My Alcoholic Drinking Style

So what did my drinking look like?  I suppose, for much of my drinking, it resembled a sort of party drinking.  It was never really what you would call genteel social drinking.   And I don’t think I was ever that kind of drinker.

Right from I when picked up a drink, right at the beginning, I liked to get drunk. I didn’t see it that way, as getting drunk, I just liked the effect, and I just wanted more of it, and always felt that the effect I was really looking for was in the next drink.  For much of my drinking drugs were often associated as well.

So there was a bit of cannabis, some hallucinogenics like LSD, there were some uppers, some downers, a bit of coke.  There was all that sort of thing associated with the drinking.  Drinking tended to be a spree. I believe that for quite a lot of my drinking I could actually control it, at least so that it didn’t run into the next day.  But towards the end, it almost always did.

I had a group of friends who were a bit like me, possibly some of them were a bit more in control.  And at least one of them ended up in alcoholics anonymous as well.  The rest of them I just don’t know where they went to.  And one or two who I drank with in the latter days are actually dead now, mostly through alcohol. But they drank a lot like me and when we met it was, you know, it was party time.  You know it was load music, it was party.  We would invite people along the more the merrier.  We would go to the pub first then afterwards we would get a huge amount of booze and a maybe bit of cannabis.  And you know that’s just the was the way it was.

When I got married my wife decided that this was not a lifestyle that she wanted to be part of, even though that’s where she had originally met me.  And after the first couple of parties that we had our house, she banned everybody from the house.  And what happened then was that my drink really started to change.  I lost touch with the party crowd, because I just didn’t see them much.  They weren’t allowed round to my house and I didn’t make the effort to go to their place.  So we lost touch.  I ended up drinking with people in the pub that I just I didn’t know and, if the truth be told, I didn’t particularly like either.   But they were there, and they were drinking and that was fine by me.  So they were not friends, they were acquaintances and, when I left the pub I guess they didn’t even notice, except to say well maybe who was that guy sitting in the corner.

So my drinking was never really what we would call particularly civilized, and as it came towards the end it became more bingeing.  So the one day would run into two days, three days, four days and eventually it ran into weeks.  And the withdrawal symptoms started.  Then they got worse and then I wasn’t drinking to have a good time any more, I was drinking to get rid of the effects of the previous drinking, and on it would go.

And so, I became very dependent on drinking, and if I didn’t drink I had really horrendous withdrawals, and so I kind of needed to drink as I mentioned in another video.

That was kind of the style of my drinking.  Drugs were not always but very often involved, and particularly towards the end.  It was more often a tranquilisers.  So if I couldn’t drink then I’d take one or two tranquilisers just to keep me stable.

In the next video I’ll talk about why I stopped drinking.