I quit drinking and using drugs 11 years ago after I had what I call a “really bad accident” with some liquor and a bottle of pills – for about five years. Things got really ugly and out of control, so I got help and quit using.
That said, I’m in no way opposed to other people enjoying a drink. I have noticed, however, that summer holidays like 4 July and Labor Day seem to compel people to take photos of their brightly colored cocktails and dew-flecked beer bottles and post them on social media. Usually that’s not a problem for me. Usually.
A guy I met after an LGBT AA meeting in Miami told me that you know you’re getting older when people start coming into recovery who bottomed out on drugs you’ve never heard of.
“I can’t keep all the letters straight these days,” he said. “GHB, PCBs, and what was that stuff you said you were on, oxen cotton?”
“Oxycontin,” I said, “but I did a lot of other stuff, too.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I got sober in the 80s. I kind of wish I’d gotten to try Ecstasy, but that was after my time.”
That’s how I feel about Moscow Mules. Last summer, my social media feed erupted with photos of my drinking friends’ frosty copper mugs, brimming with lime wedges and ice cubes.
“Why, ginger beer is delicious,” my inner alcoholic – I’ve named him Earl – woke up and said. “Why didn’t we ever think to mix it with liquor?”
And for the first time in a long time, I felt the stirrings of that deep, unquenchable thirst. I quickly scroll away from those photos now, but there’s no denying that they stir my cravings, that little itch that just turns into a bigger itch when you scratch it. Then it turns into a spark and the spark turns into a bonfire that no amount of intoxicating substances will smother.
That’s what it’s like when you’re an alcoholic and drug addict. There’s no such thing as one drink or one cigarette or one Valium pill. So, even though the broken parts of my brain whisper to me that it couldn’t possibly hurt to have one little Moscow Mule, I stick with soda and lime.
It’s not usually all that tough to negotiate the world of normal drinkers. It took some adjusting, at first. In her excellent recent essay, Kristi Coulter recounted all the myriad ways that alcohol lubricates our social interactions and dulls the cumulative ache of negotiating a hostile and unpredictable world.
Many women, Coulter wrote, drink to “fool our own central nervous systems into tolerating” humiliations at work, bank accounts that hemorrhage money and all the ongoing emotional bludgeoning that comes from living in a culture obsessed with murder, rape and domination.
LGBT people, too, drink, smoke and take drugs at a higher rate than our straight counterparts. A 2012 study by the Center for American Progress found that while 9% of the general population abuse drugs and alcohol, an estimated 20 to 30% of LGBT people fall prey to addiction.
“The stress that comes from daily battles with discrimination and stigma is a principle driver of these higher rates of substance use, as gay and transgender people turn to tobacco, alcohol and other substances as a way to cope with these challenges,” the study said.
I’ve got better ways to deal with stress now. I work out, I box, I go to meetings and call my sponsor. I take my meds and go to therapy. And usually, that’s awesome. But it would be great if, this Labor Day, you didn’t wave your drinks in my face.
