Meditations II: College & the Bottle

Copyright 2007

My freshman year was pivotal in starting me on the road to alcoholism. I began because I wanted to belong. Because I wanted to be seen as a sophisticate. Not a neophyte, a little southern girl from “the sticks” who really was not hip, slick and cool. I lied when an important date asked me if I drank. I didn’t. But after that night, I did. Rum and coke did me in that night and I ended up passed out in the john with my arms wrapped around the base of the toilet stool. At some point during the week that followed, I vowed to myself that I would “learn” how to drink without passing out. Which, eventually, I did. It took a while before I could get high without getting sick and passing out, but I managed to do it, thanks to those college weekends when my college buddies and I spent our Saturday nights devoted to rum and coke, seven and seven, boiler makers, and the like.


Cut to my sophomore year. The second semester I started drinking during the week on a regular basis. I cut classes, too, so my grades dropped way down from the three-point, B average, that I’d worked so hard to get during my freshman year. Up til then, I’d confined my partying to weekends and ONLY after I’d done all my studying and class assignments. Until that semester, I’d been solicitous of my grades and grade point average. But all that changed. I knew what I was doing when I began to drink like that. I knew I was screwing up, but I couldn’t pull out of screwing up.


When the semester was over and I went home for the summer, I was mortified to face my parents who were sacrificing to send me to a Big Ten college, Indiana University, so far away from home (Knoxville, Tennessee). They didn’t fuss at me or punish me and that made me feel that the two D’s and two C’s on my record were pasted on my forehead like some shameful brand for all the world to see. One of the D’s was in a class that was an introduction to what I thought would be my major, Journalism. What a disaster that semester was!


I think back now and remember a little bit of what was going on inside of me: the conflicts and pain and terror that I was choking back over my same sex attraction. I was trying to use alcohol to cover them, drown them, kill them off.


Anyway, I was so horrified and ashamed about my grades and that I’d let my parents down in their expectations for me to succeed that, from my junior year through my senior year, I rigorously disciplined myself to only drink to excess—“party”—on the weekends or during holidays away from school. I did drink a little bit sometimes during the week, but I never let myself go over the top because I had set a goal to get my grade point average back up to a three-point. Though I succeeded with my disciplined drinking, it only left me yearning for the weekends, for holidays, so I could drink all I wanted. My grades did go up, but the bottle was getting the better of me. Of course, that was a red flag, but I chose to ignore it. Besides, though I didn’t know it, I was already at the point that I couldn’t stop. Will power, I would learn later, was no match for alcohol.


By the time I was a senior, I had my grades way up. My last semester as an undergrad, I scored straight A’s in all my courses. I remember that Joann and some other girls in my dorm marveled at how I could make such good grades and “party” (read “drink to excess”) as much as I did. I was a functioning alcoholic already. But they didn’t know it and neither did I. After graduation, I went right into grad school. One of the benefits of having a single room was the privacy to stash my drink in the closet. The bottle was a fifth. And I never let it go below one-third empty before I dashed out to buy another. That was axiomatic.
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