Recovering alcoholic thought 10 signs were ‘normal’ before realising he had a problem
A recovering alcoholic has laid out the 10 signs he now looks back on as things he used to see as 'normal' or even romanticise about his drinking before realising they were the signs of alcoholism.
Stu runs a channel where he talks about his drinking where he discusses going sober, what alcohol abuse was like for him and the various signs to watch out for that others might recognise within themselves.
Among these were the behaviours from him which he now realises were evidence of him being an alcoholic, but at the time he would see as something normal.
They range from him buying himself more drinks whenever he was on his feet in the pub to planning out his hangovers and picking drinks based on how alcoholic they were for the price.
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Laying out 10 major signs, Stu explained that each time 'it felt normal' but he's since come to realise 'it was alcoholism'.
Buying himself extra drinks
"First, buying myself extra drinks at the bar," Stu said as he described how there'd be 'a couple of variations' to this.
One of them was whenever it was his turn to buy a round he'd get himself 'a tax drink for the pleasure of buying a round'.
He said: "I would go up to the bar and I would say, I don't know, like six beers plus a shot of whiskey. And that shot was just for me, just for the privilege of buying a round.
"Every time I bought a round, I would buy an extra drink for myself."
This also manifested in another way as Stu would also buy himself an extra drink when he popped to the loo.
"On the way to the bathroom, I would pass the bar, ask for a drink, go to the toilet, come back, drink the drink, go back to my friends," he explained.
"I thought I was just like, I don't know, keeping my drunken energy up."
Taking a longer route home
When Stu left work he used to wander round the scenic route home and drink along his way, and if he took a longer route it meant more time to drink.
"If I had no plans that evening, I would deliberately pick the longest, slowest way home so that I could buy a little flask of whiskey or vodka and just drink that on a long meander home. I used to enjoy it.
"There's a word for it. Uh, I used to consider myself a 'flaneur'."
He said this was a 'kind of poetic name for someone who likes to wander around cities and enjoy the atmosphere and the culture'.
However, what he was doing was wandering the streets drinking.
"I used to think that was cool and interesting and kind of bohemian and all of that stuff, but really it was just alcoholism," he said.
Drinking before events with alcohol
Even when he was going somewhere where he knew there'd be alcohol, he'd make sure to leave early and get tipsy beforehand.
If he had something on at 8pm, he'd be out at 6.30pm and get a few drinks.
He said: "I would need 45 minutes to an hour before I arrived to get tipsy so that I could face the social exchanges, the social interactions.
"I would turn up inevitably late and drunk for everything.
"We call it pregaming, right? We give it this cutesy name. You pregame with your friends. It's unhealthy. It's unwise.
"It's definitely un-good and unsober."
Expecting everyone else to keep up
Something else he noticed about himself was his irritation at his friends for not drinking as much as he was, as he thought 'the purpose of drinking is to get drunk' and expected others to think the same.
"I wasn't drinking socially. I wasn't sociable. It was just the social event was an excuse to be able to drink high volumes of alcohol," he explained.
"I used to get frustrated when people would drink slow. If people were drinking slow, I would offer to buy everybody drinks.
"I would increase the rate of drinking of the entire group just to kind of validate my own trajectory toward drunkenness."
Using every event as an excuse
Stu recounted that when he was 16 he and his friends flew to Magaluf for a holiday, pretty much his first holiday without his parents.
He said: "I remember arriving at Heathrow to fly out and I remember arriving at Heathrow to go home and f**k all in between. Almost nothing."
For the next 20 years he said that pretty much any event he was going to was about drinking whether it was 'a football game, or it's an actual week off work and flying to a destination'.
He said: "If it was a bank holiday, it was an excuse to be slammed Saturday and Sunday so I could recover on the Monday. I would usually drink on the Monday anyway."
Irritation at his drunken behaviour
While he got annoyed at others for not drinking as much as he was, he'd also be irritated when someone brought up something he'd done while drunk.
He said: "I used to think that everybody got spiky and irritable when someone pointed out the fact that they said something stupid the night before."
He said it make him 'feel very uncomfortable' and he'd try to change the subject quickly.
"What I didn't like was that it revealed my relationship with alcohol. It revealed an unhealthy relationship with alcohol," he explained.
Spending lots of money on drinks for everyone else
Explaining that he tried to 'deflect away from my own drinking' by getting others to drink more and faster, Stu said he would spend a lot of money on rounds for other people.
He reckoned people thought he was a 'generous guy', but he says it was just another manifestation of the alcohol.
"Secretly, I was hoping that everybody else gets leathered with me so that it would give me an excuse to get leathered," he said.
Stronger drinks
Stu said that the main thing behind him choosing what to drink 'was the alcohol by gram to pound or euro', saying it was a matter of 'how much alcohol can I get for the least amount of money, basically'.
He said that the 'kind of vodka they sell at the till' in a shop usually fit the bill for this.
Pride at high alcohol tolerance
Something else he wanted to tackle was the idea that being a big drinker was something to be proud of.
He said that once upon a time he was 'proud of being a big drinker', saying that he thought he had an image 'of having a high tolerance, of being a hard drinking, big bearded, tattooed, liquor, whiskey drinking, fighting, fake teeth guy'.
Now he sees that was 'dumb, stupid, just unforgivably stupid'.
He described how he'd start some nights by doing 'drinking tricks' where he'd chug up to half a litre of vodka as a 'starting drink'.
Stu said: "I bought into the same kind of macho bulls**t as everybody else that your your worth as a man is linked to how much liquor you can handle."
Planning the hangover
Hangovers are horrible but Stu says he used to 'romanticise' them back in his 20s.
That didn't last forever as he pointed out that as you get older 'your relationship with hangovers changes pretty fast and they become miserable'.
He said: "There was a while where I'd be in relationships or dating or something, and part of my part of my of my love of drinking would also be the day after.
"You lose a day just on a Sunday lying in bed eating ice cream, watching s**t, having sex and and doing nothing.
"I used to think that that was normal to just be okay, to even look forward to losing a day of the week just to recover from drinking.
"Now in sobriety I realized that that was all in service of romanticizing the alcohol itself."
Topics: Lifestyle, Alcohol, Health, Mental Health
Joe Harker