Confessions of an ‘almost alcoholic’
COMMENT: Study says professional women drinking hazardous amounts
What does an alcoholic look like? For years, I wouldn’t have said that label had anything to do with me. I am a professional and the mother of two who grew up associating alcohol with fun. In my early 20s, it’s what marked me out as the archetypal party girl; in my early professional life, big nights out were par for the course. After the birth of my first child, wine lifted me from the humdrum and provided a reliable link to the old me, the one unfettered by responsibility.
I never drank during the day, but I now know that I was definitely displaying alcohol-dependent characteristics.
Which is why it came as no surprise to me to recently discover that educated women now head a global league table for alcohol abuse.
As the study by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development suggests, it’s lawyers, teachers and those working in the finance sector who are statistically more prone to consuming hazardous amounts of alcohol on a regular basis. (In Canada, highly educated women are almost three times more likely to be problem drinkers than their less educated counterparts.)
It is a problem that I only admitted to when I woke up in an emergency room under the disapproving glare of the duty nurse. By then I was consuming up to two bottles of wine a night and had blacked out during one of my regular binges. It was April 2011, and I haven’t touched a drop since.
I come from a middle-class background. I did not suffer any abuse or major upset during my childhood and can pinpoint nothing in particular as being behind the heavy drinking that would come to define me for more than 20 years. After my first daughter was born in 1999, I switched from beer to wine, drinking at home with my then husband or out with girlfriends in fashionable bars in the city.
A night out wasn’t enjoyable unless alcohol was on the cards. But the years I spent binge drinking were also marked with frequent episodes of drinking gone wrong. Friends would often bundle me into a taxi, handing the driver my address and an extra $10 for taking a drunken woman home who could potentially throw up in his cab. I woke up on countless occasions with no memory of the previous night. I showed up in front of work colleagues slurring my words, falling over and flirting outrageously. And, finally, the incident that called time on my drinking career for good — I woke up in a hospital at 3 a.m., covered in my own cold, congealed vomit, and had absolutely no idea how I had ended up there.
The shame and horror of that day made me realize that I had serious issues with alcohol, but even then I did not consider myself to be an alcoholic. This recognition of a “middle ground” type of alcohol dependency — which I believe many women will be able to identify with — led me to launch Soberistas.com in November 2012, a social network website aimed at women with problematic drinking patterns.
Within its first year, Soberistas attracted 20,000 members and my story was repeated over and over again in the site’s blogs and discussion forums; educated women, often mothers, largely with demanding jobs, were downing bottles of wine most nights in an effort to ameliorate their hectic worlds.
These new statistics on drinking are sobering for all of us. Thousands of women are struggling with their own, often hidden battle with booze. This is a secret and silent crisis, and I hope my own story can show that there is a way out.