I drank for ten years, though the first ones shone with false brilliance. In college, alcohol was the point. Everything worth doing happened with a drink. Everything worth remembering blurred into nights that were never fully remembered at all.

For me, the point was never the buzz. I wasn’t interested in getting ‘tipsy,’ or laughter, or surface-level fun, the things that ‘happen.’ I drank to black out. It was always the destination. The apotheosis of the evening wasn’t the joke I told or the girl I kissed or the party I stumbled through, it was the moment when memory failed.

People like to call alcohol “liquid courage” but I never experienced it that way. Courage implies stepping more fully into your life, doing the thing you were afraid to do. I wasn’t looking for that. I wasn’t interested in being bolder or more present. What I wanted was absence. Blackout was about vacancy, not bravery. It was a release from the untreated depression and anxiety that made ordinary existence feel unbearable.

And for a while, it worked. Obliteration felt like mercy. The night would dissolve into static, and for a few precious hours I didn’t have to be myself. It was more than being drunk. Drunk meant dulled but still tethered. Blackout meant severed. The tether was gone, the loop was cut, silence at last.

But the myth or glamour of it couldn’t survive with time. The first blackouts felt shocking, almost profound. Later they were just math. If you keep drinking, eventually you black out. What I once romanticized as antihero self-destruction was really just the structure doing what it was designed to do. The system wrote the script, and I just followed it.

By the later years, alcohol wasn’t giving me anything. It wasn’t a gateway to transcendence. It wasn’t rebellion. It wasn’t fun. It was just a cure for the hangover it had caused the day before. I woke up sick and reached for the one thing that could help, even as it guaranteed it would return again tomorrow. The lie had long since revealed itself, but by then I was stuck in a closed loop.

Eventually, I quit. Not in a blaze of insight or a heroic moment of willpower. Not with a speech or a vow or an ultimatum. I quit because there was no other option left. My body was crumbling, my mind unraveling, my life was unlivable. Quitting wasn’t a choice. The decision had been made for me long before I claimed it.

That’s all there is to it: I drank for relief, and I quit for survival. The rest is details. The blackout-as-apotheosis, the antihero romance, the grand narrative of drinking as destiny; that was merely cover I laid over a decade of erosion.

I kept drinking until I couldn’t anymore.

Then, I stopped.