I don’t remember when drinking stopped being a choice and started being the only thing.
There wasn’t a single day where I crossed some obvious line. It just… happened. One day it was a few beers after work. Then it was a few before work. Now it’s the first thing I think about when I open my eyes, before I even register what day it is.
Mornings are the worst. It’s not like waking up — it’s like surfacing from a bad dream straight into another one. My hands shake before I’m even out of bed. My tongue feels like it’s wearing sandpaper. My heart is pounding but my body is sluggish, like my blood’s been replaced with glue. The sweat is cold and clammy, soaking into the sheets. My stomach rolls in slow, nauseous waves.
That’s withdrawal. And I know exactly how to stop it.
The first swallow in the morning is never enjoyable. It’s not about taste — I stopped caring about taste years ago. It’s about the burn hitting my throat and the warmth flooding my chest, and feeling my hands steady out like someone flipped a switch. It’s the relief. The relief comes before the buzz now.
From there, the day is a slow, deliberate maintenance routine. I know roughly how much I need to drink each hour to keep the edge off without tipping into the kind of sloppy drunk that gets noticed. I tell myself I’m pacing. In reality, I’m just feeding the beast in steady intervals so it doesn’t claw me apart from the inside.
Work is a blur. I do just enough to not get fired. My brain runs on two tracks — the one that gets me through whatever task is in front of me, and the one that’s always calculating how much is left in the bottle at home, whether I need to stop on the way back, how long I can wait before the next hit. I keep mints and gum in my pocket like talismans, swishing coffee in my mouth to mask the smell.
Social interaction is… complicated. I’ve learned to keep my distance, to smile just enough so people don’t ask questions. Eye contact feels dangerous — like someone might see the constant low-grade panic behind it. Most people don’t look that closely, though. They’ve got their own problems.
Physically, I’m breaking down. My liver aches in a way I can feel when I twist or bend. My skin looks dull, my eyes are ringed in red, and I’ve started getting this weird numbness in my fingertips. I tell myself it’s bad circulation, but I know better. My sleep is fractured into short bursts, and the nightmares come every time I start to sober up in the night.
Emotionally, it’s smaller and meaner than people think. There’s no dramatic sadness, just a constant background hum of dread and self-loathing. You start every day promising you won’t drink as much, and you end every night staring at the empty bottle, wondering when you lost control.
And the cycle doesn’t stop. You wake up, you fix the shakes, you maintain, you pretend, you fade out, you start over. The hours blur. The weeks blur. The only thing that’s consistent is the bottle — the friend that’s killing you, the killer you can’t imagine living without.
People think rock bottom is a moment. For me, it’s a place I’ve been living in so long I’ve memorized the furniture.