Gentle Suggestions

This is not an advice column

I hope this is not too much. I had a binge drinking problem about 5-6 years ago that culminated in a trip to the hospital for alcohol poisoning and losing the trust of my best friends and family. Anywho, I've worked hard over the years to control my drinking and have regained the trust of those people. But, I feel myself slipping. I don't drink at home, apart from an occasional beer during a movie, and can go out to dinner or a happy hour and have one or two drinks and go home. But, when I want to "have fun" it's over for these hoes. Now that the sun is out and the temperature is rising, I'm finding that I want to "have fun" more often. Lots of questions for you: Do you drink? Have you ever had an issue/problem with controlling yourself with any vice? How do you decouple that vice with the "fun" you have while doing it?

I was going to answer some suburban neighbor drama this week—they have so many weird problems over there— but you’ve been on my mind a lot. A lot. So much so that it caused me to track my drinks all week. And because of that I am going to take your questions one at a time.

Do you drink?

Where to even start? Nobody ever knew when I was a drunk as a teenager and at the time, I really thought I was getting away with the crime of the century. The Christian missionaries that ran my boarding school really surveilled us a lot and they created a culture where the kids surveilled each other so I was kind of proud of myself for operating under Jesus’ radar. But honestly I wasn’t running a sophisticated scam at all.

The missionaries were too focused on breaking up interracial couples and making sure there were no copies of Harry Potter on campus (witchcraft allegations) to pay attention to my drinking. And I was smart enough to mostly drink alone. Can’t get caught if you don’t drink with the other amateur drinkers. Especially if they’re spies for Jesus. Those kids were always doing questionable things and then throwing each other under the bus during morning devotional. I wasn’t going to get caught up in someone’s Dear Lord, I want to lift up Aminatou who is struggling a lot right now. Praying out loud as a form of gossip. We don’t talk about that enough and we should. But that’s not what we are here to talk about today.

The first week on my college campus, I saw a girl get a Minor in Possession charge in front of a frat house. A few hours later, she got ticketed AGAIN by another cop on the same block and her dumb moves solidified my resolve to not drink until I turned 21. Who comes to a consistently ranked top party school to dry out? Me, baby. I was not going to jeopardize my visa and more importantly, I was not going to look foolish.

Reader, I ended up looking very foolish halfway through Sophomore year. My mom died and I acted a fool big time. There are pictures of me from that time that if they were released, they would tank my Supreme Court nomination. Unless I was a Republican and they would name an amateur drinking holiday after me. A keg stand used to hate seeing me come. You really wanted me on your team for a drinking game but wow, how stupid were those? All beer pong and shotgunning beers do is lend a thin veneer of grandeur to the otherwise lackluster pastime of drinking mass quantities of lite beer. Competition, plus some sharp, shiny objects and suddenly that 24-pack of shitty beer seems a lot more exciting, and your afternoon far less depressing. The problem though is that even if you win a drinking game, you’re a loser. I won all the drinking games.

I feel bad for university administrators because they really do warn you about the dangers of drinking and nobody pays attention. At my school, they would also give you this card that had the exact number of calories for each drink and a diagram that would tell you how many burgers or whatever each drink corresponded to. So it would be something like a margarita=2.5 burgers or a piña colada= one bag of french fries. They were trying to swap out alcoholism for eating disorders but my frontal cortex was not done cooking yet so honestly it all sounded like a good deal to me. I was here for a good time, not a long time. My junior year of college, I would black out a few days a week at least. But I’m not going to lie to you. I had a lot of fun. And there was no hangover the Juan in a million migas plate could not fix.

Describing all this drinking is so boring to me now so let’s fast forward. After college I drank too much still. And worse, I went back to my habit of drinking alone. But it was classy. Very Olivia Pope with the big glass of wine vibes. It was cute until I started paying attention to my neighbors’ recycling. There were 4 of them in that row house and only one of me in mine but you wouldn’t have guessed it from the wine bottle recycling operation I was running in our backyard. I didn’t stop drinking and in fact, I had many alcohol fueled meltdowns over the years after the recycling revelation.

The thing that sticks out to me the most is how much I didn’t understand the role alcohol was playing in my life. Now it’s very clear to me that when I was crying on my friend’s air mattress about a man who I should not have been in love with, alcohol was doing the incoherent talking and the crying. Or that when I decided to introduce romantic intrigue to my living situation, the alcohol was fueling the makeouts with my roommate. Or that when I’m singing (Woop, woop) That's the sound of da police on the sidewalk instead of going back inside of the bar like the police officer said I should, that is definitely the alcohol singing.

I cannot believe I survived all that drinking.

Have you ever had an issue/problem with controlling yourself with any vice?

My relationship with alcohol today is pretty straightforward. I try not to keep any alcohol in the house and when there is a surplus of it—holiday gifts, dinner party offerings— I give it all away. I am blessed with genetics that did not predispose me to alcoholism, I do not have an addictive personality type and I am lucky enough to have good enough impulse control around substances. It really is all dumb genetic luck.

I still drink but I also can go months at a time without a drink. I don’t really need it is what I tell myself. And honestly, my body has changed and now it lets me know very loudly when I do dumb shit. For example, I had a glass of champagne and then an espresso martini the other night over the course of many hours. I am still a relatively new coffee drinker. Do I have any business mixing vodka and coffee? After the bubbles? After 10PM? This was absolutely an own goal and I did it to myself.

As I type this, I am nursing a coconut water that cost me too much money from the happier grocery and also a Nalgene full of water mixed with this Mexican effervescent antacid I swear by, sal de uvas from the good people at Picot laboratories. It’s basically sodium bicarbonate with citric acid and I know I said I don’t have an addictive personality but it’s possible I’m addicted to this. Headache? Sal de uvas. Nausea? Sal de uvas. Hot girl tummy ache? Sal de uvas. Diarrhea? Sal de uvas. Hangover? Sal de uvas! The translation means grape salt and I have no clue what that is and if it’s even prescribed for all the things I use it for, but it makes me feel better. Oh and now I am remembering that I also had a tequila soda before that dinner. This is the problem with that drinks tracking business. You think you only had 2 drinks in one evening but really you had 3 of them because the first two made you forget the third. This was such an amateur hour night for me and I am paying the price big time. They say that more than 3 drinks a day is “heavy drinking” for women but it falls in the range of “moderate drinking” for men. I’m a big girl so this is one place where I go with the boys. It’s not a good thing.

How do you decouple that vice with the "fun" you have while doing it?

I am going to level with you, when you’re asking a stranger about their drinking habits but really it’s about your drinking habits, you definitely have a problem.

And when you’re drinking to “have fun?” Big, big wahala as my people say.