I used to put away a liter of vodka a night. I kept it up for years, accumulating a solid decade of heavy drinking. I was miserable. It was souring my relationship. The stress from work, personal life, and declining mental state of course made me feel even more compelled to drink. I was becoming a shell of my former self, and my dreams were becoming strictly that.
I had a confluence of events that changed my course:
1. I attended a tech conference where someone I personally knew who had went through rehab was hosting and speaking, and he was filled with a vivacity I hadn’t seen from him before.
2. My spouse gave me an ultimatum to quit or he’d be out the door. It wasn’t the first time he had said this, but I had a feeling it was probably going to be the last.
3. My progression in life was stalling. I couldn’t keep up commitments anymore, and I was starting to feel like I had already passed my peak.
So I quit. Cold Turkey. It was a dangerous, stupid thing to do, but I knew if I tried to taper off, I’d just slide back. The withdrawals were nightmarish, and I was lucky I didn’t die from it. But I pulled through, and then started to do some heavy soul searching for why I ever picked up the bottle — what was I escaping from? And I found those answers, and got to work — A real kind of personal work that most people will never have to put into themselves.
Since then, I have been a cofounder, jumped multiple levels in my career, and have been working towards several academic publications, on top of drastically improving my personal life. It’s been nearly five years since I put down the bottle. And every day I choose to never pick it up again.
For anyone else who’s drinking at this level (a litre a day of vodka) please don’t quit cold turkey without seeing a doctor. It genuinely can be lethal. There are temporary medications that dramatically mitigate that risk.
This is why I mentioned how dangerous and stupid it was. I experienced DTs for several days, and seizures. I’m lucky to have made it through that alive.
While some people pick up the bottle in addiction due to purely genetic affinity, others are using it as an escape. While my existence is hotly debated on hacker news whenever the topic arises, my escape was a struggle in trying to not address the gender incongruence between that which I was assigned at birth, and who I truly was. About a year after quitting alcohol, which is usually the recommended space people should give before making large life decisions, I had concluded two things after soul searching:
1. These feelings were never going to go away.
2. I needed to, and could, do something about it.
So I began transition. It was not easy, and communities like hacker news unfortunately are not typically kind about the subject, which is why I generalized to say it was a real kind of personal work that most will never have to endure.
It was something I intrinsically knew, from the moment I became remotely cognizant of the differences between men and women (about 5 years old). I didn’t have words for it, and frequently any mention of the notion either by myself or in popular culture was met with instant derision or comedy. So with the social brow beatings accumulated, I kept quiet, and tried to live as a man. The depression got worse, the drinking got worse, etc. The things that helped me most:
- My spouse, who was supportive and understanding the moment I came out
- My family, who were largely unsurprised by the news (my grandfather made an oddly supportive albeit sexist joke, saying “I knew that kid was a girl the moment she learned to talk and wouldn’t shut up!”)
- My friends, who were also completely unsurprised
- My own physiology, in that I discovered in the process of obtaining HRT that I am intersex, which honestly explained a lot.
Not OP, but I can speak about what this meant to me: Primarily facing my emotions, even learning how to feel emotions again, then learning how to understand and communicate them in a way where I stay true to myself, and live life on my own terms.
Before I started doing this work I approached everything logically. "I shouldn't feel this way, because x, y and z are objectively good." "If I present things this way, I'll get people to agree with me." "I don't want to do x, but it will make so-and-so happy."
It never worked for long, and alcohol has a nice way of suppressing those feelings, as well as the little negative voice in your head that tends to accompany those suppressed emotions.
Rather than trying to logic my way to acceptance and contentment, I've had to learn how to wade into my emotions and figure out productive ways to express what they're telling me.
It's work to improve the relationship you have with yourself; it's still a work in progress for me.
1 litre of vodka daily -> cold turkey == risk of convulsions.
You need chemical assistance, typically rather a lot of valium over about 5 days, under skilled supervision (so, in a clinic; or at home with a companion, and with daily visits from a clinician). The valium prescription will require assessment by a psychiatrist. The clinician will adjust the valium dose regularly based on his observations.
That's not really cold turkey, because most of the withdrawal symptoms are suppressed. But you have to stop dead, a good 12 hours before you start on the valium. If you're at home, the clinician will check you for alcohol on your breath, check blood-pressure etc.
Mixing alcohol with large doses of valium is a total no-no, and the clinician will cease treatment immediately.
They mean every night, as in each night. About 20 standard drinks in a bottle of vodka, so takes 18-20 hours to process all the alcohol before starting again. It's just about doable with a day job if you start as soon as you get home from work and don't have to drive in the morning. I know because that was me once.
This is why people with serious drinking problems find the "I drink a beer every night I must be an alcoholic" chat a bit offputting. And look, a bottle of vodka a day leaves some room for a few sober hours, so it's actually not as bad as the people who get withdrawal unless they stay topped up 24/7.
Someone drinking really regularly fires up their MEOS which also reduces/oxidises alcohol and can significantly speed up standard drinks per hour. Like, in the realm of double.
That’s why you or a drinker may have started to get the shakes 24 hours after you first drunk - they haven’t had any etoh in your system for 12+ hours
I had a confluence of events that changed my course:
1. I attended a tech conference where someone I personally knew who had went through rehab was hosting and speaking, and he was filled with a vivacity I hadn’t seen from him before.
2. My spouse gave me an ultimatum to quit or he’d be out the door. It wasn’t the first time he had said this, but I had a feeling it was probably going to be the last.
3. My progression in life was stalling. I couldn’t keep up commitments anymore, and I was starting to feel like I had already passed my peak.
So I quit. Cold Turkey. It was a dangerous, stupid thing to do, but I knew if I tried to taper off, I’d just slide back. The withdrawals were nightmarish, and I was lucky I didn’t die from it. But I pulled through, and then started to do some heavy soul searching for why I ever picked up the bottle — what was I escaping from? And I found those answers, and got to work — A real kind of personal work that most people will never have to put into themselves.
Since then, I have been a cofounder, jumped multiple levels in my career, and have been working towards several academic publications, on top of drastically improving my personal life. It’s been nearly five years since I put down the bottle. And every day I choose to never pick it up again.