Am I an Alcoholic?

If you found this article because you searched, "Am I an alcoholic?" you're not alone. It's one of the most common questions people ask when they begin to wonder about their relationship with alcohol. I know because I spent years asking myself the same question.

Not in a Google search bar, of course. Back in 2002, I wasn't searching the internet for answers. I was searching my own conscience. I wasn't looking for a diagnosis as much as I was looking for reassurance. I wanted someone to tell me I was fine. More accurately, I wanted to convince myself that I was.

The first time I seriously wondered whether I had a drinking problem was in the fall of 2002.

It was a Saturday afternoon during college football season. A group of friends had gathered to do what we did almost every weekend that time of year. We watched football, drank beer, argued about bad calls, celebrated touchdowns, and laughed at just about everything.

After a few hours, my friend Liz looked around the room and said, almost casually, "I hope I'm never diagnosed as an alcoholic because I don't think I could give up beer."

Everyone laughed, including me, and the conversation moved on almost immediately. But for reasons I couldn’t explain at the time her comment stayed with me long after everyone else had forgotten it.

On the drive home, I found myself repeating Liz’s question in my head. Could I give up beer if I wanted to? Part of me answered immediately: Of course you could. But underneath that confident voice was another one. I'm not really sure I could.

That second voice scared me. Not enough to stop drinking, of course. But it scared me enough that it planted itself in my psyche.

My life continued. I kept drinking, and I kept working, and I kept telling myself everything was fine.

Then, during the winter of 2003, I was driving home from a company holiday party after drinking more alcohol than I should have, and I was pulled over for speeding. The officer asked me to step out of the car and gave me a roadside sobriety test, which I passed. Then he asked me to take a breathalyzer test, which I failed. I blew a 0.08, which had recently become the legal limit in Indiana.

So I was arrested for DUI, and I spent the night in jail.

As part of my sentence, I completed community service and attended a weekend workshop for people with substance abuse issues. Looking back, it feels obvious that this should have been a turning point. But it wasn't.

On the contrary, I was convinced the whole thing was unfair. I couldn't understand why I'd been given the breathalyzer after passing the roadside test. I reminded myself that the legal limit had only recently changed from 0.10 to 0.08. Had I been pulled over a couple of years earlier, I told myself, I wouldn't have even committed a crime.

While at the weekend workshop, I looked around the room. There were people with three DUIs. People who were struggling with cocaine. People who had blown numbers twice as high as mine. Compared to them I felt normal, and that comparison became one of the most effective lies I ever told myself.

As you have probably guessed, the workshop didn’t stop me. I spent almost another decade drinking heavily.

Every now and then Liz's comment would drift back into my mind. Could I quit if I wanted to? Every time, I found a reason not to answer honestly.

I drank a bottle of wine after work on weeknights, sometimes with a few shots of whiskey. I showed up to work with hangovers more times than I care to admit, but I was also a charismatic high performer. My career continued to move forward. From the outside, alcohol didn't appear to be costing me much.

I drank hard on the weekends, but so did my friends. It never felt like I was an outlier because the people around me drank the same way I did.

The truth is that there were always signs alcohol was interfering with my life, my work, and my relationships. But there were also always signs that I was "normal" or "high functioning." I chose to believe the evidence that allowed me to keep drinking.

When people ask what finally convinced me to stop, I sometimes struggle to answer because there wasn't one defining moment. There wasn't a spectacular rock bottom. There wasn't a horrific car accident or waking up naked in a hotel lobby. The reality is that it was death by a thousand paper cuts.

There were so many missed opportunities to show up fully. There were so many promises that I made to myself and others that I quietly broke. There were so many conversations that I barely remembered.

And candidly, every morning I woke up disappointed in the person staring back from the mirror.

One paper cut isn't much. Neither are ten. But eventually enough small wounds become impossible to ignore. That was my reality with alcohol. 

I don't love the word alcoholic. I understand why it helps many people, and if that word gives someone language for their experience or opens the door to getting help, I genuinely hope they embrace it.

For me, though, it never quite fit. My struggle wasn't simply with alcohol. It was with honesty, and with integrity, and with identity.

When I drank, I became a tiny version of myself. The parts of me driven by fear, insecurity, ego, and escape slowly took over the control panel of my life. I didn't need a different label. I needed a different life.

Years later, after I got sober, I finally found language for what I had been trying to describe. In her exceptional book, We Are the Luckiest: The Surprising Magic of A Sober Life, Laura McKowen writes:

"People ask themselves all the time if they are an alcoholic, and I'm telling you it's the wrong question. It's the question we've been socialized to ask, the question I asked myself for a long time, and the question that shows up in my inbox all the time, but it's the wrong damn question. If believing you're an alcoholic feels true, if it elevates your life by furthering you on the path to betterment and healing, believe it. If it doesn't, throw it away.

The normal question is, Is this bad enough for me to have to change?

The question we should be asking is, Is this good enough for me to stay the same?

And the real question underneath it all is, Am I free?"

When I first read those words, I realized that was the question I had been trying to answer all along. For nearly twenty-five years, I wasn't free. I didn't think of myself as an alcoholic, but my life was undeniably chained to alcohol. As a result, I wasn't free to trust myself. I wasn't free to fully become myself. I wasn't free to live according to my values.

Sobriety gave me something alcohol never could. It gave me my voice. It gave me my integrity. It gave me my freedom.

I still think about that Saturday afternoon sometimes. Liz probably has no idea she planted a question that would follow me for the next decade. At the time, I thought the question was whether I was an alcoholic. It turns out that wasn't the question at all.

The question was whether I was free, and for nearly twenty-five years, I wasn't.

But today I am.

If you're reading this because you typed "Am I an alcoholic?" into a search bar, I can't answer that question for you. I will instead leave you with the question that will actually change your life:

Are you free?