It’s quite interesting what people think an alcoholic is. The age old description is someone who drinks in the morning or someone who ‘has the shakes’. Or someone who drinks out of a brown paper bag to hide their habit. I mean really? Even that would cost you an extra 5p these days! 

Everyone has a ‘vision’ of what an alcoholic is but it is unlikely to look like themselves. My personal definition is anyone who cannot control their intake of alcohol or drinks to excess, with negative consequences. I think your personal definition is dependant on your own alcohol intake. If you have a couple of glasses on a special occasion, then you’d consider me to be a raging alcoholic, however I didn’t drink in the morning, or out of a paper bag, so maybe I wasn’t after all?

I know that writing about my ‘habit’ has created some discussion about ‘my problem’. Some people have said ‘they didn’t know it was that bad’. But that’s dependant on your definition of bad isn’t it? I didn’t fit in with the stereotype but once I got started, there was no stopping me. And for me, that was a problem. Throwing up all the next day, that was a problem. Losing my free time at the weekend, eating rubbish, getting fat. That was a problem. But did I escape being an alcoholic because I didn’t sip out of a brown paper bag on a park bench at 8am? It’s questionable. 

It is also interesting that people feel there must be something sooooo wrong if you don’t want to drink alcohol. Why has it become so normalised to partake in ingesting poison? If you politely decline heroin, that doesn’t make you weird or boring? That makes you an intelligent human being so why is alcohol so different?! So acceptable??!

I prefer to categorise myself as the ultimate binge drinker. And eater. And smoker. Nothing could satisfy the beast. And the more I drank, the higher my tolerance became. I do think it is a problem to drink for 12 – 15 hours at a time, to drink a bottle of wine before leaving the house for a night out, to forget doing the things the night before. On a programme I saw, it described drunken black outs as your brain being physically unable to make memories. How sad is that? That I actually chose to do that to myself? It makes me shudder and I intend to never do that harm to myself again. #day91 🙋🏻🐟