After years of drinking and pushing the limits, I wanted to share my story

I once heard somewhere that alcohol is one of the only things you can put in your body that tells a story. Most of them are usually comical and entertaining while others can be traumatic or even tragic. Everyone has learned a thing or two from drinking; whether it’s how to set your drinking limits or even something small like how to drink on a $10 budget amongst three friends. I have had both great and terrible drinking experiences and I’ve learned from almost every one of them. I’ve woken up halfway across the state in a car full of random girls I had apparently met the night before. I have also woken up in a hospital bed 400 miles away from my house.

It all started in California. I grew up being mostly raised by my older sister, Rachelle. My parents were out of town a lot, so my sister taught me everything I needed to know. My sister, like my parents, was also an alcoholic. So as an obvious guess, the apple didn’t fall far from the family tree. I assume my parents figured that their five screaming kids sounded like a fun day at Mardi Gras when they weren’t sober, which was seventy-five percent of the time. So like the rest of the family, I started drinking at a very young age. In high school I wasn’t the usual partier that drank occasionally such as weekends or holidays. I was usually going to school intoxicated or would start drinking the second I got home from school.

In the seven years of drinking, I have learned a lot. I now know the best way to pass a sobriety test while intoxicated. I’ve learned the best places to hide if a party gets raided are under bathroom sink or in the dog house. I’m also known to make the best and most efficient hangover cure the morning after. This year I learned the biggest lesson of my life. I finally realized that it was no longer important how fast I could chug a beer or how many shots I could take before I passed out. All my life it has been about what I’m drinking and where I’m drinking that had been the most important to me. And then it all hit me one day. Had I become so obsessed with drinking that I lacked the most important values in life? Since when did a bottle of vodka become more important than my friends and family? It was about two months until graduation and soon the rest of my friends and I would be moving away to college to hopefully do better things. Finally one day I got a huge reality check.

After seven years of underage drinking I was arrested by the police finally being caught at a party. Two weeks later I got my diversion sentence. I either had to do seventy-five hours of community service or attend a month of alcoholic anonymous classes. I figured that the classes would be a piece of cake and I would just fake like I was recovering and that I was cured of my “disease.” The first meeting just started at as an introductory. We all said our names and told some of our stories, each of us trying our best not to sound like the biggest addict. I didn’t know whether it was the grown men sobbing on each other’s shoulders or the horrifying stories that got to me the worst. Some of these guys had hit rock bottom: going from wealth and marriage to living on the street because they had drank away their motivation and self-respect. Some had even lost friends and family members to drunk drivers. Even worse, some had been that drunk driver behind the wheel responsible for the death or injury of that one unlucky innocent soul.

No parents should have to arrange their own son’s funeral. I didn’t want my parents to. Most people would probably say “at least you’re out drinking instead of doing drugs.” At the rate I was going I would probably have ended up dead faster then any drug user. I looked back at all the times I had put my life in danger. I had driven drunk on several occasions. I had ridden with drunk drivers hundreds of times. I can name more than one time I had woken up not knowing where I was at or who I was with. After seven years I finally realized that alcohol wasn’t worth my life.

Though I did learn a very good lesson, I’m not going to lie and say I quit drinking, because I didn’t. Though, for the most part, I have recovered and I’m no longer as stupid as I once was. I no longer let my life dangle by a small string. I have learned how to limit myself from drinking and keep it mostly social. After seven years I finally developed self control, which is hard to say for a lot of college students. In my case, alcohol did tell a story. It told the story of my life. And after seven years, I’m finally the one telling the story.