028: staying sober
Like previous family occasions, the last couple weeks of 2023 were spent chugging much of the booze we’d bought to celebrate, most of them mixed drinks as I could no longer stomach drinking gin on its own. Out of gluttony and greed, I even managed to sneak in a few ice cold bottles of Tanduay Ice and Smirnoff in our last grocery run of the year. Since the pandemic began, it became tradition to celebrate the holidays barely sober.
There’s not much I remember about how I closed the year, the lack of recall part of the routine each time I would drink: my memory would slowly fog as the night draws on, unable to make sense of how I got to bed unless I tried really hard. Without my digital footprint and my journal on hand, I’d be clueless about what went down or what I was up to before all the booze caught up with me. All I remember was wasting away those days in bed, watching random videos and films and taking very long naps to make up for those days I failed to reach 8 hours of sleep.
It wasn’t always like this. I entered lockdown with very little tolerance for alcohol, a trait I was content with despite being teased by veteran alcoholics, who believed that the amount of entertainment you could have in a night was proportionate to how much alcohol you could consume. Though I get flustered very easily, I found no shame in only needing one bottle of beer to be inebriated. I reveled in this type of innocence, considering it an economic choice in enjoying the rare nights I would go out. All it used to take was less than a hundred pesos for me to feel wobbly enough to begin dancing the night away. Alcohol consumption was a social activity back then, and you would only ever see me with a drink in hand during a night out, be it in a bar that a friend dragged me to, or a restaurant where friends and I would overstay our welcome, giggling like teenage girls after finishing a pitcher of cocktails.
The times I’d get drunk were only a handful of occasions back then, my first time in 2016, d dear friend’s 21st birthday party in Ortigas. We had an entire hotel suite to ourselves, too much booze for our own livers to handle, but this newfound freedom was unlike any other that we basked in it anyway. A few drinks in, I began to fight my best friend’s situationship, warning him that I would go to Taft myself if that meant throwing hands at him. Everyone bursted into laughter at my drunken threat, the last vivid moment I remember from that night. I woke up in the bedroom at midnight to Jem and Shaina by my side, the pair making sure that I got hydrated while they filled me in on what my consciousness missed out on. Apparently we all drank some more, but I found myself puking my guts out in the bathroom not long after, while my best friend at the time was puking on the sink.
Months into the first semester I would once again experience getting drunk at a dingy bar somewhere in Taft where I met my Tinder match again. After some friendly banter amidst the crowd that unabashedly screamed the n-word when Caroline came up, he challenged me to a drinking game that involved chugging as many bottles of Red Horse as possible. He was raised in a very strict and traditional household, his only form of relief found in nights out with friends after a stressful day in school. Even if I knew that we would never date due to cultural differences, there was a growing desire to stand out from his roster. I shamelessly took on the challenge even though I’d never had beer, downing three bottles like it was just another Thursday. I hated how it tasted, but I chugged it all down anyway, hoping that it either starts to taste better or I get desensitized to its bitterness.
Impressed at my new personal record, he had no clue that it was my first time drinking beer. “I really thought you’d back out,” he told me. “But damn, dude, you’ve earned my respect.” Though he and I would become really good friends later on, that night we went our separate ways, my memory unable to explain how my friends and I ended up sharing a table with strangers where I tried sobering up by staring at some guy’s green alumni card.
People have a hard time taking alcohol dependence seriously, and more often than not, this does not come to mind when young adults of today think of addiction. Many would think about hard drugs, most of which we cannot afford without any kind of financial safety net. To be fair, it was also hard to take seriously back in school when we were introduced to the concept of gateway drugs in our General Psychology class, our professor citing alcohol as an example of a drug that could cause an individual to use heavier, more addictive substances. I remember laughing at how absurd this logic was, because who in the right mind would let their alcohol use take them down the rabbit hole of experimentation with more dangerous substances?
It turns out a lot of people would.
Once you are of age, alcohol becomes a legal substance that even serves an important function in social gatherings: for one, it makes navigating your meat suit a lot easier. When taken in small doses, alcohol acts as a stimulant, which explains the boost of energy and elation after a shot of tequila or a sip of your favorite alcoholic drink. Pair this with mingling with strangers and friends, and you now have the young adult’s guide to a thriving nightlife. Prior to the pandemic, I was never one to rely on this formula, but I did meet more people who would prove its reliability. It was post-grad life in Katipunan that I observed how much of a necessity it was to drink in order to stay social, to tolerate one’s table, or to even get laid.
There were people that I met in Walrus and sometimes Pop Up that happily introduced themselves as high functioning alcoholics, a term used to describe those with enough self-awareness that they are dependent on booze to stay sane, but possess the restraint to keep themselves from falling off the deep end. It became fascinating to me how this vice is prevalent in social settings regardless of its risks, almost everyone needing a drink in hand to enjoy the company of strangers or to convince themselves entirely that this function is great.
When community quarantine was implemented and the government had all these silly names and distinctions for each type of quarantine, one of the biggest concerns that people mulled over was the liquor ban in the first two weeks of March 2020. Even if I identified as a social drinker, I also began to crave a bottle of Smirnoff because it was getting too much, man. It was probably the scarcity of alcohol that made it so alluring to purchase and consume, but at the time my only reason was that I simply needed to unwind. The days were starting to blur, boundaries between my professional life and personal one no longer in sight, because the school that I worked for back then thought that it was a good idea to maintain the pre-pandemic workload despite the massive shift in basic education.
What started out as a mere craving turned into my weekend plans. My being restrictive and shy with booze changed throughout the first year of the pandemic, as I found adventure in trying new drinks, my favorite ones being Smirnoff, Soju, and Lemon Dou. I wasn’t very choosy with cocktails, although I often gravitated toward those with tequila or gin as its base. I survived much of the 2020 pandemic half-sober, eventually relying on alcohol to get me a good night’s sleep, or to temporarily forget this limbo that we were all stuck in. It did not help that e-numans became a thing, video calls we’d have with friends either planned or spontaneously, supplemented with our drinks of choice. Alcohol found its way to my routine.
As restrictions eased in 2021, the first place I ever set foot in was at a bar that a friend worked at. I would hang out there whenever I wanted a breath of fresh air, whenever I wanted to remember that life existed outside my parents’ house, and so I was there often. This was when my drinking began to take a turn for the worse, and I’m not even very trusting of my own recollection in explaining how exactly it came to be that way. According to friends who witnessed the worst parts of drunken me, one time I drank too much Empi Light (that I do not remember even getting) that I ended up puking all over the smoking area outside. I was lucky enough to have had people care about me enough to protect whatever dignity I had left, rushing to get me water and sober me up before I was brought home safely.
Situations like these happened numerous times throughout 2021, and at the time it was still acceptable to blame the ruckus on how the pandemic forever altered the way we behave and cope with change, but part of me was not content with this kind of reasoning. I could not stop, though, as I still went out and I still drank and I still invited friends to tag along with me. It was not too long until I brought this behavior home with me, drinking regardless of the occasion and finding comfort in the fact that I could literally drink anytime.
Those clumsy, drunken nights in Mugen should have been my wakeup call, but I was too stubborn to admit how bad it had gotten. The realization that I was becoming an alcoholic—or that I’d become one—dawned on me just last year, when I would go out of my way after work to buy a can (or two) of Lemon Dou so that I could drink it at home. This happened more times than I’d like to admit, and what used to be a social activity that I engaged in when there was an event to call for it, finally turned into a solitary act that I was not happy with at all.
I also noticed how much tolerance I’d gained in the last few years, how many more bottles of beer it would take to feel the buzz, and even how fast I would gulp down my drinks compared to my peers. There were people impressed by this, but it was the kind of validation that I no longer found value in anymore. This high tolerance for alcohol was only ever worth the praise and bragging rights back in college when there were less health risks to worry about. I finally got around to admitting to myself that the blackouts weren’t normal at all, and that I’d been lucky all these years that I never got harassed or assaulted because I had people looking out for me by my side, even if it was difficult work having to care for a friend that did not know their limits or refused to honor it.
Today marks 150 days of not drinking alcohol. I’m both surprised and relieved to have gone this far, especially that the pandemic took away the very little faith I had in my own self-restraint. Looks like I still got it. The consensus is right: the first two weeks swearing off alcohol were the most difficult ones, although it took very little effort for me not to get swayed by the urge to grab an ice cold can of booze. I was already happy having gone a week without alcohol, but then I wondered if I could go two weeks. Then three, four, five went by so fast, and by June I’ll have gone five months without it.
The pros significantly outweigh the cons: I’ve been more clear-headed, which has led to better and more informed decision making. Emotional regulation has felt like much more work now, and I consider this a good thing, because no longer do I have to reach for a glass of alcohol as substitute for the work that is needed to be present and to accept my emotions instead of dissociating or running away. Nights out become a practice on liking myself without the kick of booze to boost my ego and act more confident, although it seems that I have to get more sleep if I want to last past midnight when socializing with others. Being sober is a less costly lifestyle for me now, although a good amount of money that I could be saving often goes to supporting my iced coffee dependence which, as I think about it, is the new addiction that I have to regulate before I begin to regret it.
Ever since I hit 3 months sober, it’s become more obvious to me how my conscious decision not to drink actually gets the attention of people. I’ve been getting asked by friends when I intend on breaking my streak and allowing myself to drink again. Some have been more dramatic about their curiosity, wondering aloud if this lifestyle change would be a permanent one. And it’s both funny and awkward to bump into old friends who, upon finding out that I haven’t had a drink in a while, express their doubt about my sobriety and happily anticipate the day that I drink again, telling me that I ought to invite them out so that we could celebrate. My months old sobriety is now the conversation starter for new people I’d meet at a night out with friends, right after I get myself a glass of water while everyone else pours from the pitcher, directing questions at me such as, “Why aren’t you drinking?” or “What got you to stop?”
And I don’t blame any of these people for acting the way that they do and asking all sorts of questions about this lifestyle change, because it often happens in bars and hangouts on weekends. While I can temporarily give up booze, I cannot sacrifice my social life, which explains why I still go out with friends even if our itinerary for the night includes having a drink. The answers have all been the same as I’ve rehearsed it enough times now: no, I’m not drinking. I’ll only have water. Well, the pandemic made me high tol and I didn’t like that, so I’m doing a little reset. Uhh, it’s been a few months now, and at this point I just want to see how far I can do without it!
Although I have no plans of breaking my streak anytime soon, there have been moments of vulnerability where I wanted to pick up a drink and have fun with friends. What makes staying sober sometimes hard is that you feel like you’re missing out on a shared experience, like increasing your chances of developing cirrhosis with friends, or getting so wasted in the girl’s bathroom that you feel this woozy oneness that seems like the closest we will ever get to Barbie land. These are moments that I still want to experience in moderation, which will be inevitable once I feel like drinking again. In the meantime, I am learning to treasure the sharpness of my memory in remembering my days, the confidence in my own decision making, and the discomfort that sometimes comes with confronting certain parts of my psyche that I don’t fully understand. I think I’m getting close to liking all of myself now.