Answer Addiction

Tag: college drinking

  • How I Stayed Sober Through College

    How I Stayed Sober Through College

    It took intense emotional, psychological, and physical energy to mourn my lifelong relationship with drugs and alcohol and process the trauma I had spent my life suppressing.

    I was lucky to get accepted into one of the top colleges in the U.S., but I brought with me a serious drug habit and alcoholism. In my first semester, I would down 3 ½ – 4 ½ bottles of cheap red wine in a night, paired with a combination of cocaine, angel dust, weed, and benzodiazepines. Most nights, I passed out by 8 pm and my friends slipped out to clubs without me. Two months into college, I started collecting write-ups for violating the school’s drug and alcohol policies, which snowballed until I hit my bottom. 

    The first sign that my style of “partying” was out of control was that three groups of friends each suddenly severed ties with me. I still don’t know what happened, but I can imagine, based on scenes I’ve snapped into from blackouts—my boyfriend trying to scream sense into me after I punched him in the face at a concert, rolling naked on the kitchen floor in a pile of broken glass while crying, friends dumping me on the doorsteps of psych wards. That’s how I partied.

    I somehow managed to squeak out mostly A’s in my first semester, but I struggled to show up. I was constantly handing in assignments late, rescheduling exams, and conjuring doctors’ notes to excuse excessive absences. I was oversleeping for classes and therapy appointments in the late afternoon. At the end of my first semester, my school forcibly relocated me to a new dormitory for erratic behavior and chronic drug use. 

    Friendless on campus, I turned to the local homeless population. That’s when I found heroin. It didn’t take long for consequences to reach a tipping point. Halfway through my second semester, I was arrested on two felonies and two misdemeanors after waking up next to my best friend’s lifeless body (she overdosed but was revived and survived). My school suspended me for a year, pending expulsion if I didn’t get sober. My probation officer pushed me into rehab and warned that if I left, he would send me to jail.

    I fought getting sober that entire year. But at the eleventh hour, something clicked and I suddenly wanted recovery. I abruptly left the dilapidated drug den I was living in and ran to AA meetings. I only had 30 days when a school psychiatrist evaluated if I could be readmitted. I think they saw that despite the little time I had, I was serious about sobriety. I was; I’m still sober 11 years later. And I only got through those first years of sobriety while in college because of the life I built and resolutely maintained.

    Solutions for Sobriety

    Getting suspended from student housing for two years was a blessing in disguise. I instead commuted from my family’s home an hour from school, which made it easier to build a new life free of drugs and alcohol and kept me far from the parties that were definitely happening back in the dorms. I made friends with everyone in my local AA groups; fortunately, there was a community of sober young people in my area. Those friendships showed me that I could have more fun sober than I could while using, and I was never pressured or tempted to relapse. Between classes, I went to local meetings and established a second support system at school.

    The first two and a half years of sobriety were my most challenging. I struggled with cravings every day, so I kept recovery literature with me at all times. In the streets of New York City on any given night, I was confronted with scenes of the cunning fantasy of social drinking, passing by clusters of casual drinkers jovially sharing laughs over sparkling cocktails at posh outdoor lounges. I often walked past clouds of weed smoke and stepped over empty dime bags. Like so many of us reintegrating back into society in early sobriety, temptation was everywhere, despite my careful avoidance of people and places that I associated with using. But I always had silent support from a Grapevine or copy of Living Sober conveniently stashed among my schoolbooks for when I couldn’t call someone. 

    I also developed the self-respect to walk away from situations when I was uncomfortable, like changing seats on the train when passengers were sipping liquor concealed in brown paper bags, or switching tables at a restaurant because nearby diners were drinking. For the first year, I took detours around the blocks where my homeless friends sat so I wouldn’t risk running into them. These extra buffers and barriers made it easier for me to keep my sobriety amidst incessant cravings.

    I shamelessly shared that I was sober with professors and classmates, so that when I had the opportunity to study abroad in Istanbul at two years sober, my professor helped make sure I got to and from AA meetings and fellowship in a city where I didn’t speak the language and didn’t have a cell phone. My study abroad classmates frequented clubs after class and drank during meals, so every effort helped since I had only e-mail contact with my sponsor and network. 

    I would have similar conversations with classmates when we planned group work outside of class. They always agreed to meet during the day at school lounges, libraries, or cafés when I asked. Strategies that kept alcohol out of sight proved to be the safest for me in early sobriety. During my last semester, I got to help form a recovery group for students at my school. These organizations are common on campuses now, and some schools even offer sober housing. 

    It took intense emotional, psychological, and physical energy to mourn my lifelong relationship with drugs and alcohol and process the trauma I had spent my life suppressing. After I got sober, I re-enrolled part-time in college and completed my bachelor’s degree over six years. My diligence paid off: I graduated Magna Cum Laude and immediately began a full-time position in my chosen field.

    Graduate School

    Five years after receiving my bachelor’s, I realized my career didn’t match what I finally discovered was my purpose and calling in life. After six months of meditating, therapy, and weighing feedback from my sober network, I left my steady career job and started graduate school. Unexpectedly, my new school hosted a heavier drinking culture than my undergraduate campus. The omnipresent partying frequently left me in uncomfortable situations with my recovery feeling tenuous. Everything involved alcohol, including lab assignments and fieldwork excursions. The school even hosted weekly drinking socials, with most students slurring and stumbling by 8pm. When my cohort got together several times a week, the event always included hard drinking. 

    I realized on the first night of orientation that I would need to double down on recovery again. Even though I entered graduate school with nine years of sobriety, I treated myself with the same care and caution as I did in undergrad as a newcomer. During graduate school, I felt I had no business in a place where the main activity focused on alcohol. When I’m tense or upset, the glamor of psychological escape can suddenly seem desirable. As an alcoholic, I know I have no defense against that first drink if my spiritual condition is anything less than fit that day. 

    Adding to the constant stress of endless coursework, my career change challenged my self-esteem, confidence, and self-worth. I rarely felt grounded. As a result, I only saw my cohort outside of class when I felt absolutely secure in my sobriety. I didn’t form as close of bonds with them as they did with each other, but I made a concerted effort to be fully present when we were in class or working in our offices. Though I wish I could have gotten closer to them, I don’t regret honoring the boundaries I had set to care for my recovery.

    I didn’t have to entirely avoid being around drinking; I just had to distinguish the acceptable conditions. If an event would be beneficial to my studies or career, I only went at the beginning when attendees were adequately sober and constructive conversations were possible. Cocktail receptions and academic conferences felt safe because professional networking was the main purpose, and the pressure to perform distracted me from the drinking. I found comfort in idly sipping on water throughout the night as others do with their wine or cocktails. And as attendees became tipsy, I remained articulate, poised, and professional, and carried impressively intellectual conversations in the eyes of the inebriated. If the night turned into a party, my cue to leave was when people started talking loudly and laughing infectiously at nothing intelligible. At that point, I couldn’t connect with anyone and there was little left for me to do there. If the drinkers stayed only mildly tipsy, I ended up enjoying getting to know them because they were relaxed enough to reciprocate the deeper conversations I’m accustomed to in recovery.

    I was lucky that my school already had a strong student recovery group that held meetings several times a week and frequent sober outings. They became my friends because I didn’t mesh with the local 12-step meetings. At this point in my recovery, AA had sadly become monotonous for me, but I was still committed to sobriety. I wanted to dive deeper into healing the trauma, childhood wounds, and character defects that continued to hamper effective relationships with myself and those around me. Over the years, I found guidance and wisdom in self-help books, A Course in Miracles, Refuge Recovery, Kundalini yoga, Western astrology, and Buddhist meditation. So in graduate school, I crafted a program of self-reflection and accountability around these practices, which doubled as solutions for stress management. 

    I also stayed close to my networks where I got sober. Those women remain my dearest friends and strongest support. I worked closely with spiritual advisors until I found a local sponsor. Strengthening my program was critical because graduate school was emotionally demanding. It required at least twice the amount of work as my undergrad classes; it wasn’t even possible to complete all the assignments each week. The psychological strain combined with a busy schedule left little time for much else. I quickly recognized the need for self-care and balanced it with the coursework I would be graded on. I went to my favorite exercise classes at least twice a week, also setting aside time to rest and prioritizing a full night’s sleep. 

    At the end of the day, all the effort paid off. I recently received my Master’s degree at 11 years sober and it is one of my most proud accomplishments. I graduated with a higher quality of life, stronger sense of self, and more solid sobriety than I imagined were possible, thanks to the unique challenges I had to face in the process of obtaining each degree.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • What Is Drunkorexia?

    What Is Drunkorexia?

    Experts discuss the relatively new disorder and the way it affects the body and mind.

    Eating disorders and substance use disorders are overlapping more often, according to registered dietitian and author Cara Rosenbloom. 

    What Rosenbloom is referring to is “drunkorexia”—when an individual, often female, does not eat all day or eats very little leading up to an evening of consuming alcohol. They may also exercise aggressively or purge before drinking alcohol. 

    “Drunkorexia addresses the need to be the life of the party while staying extremely thin, pointing to a flawed mindset about body image and alcoholism among college students, mostly women,” Rosenbloom writes in the Washington Post. 

    Drinking in this manner is dangerous, particularly because the lack of food in the stomach means a faster absorption of alcohol. According to Tavis Glassman, professor of health education and public health at the University of Toledo in Ohio, this can lead to more issues. 

    “With nothing in her system, alcohol hits quickly, and that brings up the same issues as with any high-risk drinking: getting home safely, sexual assault, unintentional injury, fights, blackouts, hangovers that affect class attendance and grades, and possibly ending up in emergency because the alcohol hits so hard,” he tells Rosenbloom.

    Drunkorexia may also lead to nutrient deficiencies such as calcium, B-vitamins, magnesium, fiber and protein, registered dietitian Ginger Hultin says. 

    “Alcohol can negatively affect the liver or gastrointestinal system, it can interfere with sleep, lower the immune system and is linked to several types of cancers,” Hultin tells Rosenbloom.

    Because drunkorexia is a fairly new disorder, our knowledge of the disorder is limited, while the existing research varies widely. 

    Glassman, along with others in the field, is hoping to have drunkorexia added as a legitimate diagnosis in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. They hope that doing so could establish some guidelines for professionals to identify the disorder, Rosenbloom writes.

    The addition to the DSM would also increase likelihood of insurance coverage for those who may need treatment.  

    Glassman and colleagues are working to combat the issue at the University of Toledo by bringing more awareness to healthy body image and decreasing body shaming.

    “We try to emphasize that the human body comes in different shapes and sizes, and remind students that when they look at the media, with computer enhancement and airbrushing, even the model may not really look like a model,” Glassman tells Rosenbloom. “We remind students to value people based on things besides their appearance.”

    Hultin adds, “If students see friends engaging in this type of behavior, they can intervene and encourage different choices or offer support or resources to address a potential problematic relationship with alcohol and/or food.” 

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Academics and Alcoholism

    Academics and Alcoholism

    Academics too often share a simultaneous denial and pride in their alcoholism, and the profession does little to dissuade such a sentiment, even with all the attendant problems it brings, preferring to interpret self-medication as mere collegiality.

    I’ve heard it repeated as a recovery truism that nobody is too dumb to stop drinking, but plenty of people are too smart. One supposes that’s the sort of thing intended to be helpful. I’ve no idea on the particular veracity of the claim, though I’ll say that people who are smarter (or think they’re smarter) can certainly generate some novel justifications for their alcoholism. 

    When I was deep in my cups, after stopping for one drink after class that turned into a blackout which had me checking the soles of my shoes for evidence of which way I stumbled home, I could structure an argument with recourse to French philosopher Michel Foucault’s The Birth of the Clinic about how “alcoholism” was a construction of the medical-industrial complex.

    After I woke up another countless time cringing as I recalled how I’d embarrassed myself yet again, it was only a short period until I was crafting a rationalization that drinking expressed an idyllic, pre-capitalist, medieval past that was based in revelry and joy.

    While noticing that my hangovers seemed to go on a bit too long, or that my hands were a little bit too unsteady, or that I seemed less and less able to stop that second drink from sliding into that twelfth, I could wax philosophical about how intoxication evoked the Dionysian rites, for after all it was Plato in The Symposium (a booze-soaked party) who claimed that “For once touched by love, everyone becomes a poet,” and when I was getting my PhD in English what I loved was pints of lager, gin and tonic, and Jameson on the rocks, and sometimes if I was drunk enough and squinting with one eye, I could convince myself that I was a poet.

    If I was smart, it certainly manifested itself in the same tired old story as any other alcoholic, even if my justifications seemed clever to me. Because whether or not it’s true that some people are too smart to quit drinking, many academics might enthusiastically agree that’s the case, the better to avoid church basements. Psychologists call this “rationalization”…

    Lots of discussion is rightly had about the problems generated by substance abuse among undergraduates, but much less is had about alcoholism on the other side of the podium. Something is surprising about this – the cocktail hour is valorized in academe, especially in the humanities where with cracked pride there is a certain amount of cosplaying Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf?, where the past tweedy imagined pleasures of sherry fueled conviviality run strong. Rebecca Schuman (who is not an alcoholic) writes in Slate about how this “campus alcohol epidemic, one largely ignored,” is often “heralded as an inextricable virtue of the Life of the Mind.”

    But for alcoholic academics there are also often darker particulars for returning time and time again to the bottle. The unnaturalness of living in one’s head all of the time, the stress and intermingling of life and work so that it almost always feels like you’re stuck in the latter (and people think we get summers off!), the often incapacitating imposter syndrome. Professors aren’t the only alcoholics of course; there are plenty of alcoholic plumbers, alcoholic nurses, alcoholic accountants, alcoholic cops, alcoholic lawyers, alcoholic janitors. Yet academics too often share a simultaneous denial and pride in that alcoholism, and the profession does little to dissuade such a sentiment, even with all the attendant problems it brings, preferring to interpret self-medication as mere collegiality.

    University of Notre Dame history professor Jon T. Coleman writes movingly of his own struggles with alcoholism in academe, explaining in an essay for The Chronicle of Higher Education that one of the “most sinister aspects of alcoholism was the intramural loathing it encouraged,” describing how he drank to “mute the feelings of guilt, failure, and panic that came from not being able to control my drinking,” despite having “graduated from college, earned a Ph.D., secured a job, won book awards, and received tenure from a top-tier university while engaging in a habitual behavior that rendered me a dumbass.”

    In her remarkable new book The Recovering, Leslie Jamison similarly sees the appeal of annihilation and escape as central to the professorial preoccupation with self-destruction, explaining that drinking “plunged me into a darkness that seemed like honesty,” misinterpreting that “desperate drunk space underground” as “where the truth lived.” As a way of proffered hypothesis, that’s some of what fuels the alcohol problem among humanities scholars, a misapplied radical skepticism that’s suspicious of recovery-speak (which allows for convenient rationalizations). Combine this with the accumulated boozy romance of past generations, and one sees part of what motivates the problem.

    Even now I’m hesitant to use the word “alcoholic” in describing myself, chaffing at the “One Day at a Time” folk-wisdom of 12-step philosophy, historicizing and critiquing recovery in a manner that at its worst could easily justify relapse (though it hasn’t yet). But a certain saving grace also is gifted from my vocation, for as an English professor nothing is more paramount than the sanctity of words, and if I’m not an alcoholic, then the word itself has no meaning. One of the bits of hard-earned wisdom I’ve been gifted through the haze is the understanding that if my disease isn’t my fault, it’s surely my responsibility. I believe that had I not been an academic with a drinking problem, I’d have had some other job and identity – with a similar drinking problem.

    Even as a personal responsibility, the wider academy, because of its particular culture and history, must also do more to provide support for graduate students and faculty with substance abuse disorders. Graduate student Karen Kelsky in a guest blog for “The Professor is In” writes that the “stigma associated with addiction may be stronger than stigmas for mental illness,” in part because alcoholism is so often perceived as a “choice,” and not a complicated issue of heredity, acculturation, and brain chemistry. Even moderate drinkers face opprobrium in the wet groves of academe, with Shuman writing about how after she decided to quit excessive social drinking, she was “cut off socially” and that as she “drank less and less,” she was “accepted less and less by my peers.”

    There needs to be a shift in how academe grapples with alcoholism, and with alcoholics. In the short term, a small start would be to provide alternative possibilities at conferences and symposia that are so often permeated by alcohol. Jeffrey J. Cohen, a scholar of medieval literature at Arizona State University (who is not an alcoholic himself) argues in The Chronicle of Higher Education that those “who arrange conference social events were alcohol is served must ensure that they are not the sole access provided to conference conviviality.”

    In the long term, academics need to become more sensitive to and aware of the definitions of alcoholism and addiction. Kelsky writes of how a “common misconception… is that once someone has gone through treatment, they are ‘cured.’” Consequently, non-drinking graduate students and faculty are often shut out of professional opportunities, their self-care interpreted as being the behavior of a scold or a Puritan. With an important awareness of how difference is manifested for various marginalized groups in our culture, too often academics don’t extend the same consideration to those in recovery, or provide assistance for our colleagues in need.

    Of course even if mental health and substance abuse care are woefully lacking in professional contexts, most fellow individual academics can and do respond to those in recovery with care and empathy. I first read Coleman’s essay after it was sent to me by a concerned colleague and I was able to recognize the malady, so eloquently described, as my own. I drank for two more years.

    My thirst was unquenchable, simply confirming Coleman’s observation about being “Caught in a trap… [with] an inability to break loose.”

    The kindness in being sent that essay had an effect, though, part of that arsenal in my spirit that I was able to drudge up after numerous shaky mornings haunted by fear, a little indication in which I knew that the center could not hold, and in which I could sometimes glimpse the awful grace of that thing called hope, which we alcoholics know as a “moment of clarity.” Coleman did break loose, and so have I for the time being, while always remembering that “There but for the grace of God go I.”

    Three years after my bottom I still work on that first step sometimes, but I find that the organ which made those old rationalizations so evocative can be helpful in actual not drinking. I wake up sober in the morning, and I can reflect on the ways in which recovery bares the mark of the conversion narrative, I can trace the historical antecedents of 12-step groups, I can examine how important issues of race and gender affect how we discuss addiction and recovery. More than enough intellectualism in sobriety; actually, more than there ever was in the tantalizing hum of drunkenness. There can be, as it turns out, as much hope in the classrooms as there is in the rooms, occluded though it may seem, but for that I am grateful.

    Ed S. is a widely published writer and an academic.

    View the original article at thefix.com