I Was a High Functioning Alcoholic for Nine Years and Nobody Noticed

There’s one kind of morning I remember better than almost anything else from my twenties.

Alarm at six twenty. Two glasses of water already on the nightstand, poured the night before, because some part of me always knew. A shower hot enough to hurt. Coffee and one banana, nothing else, because anything else was coming straight back up. In the car by quarter past seven with mints in the door pocket. By eight I was the guy in the meeting with the answers.

Nobody in that room knew I’d finished most of a bottle of whisky on my own six hours earlier. That went on for nine years.

Before anything else, the part I have to say

If you drink every day and you drink a lot, don’t just stop tonight on your own to prove something to yourself. If you shake in the morning, sweat through the sheets, feel sick until the first drink, or you’ve ever had a fit when you cut down, see a doctor before you stop. Alcohol withdrawal can cause seizures and it kills people every year, including people who were still going to work and still hitting their numbers. It’s also treatable, and a doctor sees this every week and won’t be shocked by you. That is a medical decision. I’m a coach, not a doctor.

What does high functioning drinking actually feel like?

It feels like being extremely good at something.

That’s the part nobody writes down. From the outside it looks like denial. From the inside it feels like competence. I wasn’t stumbling through my life failing to notice a problem. I was running a very tight operation, and the operation had one purpose: drink the amount I wanted to drink, and make sure nobody ever had a reason to sit me down about it.

There was a system, and the system was detailed.

• I knew which friends drank fast, and I drank with those ones, so I looked normal.
• Never the first to order, never the last to leave. Both of those get remarked on.
• Eat before drinking, so I didn’t slur.
• Gym at six in the morning, not because I liked it, but because a man who is at the gym at six is not a man anybody worries about.
• Buy the whisky from three different shops on rotation. Not because somebody was counting. Because I didn’t want the guy behind the counter to know.

None of that is drinking behavior. All of that is admin. And I did the admin for nine years.

Why did nobody say anything?

Because I never gave anyone anything to say it about.

People don’t raise your drinking based on how much you drink. They can’t see how much you drink. They raise it when something breaks. You miss the pickup, you put the car in a hedge, you say something ugly at a wedding, the rent doesn’t get paid. Take away the broken thing and the conversation has no handle on it. There is nothing for a person to take hold of.

This is the part that fools people, so let me be precise about it. The absence of the conversation is not evidence that you’re fine. It’s evidence that you’re good at this. Those are two completely different facts and I read one as the other for most of a decade.

Afterwards, three separate people told me they’d wondered for years. They just didn’t know how to start. And what were they supposed to say? “You always have a drink in your hand at events where everybody has a drink in their hand”? That sentence is unusable. So it never gets said, and you get to keep going.

What was my day actually built around?

By the end, most of it.

Where I parked. Whether I drove to dinner or took a taxi, which I decided at four in the afternoon based on what I’d already planned to drink at nine. Which flight I booked. Whether I stayed at a friend’s place or got a hotel, and it was always the hotel, and I always had a good reason that wasn’t the real reason.

If you want a measure that’s more honest than counting units, count decisions instead. Not how many drinks. How many things in your week are quietly arranged around drinking. The amount can sit flat for years while the number of arrangements climbs and climbs, and the arrangements are the thing that’s actually moving. I didn’t drink much more at 28 than I did at 21. I just spent an enormous amount more of my life managing it.

There’s the honest check on this site if you want that laid out properly. Twelve questions, three minutes, private, and no email box at the end. It doesn’t diagnose anything and it can’t. It just asks you the things you’ve been asking yourself at one in the morning, in a fixed order, so you can’t skip the one you always skip.

Is high functioning just a nicer way of saying it isn’t that bad?

No. I’d put it the other way round.

The functioning is what pays for it. Every year I kept the job and the apartment and the girlfriend was a year I never had to look at anything. Somebody who loses a license at 23 gets a very unpleasant and very useful piece of information at 23. I got mine at 28, and by then it cost me a company with four people in it, a relationship of five years, and an apartment I left in one afternoon with what fitted in the back of a car.

I’m not telling you that to frighten you and I’m not telling you it will happen to you. I don’t know you. The only point is that nothing in the nine smooth years before it told me it was coming. Smooth is exactly what this feels like, right up until it isn’t.

What finally happened?

Nothing cinematic. There is a dramatic scene. The dramatic scene isn’t the reason.

The reason is that at 28 I was sitting on the floor of an apartment that wasn’t mine anymore, doing arithmetic about how many hours until the shop opened, and I noticed I had done that exact arithmetic thousands of times and couldn’t remember ever deciding to start.

That’s what I’d want you to take out of this. Not a rule about units. Just the question of whether you can remember choosing.

What actually changed when I stopped?

Boring things, in a boring order.

The first two weeks were bad. Sleep was garbage for about a month. Somewhere around week six I noticed I’d stopped rehearsing conversations in the shower, which I’d done daily for years without once thinking of it as connected to anything.

The thing I didn’t expect was the time. About two and a half hours a day came back, and not from the drinking. From the managing. All that admin has a cost, and when it stops you’re suddenly a man standing in a kitchen at eight in the evening with no idea what people do with an evening.

Ten years on I live in Bali, I’m married, and I have a baby who is up at five thirty whether I like it or not. I’m not a better person than I was. I’m just not doing the admin anymore.

What I’d say if you were sitting in front of me

You don’t need to book a call with me. Genuinely. Most people who read something like this need to say one true sentence out loud to one person, once, and it doesn’t have to be me, and it should probably be free. Say it to a doctor. Say it to your brother.

But if you’re going to keep doing this alone at one in the morning with the screen dimmed, at least be accurate about what you’re looking at. You are not looking at whether you’re bad enough yet. You’re looking at whether you want another nine years of the admin.

That’s the whole question. The rest is detail.