Part Two

This is Part Two of Five in a series. Please see this for the First Post of this Series.

Part Two

I didn't start drinking until I was in college. I was a very introverted, scholarly, "good girl" in high school. I didn't touch the stuff. I always hated the way I was perceived by people in my hometown. I wanted to be popular and well liked, not just known as a quiet smart girl. So, I picked up and graduated a year early from high school. I went to college when I turned 17. I made a conscious effort to change my "image". I drank my first night of school in the dorms. I joined a group of people drinking Southern Comfort and Coke. (terrible...and I never touched the stuff again!!) I loved the way it made me feel, even though I got deathly ill afterwards. The next day I had a major hangover. Despite that, alcohol made me fit in finally. It made me extroverted. It made me feel like the me I wanted people to know. Recently, I recalled that when I was getting sick from alcohol for the first time, there was a girl holding my hair back while I basically sat ill in the dorm toilet stall. To me at the time, in my warped mind, that seemed like true friendship. A feeling came over me the following day like “oh, this is what you do to become popular”.

I was a little lost during my first year of college. Although I had the “tool” (alcohol), per se, to become socially acceptable, I had a couple issues my first year. One of my roommates tried to commit suicide, I was accosted and shoved against the door by an Ohio State football player who was upset with me for telling my friend that he had a girlfriend, and my new roommate had some major anger/rage issues and decided to take them out on me. In high school, I had one serious relationship, but I never dated other than that. Drinking made me comfortable to talk to men and “be myself”. I think, in using alcohol as a social lubricant and to escape my issues, I saw it as the perfect elixir.

At the end of my freshman year, I was an emotional mess. I was dealing with a turbulent living environment. In addition, the drinking had gotten me into some precarious situations with men. I don’t know if I was naïve (I don’t think I was?), but I think I wanted so badly to believe that these men paid attention to me because I was interesting, not because I was drunk and perceived as an “easy lay”. It was because I pretended that they liked me for me that I got into these situations. When I usually ended up telling them “no”, I had a hard time dealing with the fact that they only wanted sex and I usually got a hard time from them for “leading them on”. There were a couple points where I passed out and almost got raped. Luckily, I came to in time and usually ended up walking home by myself on the large, unsafe campus.

At the end of that year, I enrolled in a program to learn Spanish in Mexico. I went to Mexico that summer and had a blast. I made some real friends and learned some Spanish in the process. It was a great place to drink, too. What's Mexico without the beer and margaritas? I thought that I couldn’t practice my Spanish with the natives without drinking. I am a perfectionist, as are most alcoholics, and if I can’t do it perfectly, then I won’t do it. Yet, if I had a drink in me, then it came “easier” and gave me more courage. Drinking “helped” me, I rationalized, as I would for years. It helps me feel at ease with people and it helps me be conversant.

I continued to abuse alcohol like any other college student and actually slowed down for awhile. I certainly could go some time without drinking, and my drinking at that time was in binges. I graduated and went on to get my Master’s Degree. I drank in graduate school when appropriate, always in excess, but I was in control. I remember I dated a man who was most likely in the late stages of alcoholism in ’95 and ’96. I tried to get him to quit and told him that I would quit along with him. He never did, and the relationship ended. However, I realize now that I must have crossed the line around that point because I could have stopped at that moment and never looked back. I continued to drink, though, and my addiction started to rear its ugly head.