A Queer in Recovery: A Romance of Lies

Hi, my name is _______, and I am an alcoholic.

I can honestly say that not all of my drinking days were bad. Not by a long shot. I still have many fond memories that involve or revolve around drinking, and those moments are the hardest to let go of as I enter into recovery.

There is an undeniable romance that is involved with the consumption of alcohol. The idea of a candlelit dinner with a sexy partner, opening a bottle of grigio and feeling the warm tingle traveling through my body still holds a space of desire inside me. Meeting up with a good friend inside a trendy bar on Walnut Street with the overhead lights set on a dim glow or sitting on a backyard patio sipping an ice-cold lager on a warm, summer evening are primarily the things I think of when I picture myself drinking. It’s not the endless nights with the curtains drawn, promising myself this won’t happen again tomorrow as I take swigs directly from the liter bottle of vodka, praying for this to, in fact, be my last drink.

There is a phenomenon that exists inside the brain of an addict that is two-fold and often fools us into using our drug of choice again: minimization and amnesia. I can, time after time, tell myself in the bright light of day that my drinking isn’t that bad, that I can control it this time, and that I can in fact stop after just one drink. I can forget the feelings of hopelessness, desperation, and shame that are associated with the countless number of times I have been proven wrong and wind up passing out on my living room floor because going up the stairs to my bedroom was an impossible task.

I have tried multiple times in my life to get sober, with the first time being at the age of 21, when the abundant access of alcohol was both legal and expected. I was supposed to go out and explore the world in an inebriated condition because that’s what young folks of drinking age do. Experimenting with boundaries was normal; blurring the line of upstanding citizen and acceptable trash is coming into adulthood and a right of passage. However, I started drinking at age 16, and by 21, I had built up a tolerance of someone far beyond a young 20-something-year-old.

I went almost four years clean that first time I dipped my toe into sobriety, yet I wasn’t convinced that I was an alcoholic. Remembering back to the reasons why I quit drinking was difficult, and my disease had not progressed enough to truly drive home the fact that I was better staying in recovery. I needed to hit a rock bottom that I couldn’t talk myself out of.

Through the gift of amnesia, I picked up a drink again at age 24 and was quickly off to the races. It took less than two years for me to get a DUI and start having significant consequences due to my lack of control with alcohol. I then spent the next eight years drinking on and off, with my bouts of sobriety lessening each time, from two years, to three months, to one week. My alcoholism had progressed past the turning point from problem drinker to full-blown alcoholism, and my brain continued to come up with cunning and baffling ways to convince me that I still didn’t have a problem.

It was the fear of missing out that typically led me to pick up another drink after a time away from alcohol.

It wasn’t necessarily a desire to drink, or even a search for the euphoric feeling that drinking offered; it was the romantic notion of what a life with alcohol meant.

Weekend getaways to a beach with a mai tai in hand, happy hour with coworkers after a long and shitty week, jubilant celebrations with popped champagne bottles among friends and loved ones, was what I dreamed of. I feared those would be taken away from my life entirely if I couldn’t participate in them sans alcohol.

Since sobriety, the only thing that has been truly taken away from me are the surface-level relationships that revolved around my drinking. The partner who was a bartender, the friends who only wanted to meet up for drinks, and the parties where getting shitfaced were the sole objective. My drinking never led to those beach mai tais and never ended at happy hour; it usually left me hiding and sneaking sips between meetings at work; it led me to doing reckless and dangerous things to get another drink when what I had in the house wasn’t enough at night, and it gave me horrendous hangovers and tremors in my hands each and every morning.

Having a single glass of wine with dinner, a couple beers with my friends in the evening, or sticking to one vodka and soda while I’m at a queer bar watching a drag show is my greatest desire. Even after my last relapse that led me closer to taking my own life than I ever thought possible, I still have the uncanny ability to minimize the horrible memories of what actually happened and tell myself, ‘it wasn’t that bad’ or ‘it will be different this time.’

What works for me is surrounding myself with other people who suffer with the same talent of alcoholic amnesia and minimization as I do in order to prevent the romance of drinking from leading me back to it. While programs like Alcoholics Anonymous aren’t for everyone, and trust me, I have my own issues with handing my will and my life over to the care of a higher power (we will talk about that later), it is the only medicine at this stage of my recovery that can cure my insanity of repeating this absurd cycle. The honesty, the vulnerability, and the fellowship of recovery groups remind me of how bad it truly was so I can accept the fact that consuming alcohol for me is anything but romantic.

-An anonymous queer in recovery

*Follow @queer.in.recovery on Instagram or email a.queer.in.recovery@gmail.com for additional support and resources.

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