I don’t believe that alcohol is bad for everyone, but for many, it is. And that’s an important distinction for me to make. In this thread I will attempt to explain why, and why I’m trying/struggling to put it away for good. 1/ ...

2/ I was raised in a very strict #evangelical home. I was also raised in a dry county and state (MS) with strict prohibition laws. I was taught that alcohol was a sin, something sinners do that send them to hell. Literally.

3/ Neither of my parents ever drank. (Still don’t.) And barely any of my extended family do/did either (at least in the open). To this day, alcohol is not a part of my family life, holidays, get togethers, reunions. It’s not a part of the culture I grew up in.

4/ Or at least on the surface. As I grew older, I started to learn that a lot of drinking WAS happening, by my extended family at least, but they hid it. They hid it from kids, elders, church family, the outside world. The only acceptable way to drink was to do it in hiding.

5/ In high school, I started to figure this out. As you get older, what you think you’re hiding is often not hidden, just overlooked. I remember seeing my uncle holding a beer in the driveway at a family dinner once and it felt like the air was sucked out of atmosphere.

5.2/ ( I know I know.) But that’s how strong the feeling was.

6/ In HS is when I started to see kids beginning to drink underage on weekends too. The “thing to do” was drive to the county line beer store, buy some beer with a fake ID and ride around backroads, drinking and driving.

7/ Along the way, there were casualties too. I know several teenagers from my youth who either died or were severely disabled due to car wrecks from drinking and driving. Casualties of hidden truths.

8/ But I never wanted to be like those kids. I was never in the “popular-drinking-cool kid-crowd”. And ... I had been raised with an unhealthy fear of hellfire, so I abstained. At least until college, when I was 21.

9/ I had my first drink in my dorm room in junior college in 2001, just a few weeks before my 21st birthday. I think it was a cheap wine cooler. It was gross, but I didn’t go to hell, so it wasn’t bad. I was just hanging with my friends and thought, “Hell, why not?”

9.2/ I already knew I was being lied to about it, so what did I have to lose. I don’t think I felt anything from it.

10/ Skipping ahead a few years, I lost my faith around this time, & along with it, the last threads of my tattered sense of place. I started drinking more casually with friends I played in bands with, but not seriously. (We were pretty dorky, ex-Christian punk kids.)

11/ Fast-forward a few years, I’m married, 1 small child, working a shit job, trying to be a songwriter, stuck in a small town that I didn’t want to be in, and my drinking starts getting out of control without my noticing. It was the only thing making me feel anything.

11.2 I was empty inside and I filled that emptiness with alcohol.

12/ Before I know it I’m drinking a bottle of liquor a week. I’m 40lbs over weight. I have back problems due to my job. A guy I work with starts selling me pills and I almost get an opioid addiction, but I cut that off as soon as I realize what is happening. (Thank god.)

12.2/ Pills are bad. Nothing abstract about that.

13/ But the thing that makes it hardest for me to control happens a few years later. Heavy drinking becomes a part of my culture. I am in a new town, a new band, a new scene, where drinking is not only accepted, but romanticized. The theology has been loosened.

13.2/ Alcohol is not a sin anymore. I know that, I accept it. But I don’t rename it.

14/ 14/ Present day, I know I can’t hide it anymore. I’ve been in and out of AA for the last few years, in and out of therapy, divorced, remarried, and I consistently end up back where I started with alcohol: hiding something that is killing me.

15/ To my family, killing myself slowly in the shadows. To others, killing myself in plain sight along with everyone else. Anyway you want to look at it, I am modeling the behavior I was brought up with.

16/ Maybe if I’d had healthy models for drinking responsibly, I could have a healthy relationship with it. But that’s just not the case. This is the argument I’ve gone over and over again, and I can’t have a healthy relationship with it.

17/ The reality is, I’ve been drinking myself to death in the dark, or in plain sight because of the the culture I was raised in. It’s what has been taught and expected of me since I was young. So I struggle to change that, daily. I am struggling to unlearn my unhealthy behavior

18/ Hi. My name is Andrew Bryant. And I’m an alcoholic.