Several years ago, I stopped at the store for toothpaste on my way to morning yoga. In the checkout line, a dishevelled-looking woman rudely cut in front of me to buy a 4-pack of small wine bottles. When I got to my car, she was parked next to me. I watched as she opened those bottles one by one, chugged them down, and tossed them over her shoulder into the back seat. I sat there for a minute, trying to pick my jaw up off the floor as she sped out of the parking lot. I wasn’t yet ready to evaluate my own relationship with alcohol, but the moment stuck with me. It became my mental image of what someone with a “drinking problem” looked like. Dishevelled, drinking cheap wine in the morning, driving under the influence—that was serious. The way I was drinking looked nothing like that, so in my mind, it was fine. I had no idea what was going on in that woman’s life. I don’t know if she was at her own version of rock bottom or if that day was an anomaly. All I know is that, at the time, she fit my preconceived notions of what it looked like to struggle with alcohol. Like so many of us, I had been conditioned to think that there are only two categories of people. Either you’re a “normal” drinker, or you have a problem. Black or white. For years, my intuition nudged me, whispering that something was off in the balance of my life and that alcohol was the culprit. I ignored that nudge for so long because I looked nothing like that lady in the car. I had my act together. I was successful and driven. My family and business were thriving, and I was full of inspirational quotes for social media. I was hurting on the inside, but I wasn’t experiencing any outward consequences of my drinking. Ridiculously, I believed that quitting was only something you did if you hit rock bottom, whatever that really means. You only stopped drinking totally if you were at the lowest of lows and there were no other options. Otherwise, you were supposed to push through.
