Hitting rock bottom

The mornings after drinking all night are the worst. Don’t get me wrong: It’s not about the hangover; it’s not about the feverish feeling or the throbbing temples or the immense thirst that seems impossible to quench. It’s not even about the stale taste of alcohol and smoke in my mouth.

What I hate about these mornings is the feeling of alcohol slowly leaving my body. Getting sober is getting dragged out of my comfort zone. It’s about me regaining consciousness, along with those memories I would rather forget. I hate how, as the seconds tick by, the world gets less and less friendly.

I have been quite the drinker this year. Not a week has passed since February that I didn’t drink. Maybe it’s important to know that I teach for a living. And it is more important to know that despite spending some nights drinking, I manage to attend to my classes regularly and accomplish my clerical obligations well. I have the recent result of university faculty evaluation where I emerged No. 1 to back that.

Apparently, my skill in juggling my work responsibilities and my drinking is impeccable. But don’t get me wrong: I am not trying to justify my drinking. I am not trying to send the message that drinking is okay for as long as it doesn’t get in the way of performing your work duties.

For the record, I didn’t start drinking early. The first time I got drunk was when I was in third year in college. It was a planned sleepover at a friend’s house. I remember lying to my aunt with whom I was staying then. It was the submission deadline of our thesis manuscript the following week, I told her, and my partner and I needed to work hard over the weekend. That weekend was when I got acquainted with Fundador. Needless to say, I got so wasted. And I enjoyed it.

Thus did my love affair with alcohol start. I tried a lot of it, from the cheap Empi Light to Red Horse to the pricey Jack Daniels and Double Black. There is just something amazing about getting intoxicated with alcohol. You know that feeling when it slowly creeps up into your brain, the part when all those tequila shots are working their magic to loosen you up. I like that wonderful moment when I am at the border of staying sober and getting tipsy. I like how gradually making sense of things starts to get irrelevant. Then when the alcohol finally hits, the words of Barney Stinson become my mantra: that I should stop to think, think, think and start to do, do, do. And it’s nice to finally stop thinking for a while.

When I drink, I live only in the moment. It’s like being caged in this happy bubble surrounded by people who are as drunk as I. And I just love being with them. In their slurred words, I find meaning. In their droopy eyes, I find truth. In their slumped shoulders, I find peace. And yes, they provide me this comforting thought that, finally, I am not alone.

Drinking makes me feel that I am a different person. And I like to believe that the drunk me is the real me; that I am not really this struggling twentysomething who still barely makes it from one payday to the next; that I am not this person who feels stuck in a job which does not challenge him anymore; that I am much more than a millennial who has been unfairly stereotyped by society. When I am drunk, I am this happy-go-lucky guy. I can laugh as hard as I can. Heck, I can dance as wild as I want. No inhibitions. No limitations. My alcohol friend tells me that I own the night—and own the night is what I do.

Of course, spending a lot of drunken nights with friends has caused me some collaterals. I’ve lost a lot of my personal belongings—from tons of handkerchiefs to phone charger to ear buds to my flash drive and even to two pairs of eyeglasses. There was this one night when even my ATM card was captured by it. Good thing my phone still had load and my brain the consciousness to phone home and ask my mom to collect me as all my cash had been spent on alcohol.

But all these unfortunate experiences couldn’t stop me from drinking more. I just shrugged them off and wrote about them in the drinking diary that I keep. I consider hangovers and humiliating experiences a small price to pay. What matters, I tell myself, is that alcohol provides me with an escape route—that even for a couple of hours I could be happy; that I could be young and wild and free.

My favorite “Grey’s Anatomy” has taught me that whatever kind of addiction never ends well because eventually, whatever is getting us high stops feeling good and starts to get hurtful. And that we kick the habit only when we hit rock bottom. But how do we really know when we get there? Does this mean that I have to wait until things get worse before I turn my back on drinking? Is there really a chance for me when just the thought of me quitting drinking puts me in this deep anxiety?

Yes, I admit, maybe I have a drinking problem. And many actually find it ironic as in spite of being 23 and a professional, whatever that means, I can’t seem to take a step away from my drinking days (and nights). For what it’s worth, though, I know that drinking a lot is not good. I’m completely aware that alcohol is the problem. But here’s the catch: I also think that alcohol is the solution.

Lyndon John S. de Leon, 23, is a language and literature faculty member at Wesleyan University-Philippines’ High School Department.