understand why the person I was when I was drunk did things that sober me would never want to do. I felt like I was at a crossroads. I could see where this high-functioning alcoholic path was going and I didn’t like it.

On Tuesday, April 15, 2014, I drove 20 minutes home to my parent’s house in the burbs and explained the situation. AA was mentioned. I went to my first meeting later that day. The meeting was a blur. Some businessman was saying really vulnerable things! I was crying softly to myself. I raised my hand when they asked if anyone was new. A girl who had gotten a DUI came up to me afterward and introduced herself. It was recommended that I commit to 90 meetings in 90 days. So I did. I didn’t drink again for 2 1/2 years.

Going to a meeting every day for 90 days while working full-time and trying to enjoy the last bits of college was hard! I sat each of my four roommates down and essentially had a reverse intervention. “Guys, I think I’m an alcoholic.” “No, you’re not.” “Yes, I think I am.” “Okay, whatever.”

Nobody understood why I was subjecting myself to this nonsense. I was in college! Drinking was part of it! I didn’t have a problem!

This is where AA gets really sticky. They make you introduce yourself at the start of every meeting and you have to say “Hi I’m Kendall and I’m an alcoholic.” Was I an alcoholic? Who was to say? I never googled “I think I’m an alcoholic.” I never took a test online to see if I had a problem. I honestly never felt like I had a problem until the spring of 2014. I suddenly felt the urge to stop drinking and didn’t know how else to do it.

I still feel uncomfortable with the label “alcoholic.” It’s so loaded. Why do I have to put a label on it? It feels much more true to say “I’m Kendall and I don’t want to drink.” That would have been much more palatable to me.

I formally walked at graduation with my friends in May and planned to move to Portland in August to accept my first real job. The Berkeley consulting firm had offered me a position but I knew I wanted to leave the Bay Area. Portland would be my fresh start!

All summer I wrestled with defining myself as an alcoholic. Why was I purposely choosing not to enjoy myself? Why couldn’t I have a cold beer on a summer day? Because I had decided that drinking didn’t work for me, did that make me an addict?

I felt like I was punishing myself for no reason. I graduated early from Berkeley. I had a real job in finance. I drank less than my friends who didn’t think they had a problem. Was I overreacting?

---

*The Barbie movie made me feel weird about my love of beer. Seeing beautiful women hand men "Brewski Beers” made me tense up. Oh god! I only drank beer because I thought it made me “one of the guys.” Did I have any genuine interests? Or were all of my interests based on my desire for acceptance?

—

Tags: Alcohol, Friendship, Memories