Got back from family vacation, got on the dreaded Facebook, found out the woman who was my first gf 12 years ago, and subsequently a friend I talked to pretty frequently, had died of liver failure at 33 years old.
Looking back on it, when she was drinking 12 years ago it just seemed like a fun time. I didn’t know she sustained that pace for a decade plus. Some other things took a toll too, like an eating disorder.
Anyways, I am fuckin sad, fuck alcohol, it’s as bad as heroin but capitalism gotta make that $$$$$
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wife has been sober now for over 10 months after 20+ years of hard alcoholism. was hard watching her slowly kill herself and nothing you can do about it. you cant fix an addict just support them when they decide to fix themselves
i know that feel, i drink occasionally but ill never touch another drop if that what she needs to stay strong
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alcohol is really bad for your physical and mental health. i’d say about a year of my alcoholism was productively staving off depression and suicide, but then maybe 13 years of alcohol gradually erroding my brain and soul and body. its not bad as a temporary distraction from your troubles bit prolonged use will seriously compromise your ability to be healthy and sane in the future.
alcohol seems fine to me in comparison to the things that drive people to drink excessively
This is so relative and variable, it’s impossible to fully agree or disagree with. Addiction and the root causes for it involve such a complex interactions of different factors that such a statement is almost meaningless.
Like, is alcohol “fine” compared to the crushing weight of a lifetime of extreme alienation due to capitalism? I don’t know if “fine” is the right word, but sure, yes, alcohol is the smaller evil and the lesser detriment to society over all, in comparison. But that doesn’t mean that the person who, completely understandably, drinks a bottle of vodka every night for years to deal with that alienation isn’t doing damage to themselves (and likely increased pain and difficulty for their loved ones), by orders of magnitude greater than just the slow burn of alienation alone would have, even as the vodka makes the alienation vastly more bearable in the immediate short term.
And yes, almost any kind of distraction that replaces some pain of reality with a bit of dopamine can become an addiction that can potentially do great harm to the person afflicted by it. But there is still a spectrum of how bad various addictions can be to a person’s over all health, and alcohol undeniably holds a place close to the far end of that spectrum of harm. For example, you aren’t going to die at 40 from liver failure because of a social media addiction.
Addiction and habituation are complex. Different people are effected to different degrees by different types of addictions, but that doesn’t mean all distractions that can potentially become addictions are equally dangerous or detrimental. None of that has to do with any of those addictions being at “fault” either. But it’s a simple fact that continuously using alcohol as a means of coping with difficulty or pain will come with rapidly increasing costs to a person’s health as well as diminishing returns on its efficacy even as a coping mechanism.
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I’m very sorry for your loss. Alcoholism is a terrible disease. I’m hopeful that I’m seeing more ppl drinking less and seeking mental health care. It’s a monkey that’s been riding the back of so many families for generations.
my dad’s been an alcoholic most of his life. he’s in his early 60s but walks worse than his parents did when they were in their 80s and has a good deal of health problems :/
he was forced to go to rehab a year ago and has been sober ever since. i’m proud for him but wish it could’ve happened in my childhood instead of right after i go to college. we have a better relationship now at least, spending more time with him now than i did in late high school
there’s defo still some permanent mental effects but it seems like going sober’s even made his temper a lot better, he’s even kinda sharper and a lot less reactionary
Very similar except mine never actually quit.
CW venting and gross medical stuff
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I’m convinced he has Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome and he’s had cognitive evaluation that placed him as like, pre-dementia but he lies his ass off about the severity of his drinking to doctors and has gotten even more stubborn and shitty as his faculties have declined and doesn’t want to try anything or get better.
Super heavy alcoholics reach a point where they have severe enough digestive issues that they’re getting little to no nutrition from what they eat at the same time that they’re drinking a full caloric daily value of booze, so they never have an appetite at the same time their body is malfunctioning and eating its own fat/muscle/bone trying to get a bare minimum of vitamins and minerals necessary to function. When the liver gets overwhelmed, the skin tries to compensate and shed toxins getting greasy and sweaty, then the skin can’t keep up and starts getting psoriatic sheds and cracks that bleed and scab.
It’s fucking horrifying to see and something I’d beg anyone struggling with alcohol to do everything in their power to avoid. I can’t speak for everyone, but from what I’ve seen, there’s a point of severe alcoholism that once someone passes, they lose the ability to get themselves out of it and would need a medically supervised gradual detox and rehab.
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the skin tries to compensate and shed toxins getting greasy and sweaty, then the skin can’t keep up and starts getting psoriatic sheds and cracks that bleed and scab
oh wow my dad has severe psoriasis. he started taking meds that stopped it a couple years ago, but before that there were often skin flakes everywhere when i went to his house on weekends. never considered alcohol was the likely cause
his vision is terrible so he rarely drives at night anymore. has tinnitus and bad hearing. processing time and short-term memory is pretty bad but definintely improved since quitting (big part of that could just be his ADHD). he had bad muscle spams after climbing into the attic a couple weeks ago but thankfully has govt insurance and goes to doctors regularly. he goes for walks at night and takes meds, and his gait’s improved in the past months. my main concern’s his appetite is still very small and he regularly skips meals. but for the most part he’s really working on himself
all hope to your dad, it’s a disease i thought would be impossible for mine to break out of and i’m still genuinely surprised rehab did it. it took him i think 3 DUIs (at least in my lifetime, his ass got banned from canada 30 years ago lmao) and the ignition breathalyzer thing to quit. couldn’t even stop when he got in trouble drunk driving my brother and i when we were young kids, not sure why he wasn’t forced to detox earlier. being retired probably gave him the motivation to stick with it, he now goes to regular meetings and replaces beer with sugary ice tea
personally i force myself to only drink socially, and i’m often scared of drinking at all (usually have more than i planned). seeing how he ended up i think i have the self-control for at least that. weed dependency’s a bigger concern for me right now, i think i also likely inherited ADHD (and people with it have insanely high rates of drug/alc abuse), so getting tested for it soon and maybe treatment could help my impulse control
his vision is terrible so he rarely drives at night anymore. has tinnitus and bad hearing. processing time and short-term memory is pretty bad but definintely improved since quitting (big part of that could just be his ADHD).
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Yeah, that all tracks. One of the things besides his skin problems and worsening temperament that stood out as really concerning was the visual recognition stuff. He’d always worn glasses and sometimes wouldn’t wear them around the house and then have a hard time reading something from some distance, but at some point that turned into him opening the fridge/looking in the pantry/looking for kitchen implements in drawers and looking for something specific, not remembering where it is, also not being able to visually differentiate anything, and then almost immediately flipping into a rage, yelling expletives and blaming other people for shit he misplaced and couldn’t remember, or blaming inanimate objects for conspiring against him. He’s lived in the same house for like 25 years, and one time forgot where the light switch in the laundry room was, then acted like other people conspired to hide it somewhere while looking for it in the cabinets for some reason.
I have genuinely never had a sip of alcohol in my life. It’s just amazing how people still almost constantly try to get me to start. They seem offended as if I personally attacked them when I refuse. Could you imagine someone getting offended because you didn’t want to do heroin with them?
Almost everyone in my family is some form of an addict, and they all say they could definitely quit anytime they want to, even the one who mixes alcohol with coffee in the mornings and who gets drunk almost every night. The societal level of denial when it comes to alcohol is amazing, people treat addiction like it’s just a snack-eating habit and not drinking literal poison. A lot of my family basically just treats it as a snack that they “munch” on throughout the day. The physical and cognitive decline over the decades is readily apparent.
I clearly remember the amount of pressure I was under to start drinking myself to death the second I turned 21. I said no. One of the best decisions I ever made. But how is a 21 year old kid supposed to make a clear-minded decision when drinking is almost universally normalized and encouraged, so much so that they’ve probably already gotten dangerously drunk several times over by the time they’re 16? (at least, that was the norm where I grew up)
Definitely never start. I’ve been heavy drinking for a decade and it’s almost completely destroyed my life. I have squandered ever opportunity and meaningful relationship I’ve ever had. I have profound brain fog and cognitive impairment and im not even 30 yet (and I’ll be surprised if I even make it there). Never let anyone convince you to start drinking
it’s never too late to quit btw, i was in a similar position (started at 14, kept going for a decade+) and it’s been years now since i’ve touched the stuff.
you can always escape
I’ve been striving to wean off and stay off for as long as I can withstand doing so. It’s really a terrible poison lol. And it’s so ubiquitous, especially in food service, which is where im currently employed.
did you do AA or anything similar when you stopped? I’ve been thinking about going but im on the fence
oh shit i missed this in the deluge, my bad comrade.
I’ve been striving to wean off and stay off
this is the way to do it. slow and steady wins the race. uhhh which is also part of my answer to your next question: no, i did not seek any outside help. one day, after months of puking up blood every morning, i decided to go cold turkey. just quit right overnight.
i absolutely 1000% encourage you to do anything but what i did. it was super dumb as fuck and i probably should have died. it was like…a week(?) of nonstop vomiting, sweating, and shitting, and that wasn’t even the bad part. >> the hallucinations were what made it a living nightmare. idk if i’m just naturally predisposed or what but i felt like i was losing my fucking mind at points.
all that is to say that it’s totally possible to quit and not go through hell; you just gotta be smart. it sounds like you are! i will also say that imo you’ve already gotten past the hard part, which is deciding you no longer want this substance in your life and deciding you’re going to do something about it, and then beginning. those things together represent maybe one of the biggest hurdles to kicking a substance.
as a quick mishmash of advice before i have to get running to the store:
be gentle with yourself. i know stumbling feels like failure and failure probably feels like a permanent state, but this is one of those rare instances where you only actually fail once you totally give up hope.
celebrate every milestone if you want! alternatively, do what i do and totally ignore it if that’s easier. i found not thinking about it at all helped a lot more, but i know some people who’ve taken the first tack and met with success. it really is all about you and what works best.
on that note, addiction displacement is how a lot of folks i know quit. i quit booze cold turkey but i had to swap to weed when i went to go quit smoking a few years later, as a for instance.
idk sorry if this is scattershot, i am in a bit of a rush but feel free to DM me if you’d like :3 and even if not, i wish you the very best of luck
Wish I could hug you, thanks for the advice :)
My brother did the same thing, went cold turkey and he ended up having a pretty bad seizure. I’m gonna wean down as best I can and try to find a hobby or something (displacement, as you said) to replace the habit. I also need to find a new line of work, but that’s a long term goal.
Thanks again for the response, it made me feel a lot less alone.
I quit at 35, don’t wait that long comrade
People get offended because they know it’s bad for them and you’re showing the restraint that they themselves sometimes wish they’d have.
The other side is that drinking makes them vulnerable and you not drinking puts you in a power position over them. Sometimes predators don’t drink because of that. But obviously that doesn’t justify their reaction to you not drinking.
(This is the perspective of someone who does binge drink occasionally)
Yeah true, I haven’t really thought about it from that perspective. I feel like I’ve always subconsciously avoided those sorts of sober-drunk power dynamics though. I don’t like to be around drunk people. It’s like going to a concert where everyone else is raving but you’re really not feeling it at all. Being the only sober person is an extremely off-putting feeling for me. And I’m not sure if it’s the autism, but bars induce a visceral feeling of disgust. It’s not a moral thing, it just physically feels gross. So if people are going out to drink, I’m not tagging along.
I have genuinely never had a sip of alcohol in my life
That’s actually me! Just never seemed like the right thing. And know I’m regularly taking other depressants, so it’s not at all safe.
This is so sad. I’m sorry for your loss.
i am unironically a prohibitionist when it comes to alcohol, the muslims were right. though we should treat it like a medical issue rather than a criminal one, like we should with any drug problems. it should at least be illegal to advertise alcohol or give it fun packaging, like they do with cigarettes in some places.
never ever giving up weed tho, maybe i’ll switch to vapes and edibles instead of smoking eventually but its more expensive that way.
i switched from smoking to edibles after 18 years of smoking. I was coughing up black shit for months and now im good on that.
Prohibition was a disaster in the US tho. You can’t even stop people from fermenting sugar in prison.
Check out vaporents on reddit, there’s tons of flower vapes that get you the same high off less weed since they’re more efficient. The terpcicle from trww is an all glass vape for around 40, just need a decent torch
shit
I’m sorry for your loss comrade. My mom died from her alcoholism problem too. I’m an alcoholic as well (it runs in the family). Shit is bad. I remember seeing a bit on tv about how alcoholism is a killer right alongside fentanyl but that gets all the attention because it’s illegal.
I remember seeing a bit on tv about how alcoholism is a killer right alongside fentanyl but that gets all the attention because it’s illegal.
too true. plus fentanyl can kill instantly so easily, and while someone can drink themselves to death in a night it takes a lot more effort than fent.
hope youre doing well, the chronic pain and management of said pain my friend went through is something i’d only wish on the worst people in the world. And she was not a bad person at all, she was very kind and always thinking of other people before herself. But sometimes you have to be selfish…
It’s the worst drug. And people look at you like you’ve lost your mind if you say you don’t partake
me_irl
In my experience they straight up don’t know how to engage with you. Typically they get defensive about their own habit after you say “no thanks”.
Wife and I drank casually (but still too much) and stopped last year. We lost weight and our baseline sense of well-being is much higher. Once you get far enough away from drinking, it becomes alarmingly clear that people are straight-up poisoning themselves, and have no idea how to socialize without it.
Typically they get defensive about their own habit after you say “no thanks”
this feels very similar to how people often perceive it as a personal attack when someone at the table says they’re vegan
I work in the live entertainment industry which means I’m often sober working in a room full of drunks and it truly is like watching everyone slowly become brain-damaged
And people look at you like you’ve lost your mind if you say you don’t partake
I hate it so much. Some people can’t even process the phrase “I don’t drink”
I feel like that’s changing, at least in my circles/generation. A lot of us still drink, but give mad respect to those who quit, its objectively just (kinda fun) poison.
Alcohol consumption among millennials is plummeting, and Gen Z never fucked with it much to begin with.
I’ve heard Gen Z doesn’t like to drink because they’ve grown up being filmed all their lives and don’t want to be caught on camera being an idiot
Have lost family members to the stuff. It’s horrible. I’m sorry for your loss.
I went to a family event this weekend. I was offered a shot. I was ridiculed by several people. Alcohol almost killed me and I was in a coma for the entire summer of '21. They all knew this. It’s sad how socially acceptable alcohol is. I didn’t have the shot.
good for you, your family has an amazing lack of empathy
I knew what I was in for before going. I didn’t expect much. I think the two months in the coma detoxed me pretty well. Leading up to that, I had gotten to the stage in my addiction where I wished my body didn’t need booze anymore, or I was dead. I just feel bad for people going to where I was headed.
yep, alcohol is def one of the worst drugs out there
Alcohol truly is the worst. I once saw it referred to as insidious and that’s always stuck with me. It is a creeping poison that winds its way around your heart and strangles you to death. It’s a fucking nightmare substance. And you can get it at any grocery store or gas station.
I know someone who started drinking heavily at university, 18-21 or so, and in the span of ten years he needed double hip replacements. Apparently alcoholism can make your body stop absorbing calcium/vitamin D so he has the bones of an elderly person at 32.
It’s such a horrifying drug to normalise. I didn’t even know it could cause osteoporosis on top of the seizures and liver failure and cancer.
