A few weeks ago, I went back home to observe Passover with my family. While I was back, one of my sisters mentioned that drinking was bad, looked at me for affirmation, and I didn’t know what to say. Some time ago, I had told her and my parents my feelings about drinking. What I said was I hate drinking, I hate being drunk, and I hate that whenever I am around friends I feel pressure to drink. I think it will be useful to spend some time thinking about this.

When is drinking bad? Throughout my life, I have used alcohol in a variety of circumstances. From drinking being the activity, to drinking to enhance the activity, to drinking to suppress feelings of anxiety, to complete abstinence, to a drink when catching up with friends or to help unwind after a good day. Of these, the one that bothers me the most is drinking to suppress feelings of anxiety.

Around junior year in college, I started getting pangs of anxiety before going out with friends. I never really tried to place my finger on the cause, but until I was pretty intoxicated the feeling would not go away. As time passed, it got to the point where I would blackout pretty much every time I went drinking. It felt like I was trapped in a cycle. The ‘need’ to drink would make me anxious, which would cause me to drink more, which would lead to me blacking out. At the time, I remember telling myself once I finish college I will ‘stop the debauchery’.

But why was I feeling anxious every time I would drink? Looking back, I think it was because I knew something that I didn’t want to admit to myself. I was on a downward path. Sophomore year I failed math, that summer I was arrested, and then for the first time in my life I was told to deal with it myself. When I got back to school, I was trying to act like everything was the same when I knew it wasn’t.

At the time, I knew that what I was doing was wrong in some sense. Otherwise there would be no reason to stop after college, but then why didn’t I stop immediately? The first thing that comes to mind is I didn’t know or want to think about what to do instead. My entire life through then I had always been on a charted path. Go to school, go to college, get a job. But I never owned any of these pursuits. I never got good grades for myself, I did it because my parents would be upset if I didn’t. I was like a piece of wood drifting in the current, getting shaped by the waves into something bland with no edges.

As I have started to develop myself and discover who I am and who I want to be, I have been finding that I am more capable of handling the influences and challenges which surround me on a daily basis. There have been many ups and downs, but I am proud of how far I have come.

What do I think about drinking? Drinking is an escape. It can be a way to more fully embrace the present when celebrating and a way to help unwind after a stressful day. But at the same time this escape can be used as a way to hide, and that can be a dangerous path. In the same way that the act of smiling makes you happier, the act of hiding can make you more scared. Before drinking, it is important to make sure that you know where you are escaping to and why. Otherwise, it may not be clear who is really in control.