Stop Telling Me This Is Normal

I sit in my car with my friend and let the engine idle, purring into the silence I’ve created. There is a meeting in this district that I promised myself I would go to — a Big Book Study that I’ve been to before and adored. It is mid-evening and the meeting is in an hour, and I’ve just turned to my friend sitting shotgun and told her, “Why don’t we just go get a drink instead?”

Of which she is all for, nodding at the eagerness in my voice: “Yeah, we could have one last good run.”

And now it is silent but for the gentle rumbling of my car as my mind spins with possibilities of how this night could go. We could go dancing. We could see a comedy show. We could sit in my favourite bar and talk the way best friends do. Hell, we could find other drugs for all I’m into. The night is young and so are we…. right?

I ball up my fist and hit the steering wheel one, two, three times in front of me, frustrated at my own desire. Frustrated at how easily the words, ‘Do you really have a problem?’ fall from her lips. Frustrated at how quickly this deflates my fragile determination to recover.

13 days. 13 days. 13 days.

We fall back into silence. I wonder if I can’t just wait here and ponder the intricacies of misuse and coping until the meeting begins, give a weak ‘oops,’ when the minute ticks past and decide I may as well give in until next week, until the next meeting; as though this were a diet and I were having a cheat day.

As ridiculous as that comparison is, I will say this of it: We give credit and encouragement to those seeking healthier lifestyles via diet and exercise — that we cannot give the same respect to those seeking sobriety from alcohol is an homage in of itself to the (normalized, if not outright encouraged) unhealthy relationship with alcohol that the majority of our society has, particularly young people.

I am twenty years old and in the last year of my undergraduate degree. I have seen and experienced the unbelievably negative effects of ‘student drinking culture’ firsthand: blacking out, losing jobs, missing class, injuring oneself or others, driving (and crashing) under the influence, needing alcohol in some form or another just to get through the day… these are not normal. Promising oneself to only have one drink and being unable to control oneself after that is not normal — ask any alcoholic, and she or he will tell you that that is the main symptom of the disease.

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