Totally sound advice (not really).

Have you seen that @worldoftshirts guy, Joshua Block, on TikTok? All of his content - and he posts a lot - is now binge drinking vlogs. I don't know much about his earlier career. Seemingly pretty banal stuff, but he became TikTok famous and something of a local legend. I think his guardian died and he fell under the influence of some nefarious characters. And now, a couple of years later, he's killing himself via alcoholism. It's so extreme that there's an account which uses a spreadsheet to estimate his consumption and blood alcohol content over the course of each day. It's not abnormal for him to vomit on stream (often on himself), then continue drinking. This tracker of his drinking "incidents" lists 31 incidents of public vomiting, 29 of violence, 32 of discrimination.

While he may well, separately from his alcoholism, be a shitty person, it's sickening to watch someone livestream their self-destruction like this. Both because it's disgusting and sad, and because it's such a spectacle.

My drinking career: a retrospective

Thankfully my alcoholism was never as extreme as Josh's is, but I find myself doom-viewing every once in a while because it reminds me of the way I used to drink, because it makes the idea of drinking again scare me a bit more, and because it's just... enthrallingly depraved. The idea of simply giving up and indulging myself in alcoholic self-destruction still lurks, albeit much subdued. I don't imagine it ever really leaves any addict.

I started binge drinking around the age of 14 and continued for 19 years. It was consistently problematic. At university I managed to slice my hand up while incredibly drunk. Had to visit A&E, then be driven by my partner at the time to a hospital further afield for microsurgery to stich everything back together. Thankfully it all works pretty well again. I'm just left with some twinges in cold weather, and the scars^[1], as a reminder.

That was one of the most extreme incidents, but there was a litany of others. Though I was always a "high-functioning alcoholic" and mine was a "soft (rock) bottom". I never had weeklong binges, or even drank all that much on a daily basis (probably five or six pints of beer at most. Which is a lot for normal people, but not very much for an alcoholic), and had long periods of hardly touching it (after starting to use cannabis). But I did love binge drinking. Once you started, why would you want to stop? There's something uncomfortable about being just a little drunk, and something very uncomfortable about cutting oneself off, to the point that I'd choose abstinence over limited consumption. The drunker I got, the better of a time I seemed to be having.

But, as well as creating new problems, drinking also allowed me to ignore the ones I already had.

Clarity and quitting

Towards the end of 2022, and the end of a six-month backpacking trip, I'd finally started to come to terms with the fact that my drinking was not actually okay after doing some stupid and potentially consequential things, and some particularly stupid and consequential things. After that happened for the last time I started trying to tone it down and made a first quit attempt, which was pretty decent for a first try, ending when I was a pushover while touring Drunkards' Alley in Tokyo. That evening ended was actually quite sensible (aside from missing the last train and having to walk for an hour. But I like walking), and I resumed sobriety after that.

Then, the last session. I don't entirely recall what my thinking was at the time, but now tell myself that I'd probably truly accepted that I had to quit and wanted to indulge myself with one last hurrah. If that really was my rationale^[2] then things went very much to plan.

I woke up safe, uninjured, but also slumped over a table in an Osaka McDonald's. Thankfully, extreme public drunkenness is (so long as you don't disturb anyone) gracefully tolerated in Japan, and they'd just left me alone to sleep it off. I dragged my miserable self to Starbucks for a coffee^[3], and then back to my hostel, to spend a three-day hangover almost entirely in bed, miserable, regretful (I saw little of Osaka), reading quit literature. This triggered the insight that finally gave me clarity.

There was a binary choice to be made. One option was to continue drinking, now entirely disabused of the idea that my relationship with alcohol could be reformed^[4]. Each session was a roll of the dice - after the first drink, I'd have ceded control of what was going to happen. Would I have a "sensible" night, avoid blacking out, offending anyone, having unprotected sex, and get myself to bed having drank a pint of water and secured hangover supplies? Or would I be out until 6am, blacked out, trying to find somewhere else to get served? And, now knowing that sort of outcome was an entirely predictable matter of chance, left without the ability to excuse or minimise my drinking.

The other option was to just quit. So for now, and hopefully until I die, that's the last time I drank.

Fear and liberation

The experience of admitting that my drinking was problematic and needed to end, let alone actually ending it, was scary. I don't think people develop substance abuse problems without reason. It turned out that my reason was undiagnosed autism. Drinking made sensory sensitivities (though I wasn't consciously aware of them) bearable, made socialising easy, and killed anxiety. Whatever our particular reasons, we abuse substances because we find it comforting in some way, and the idea of giving up such an easy, dependable source of comfort^[5] is terrifying. Quitting sustainably means no longer being able to ignore, and so having to confront, whatever trauma drove us there.

But there's also another side to it - quitting is liberating and empowering. I realised that I never had to wake up hung over, in the grip of hangxiety, wondering if I'd done some awful thing again. It was as easy as just... not drinking.

597 days later

While I try to remain cautious, things have gotten a lot easier. I rarely miss alcohol now. I've proved to myself that I can enjoy socialising without it, that people still enjoy my company without it, and that I am capable of facing and addressing the things which led me to abuse it. It's already difficult to remember what my subjective experience used to be like. The memories (patchy as they are) almost feel like another person's.

I still have other substance abuse problems, but thankfully relatively benign ones. Nothing else has ever fucked me up like alcohol does.

Not engaging in risky and shameful behaviours, damaging my relationships and no longer writing off days to hangovers were excellent outcomes. But the most transformational changes have come from being forced to confront the problems which led me to drinking. This is what started me on the path towards finding out I'm autistic.