Alcohol
“When I was about 18, I started drinking on the weekends with friends. Every weekend, that’s what we did. But it didn’t become a problem until later.”
“I was working in healthcare. I was very fit and active – until I got injured in an accident, and lost my mobility. That’s when I started drinking every day. I was struggling with chronic pain from my injury, and had a couple other conditions. I was using drinking as a way to cope. Then I met somebody who was a functioning alcoholic and I drank every day with him, basically. It was kind of easier to drink with somebody who was doing the same thing.”
“I was secretly drinking, really. People didn’t know that I drank every day or whatever because I always manage to maintain it. I did the things that I had to do. I just kind of drank at night. I was struggling with chronic pain from my injury and I had a couple other conditions going on, fibromyalgia being one. I was using drinking as a way to cope with this stuff because medication and me don’t really have a great relationship. Yeah that’s where it started. So in May 2023 I decided I was gonna go to Sophia Recovery.”
“My problem started with alcohol when I was 12 or 13. My parents had rough lives and their own troubles with addiction. Drinking was just a part of everyday life. Honestly, it looked fun. The first time I got really drunk was the first time I got arrested for public intoxication and underage drinking. The very next day, I drank again. If I got a job, as soon as I got paid, I’d go start drinking and doing drugs.”
“Once someone took this picture of me. I was drunk, and one of my eyes was sort of closed. I realized I looked exactly how my dad looked when he was drinking. I never wanted to be like my father, so seeing that broke my heart. My dad was sort of a functioning alcoholic, and already I was proving that was never gonna be me.”
“I was in trouble with the law again and again – until finally, for the first time, I was looking at adult jail time. That was really terrifying to me. I was so unhappy that I was suicidal. I couldn’t drink, but I couldn’t not drink. I phoned my stepmom, who was this beautiful person. She had been through AA [Alcoholics Anonymous] herself. She brought me to Sophia Recovery Centre. I finally got enrolled in some programs and counseling.”
“In our society, drinking alcohol has become the norm for almost every social situation. It integrates itself into everything, whether it’s an art opening, a birth of a child, a graduation, people get bottles of champagne. Dropping into anybody’s house – that’s what happens: you get offered a drink. I’ve certainly bought into that. I’ve always had wine and beer in the house to offer to my guests and have myself. But over the last four or five years those social drinks became personal drinks.”
“I drank every day to the point that I was sick. It was hard to do my job. I was drinking in the evenings. I’d set these rules: OK, you can’t drink on a work night. That would work for a while and then it wouldn’t. And then [with] COVID… I felt the need to be at home most of the time, to not be out in public. I just continued to drink without other people.”
“Two glasses of wine a day became a bottle of wine a day, which became two bottles of wine a day. It was insidious. I was well into substance abuse before I realized. It was hard to say, “oh my God, look at what I’ve done, look at where I am”. It started affecting decisions I made: social things. Do I wanna go to that [event] or not? If I’m going to go to that, how am I going to get home? Because there was never the question of, will I drink? It was, well of course I’m gonna be drinking, and so I have to make arrangements to get home.”
“Suddenly the ugly reality was I was drinking too much and didn’t seem to be able to put sensible boundaries on how much I was drinking. I knew that if I didn’t stop, I was not gonna be able to stop. I was afraid to try to stop because what if I can’t? If I can’t stop, then what does that make me? The shame that comes with that, especially because growing up I thought, I’m never ever going to drink, I’m never going to do what my father is doing, this will never happen in my family. I just realized I seemed to be becoming like someone who I’d label as an alcoholic. My father was an alcoholic and I was aware of the shame that came with that label.”
“I drank for the first time when I was 13. It wasn’t immediately a problem. I guess I dabbled a little bit here and there, not a whole lot. In university it became a lot more of an issue, but not so bad. I had a child. I still had to take care of her. Then I got married and had two more kids. I had to be a little bit more responsible. Then something happened in my life that changed the narrative of everything. That’s when it really started to become an issue.”
“My head was too loud. I couldn’t make my head be quiet. There’s always something going through it constantly, 24 hours a day. It was just screaming at me, and the more I drank the quieter it got. It never went away but it got quiet. It wasn’t so [loud] all the time. I was able to take a breath and not feel what the voice was screaming at [me]. I talked to my therapist about my alcohol use as part of my team with my doctors. They had mentioned Sophia to me.”
“I came from a family where the people who drink, drink every day. Then there’s a good part of my family that’s sober, too. There’s a lot of us in New Brunswick. And the number of us who have gotten sober is growing all the time. In our community, drinking is normalized. When I first started drinking, I had no idea that doing it every day was a problem.”
“I didn’t really have any substance abuse issues [at first] because I was such a starving student, I didn’t have enough money to party. I was social with people, but I didn’t really overindulge. But when I got into the magazine world – at the time, it was just a party every single night somewhere. The parties had open bars, and most nights there was some kind of event. I was more shy and [drinking] was a way to open up and meet people. It just became an easy way to cope. I found myself more social, I enjoyed going out, and I got to meet a lot of people that way. It’s hard to know when it kicked into being problem territory. But it didn’t occur to me when I was in my late 20s.”
“The magazine [I was working for] went under when I was 29. It was devastating. That was the first time I realized, there’s no party for me to go to anymore, but I’m still looking for that every night. Then I started working for En Route, Air Canada’s online magazine. I was used to working with young people who party all the time, but then going there I realized every day after work I was looking forward to drinking, and hoping there would be an event [to drink at].”
“I went [to work for] this website called Ask Men.com. I hated it. It was fine to learn some of the stuff, but I realized it was not the path I wanted to go down. I let depression take hold. I went through a bad breakup. I didn’t care anymore. I didn’t care if I drank in the morning before work. I am the sort of person who takes things to the extreme.”
“I went to a psychiatrist because I thought it was like free therapy. She was like, what do you want? Should I prescribe you something? I was like, can I get Ativan? So she prescribed me that. I thought, she’s just going to give me 30 [pills], but then there were like a year’s worth. I was so happy.”
“Then a year later, I asked her to double the dose. So I had two full Ativan tablets a day I was mixing with drinking – I could feel the dependency taking over. I felt like the Tin Man in the Wizard of Oz – Ativan and alcohol was my oil. When I went without it, I could feel the withdrawal setting in.”
“In my thirties, I had my first drink. Where I lived, we would have wine for special occasions. [This was] no problem, until I grew to hope for more occasions to celebrate. I soon became the “gopher” to go get the wine, became the bartender, this caring young Sister who made sure the cupboard was not bare. Working in an Italian parish in British Columbia, homemade wine flowed often, and one learned to be grateful. I thought this was simply “social drinking.” Later, relaxing after parish meetings in Edmonton, the pastor, who drank a fair amount, would invite [me] to have a drink, and so I became fond of Canadian Club whiskey in a short time.”
“Denial was still very alive in me. I could identify being an adult child of an alcoholic, [understand] the research emerging in the 80’s and even learn that my sister had become an alcoholic, [but this] did not move me to check on my patterns growing. Truthfully, shame and self-hatred were growing as I began to secretly drink alone, with a mickey hidden in my closet. I thought I was very funny and as well found that a drink gave me courage to speak up. I even wrote letters under the influence, sometimes very respectful, and at times, not so! That’s what it was like. What happened? The therapist I was seeing for depression and anxiety finally told me she could not help me until I looked at where my drinking was going.”