By Cat Poland
Better Off Said
It was the summer of 2021. Covid was raging, and I had just finished a year of intense caregiving. I was grieving friends and loved ones we lost to the disease and other causes, while trying to give three young kids the best school experience possible, while keeping us all alive, while worrying nonstop about my elderly mom in assisted living who I could only see through a window, while watching conspiracy theorists and science deniers set fire to communal ethics and intelligence, while also trying to work.
It was … a lot. I’m sure you remember.
During this time, I turned to the one thing that had given me solace and comfort since I was 15 years old—alcohol. It was there for me when my brother was in the throes of severe mental illness, and when he died by suicide. It was there for me when I was achievementmaxxing in high school and college, graduating with straight A’s, because then maybe I was worth something. It was there for me when early marriage was rough and confusing, and then when I grieved the loss of our first child after an ectopic tube rupture. It was there for me during the twists and turns of parenting little ones, but that was okay because, “Mommy needs a drink, amiright?” It was there for me when my dad died in his sleep, and by the time I showed up to their house, he’d been laid on the living room floor while the paramedics performed CPR and my mom sat beside him in her underwear, in shock.
There are a million reasons why I drank, but only one that matters. It’s addictive. Alcohol is a drug, it’s addictive to human brains, and I am a human.
It really is that simple. And that’s the only thing that helped lift me out of the life-threatening place I was in. In July 2021, I realized that if I didn’t do something about my drinking, I was going to die. I was chemically dependent. I was terrified. I haven’t had a drink since Aug. 3, 2021.
No shame in my game
It wasn’t the first time I’d tried to quit, or hilariously, “cut back.” So what changed? I dropped all the shame and blame and prayers and pleading and digging into the backstory of why I drank, and simply looked at the science. I discovered the work of Annie Grace, and her approach to recovery called “This Naked Mind.” She has books, a podcast, workshops, online support groups, etc. And her approach, using “neuroscience and compassion,” spoke to me. (You can find more on her work at thisnakedmind.com.)
Alcohol is ethanol. Wait, we’re drinking gasoline? I mean kinda, yeah. It’s just diluted and “gussied up” with sugar, flavors, and an obscene marketing budget. Here’s how it works, explained by people much smarter than me:
- The chemical ethanol triggers a flood of dopamine in the brain’s reward center, mimics relaxing brain signals through gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA), and forces the nervous system to physically adapt over time.
- Alcohol boosts GABA, a chemical messenger that slows down brain activity and lowers anxiety. This makes the drinker feel relaxed at first.
- When a person drinks often, the brain gets used to the chemical. It cuts back on making its own happy and calming chemicals, meaning the person needs more alcohol just to feel normal.
- If the alcohol leaves the system, the brain panics because its chemical balance is broken. This causes bad feelings, stress, and intense physical cravings, which drive the cycle of addiction.
Hey wait a second. Wait one minute! You’re telling me it’s not because I’m weak? It’s not because I don’t have “willpower?”
What’s keeping us stuck
As the daughter of a man in recovery who attended AA meetings long after he quit drinking, you would have thought I took that path. But it wasn’t right for me.
Now, don’t come at me with your AA, NA, Al-Anon defensiveness. I think these can be good programs, and they’ve helped a lot of people.
But for me, everything I thought I knew about alcohol was wrong. I needed to strip away the stories surrounding it, and look at it through the lens of science alone.
I am not broken. My brain was highly susceptible to addiction because I’m neurodiverse and I’ve been through severe trauma. That’s it. Once it was simplified, I no longer needed to justify all the reasons why I drank, and I came to the calm realization that alcohol no longer served me.
I thought it was a bunker where I could go for safety, but one day, I realized that it only locks from the outside. I was stuck. My escape had turned into an escape room, and I had to get out.
Five years on this side of sobriety, and I am incredibly grateful. I sleep better, I feel better, and though I still worry sometimes about what I said or did in social settings, I know it’s just because I’m a little bit weird. And that’s OK.
If you’re questioning alcohol’s place in your life, you’re not alone. The percentage of Americans who use alcohol has fallen to the lowest rate in Gallup’s 90-year history. We’re fed up with this bait-and-switch.
I used to think I drank because I hated myself. That it was some kind of sick, twisted, self-harm I inflicted. That’s not true, either. I drank because I wanted to soothe my own pain. That’s what you do when you love someone. I loved myself. I was trying to comfort myself. I was just using the wrong tool to do it.
Now I know better. Now I am better. Happy five years of sobriety to me.
Cat Poland is a local writer. More of her work can be found at substack.com/@catpoland.
Citations:
- Caron Treatment Centers, caron.org
- Recovery Centers of America, recoverycentersofamerica.com
- Royal Life Centers, royallifecenters.com
- National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Addiction, www.niaaa.nih.gov/