The Changing Face of Alcohol-Induced Shame

The morning after I downed a quarter litre of vodka in the grounds of my senior school one summer evening, when the thought of alcohol-related harms beyond potential vomiting were as far removed from my mind as they could be, I recalled the previous night's imbibing with glee. How funny, thought 15-year-old me, that I had been staggering around, that I had blacked out and lost to memory half of the activities I had engaged in. How rebellious of me, how wild.

The morning after I drank so much that I passed out on the night of my 30th birthday, leaving all my guests to party hard without me downstairs as I lay comotosed in my bed with a bucket thoughtfully positioned next to my head, I woke up feeling slightly scared. A little embarrassed. Worried. I wondered what had happened. I had no memory of events post 10.30pm. The pink wig I had been wearing was strewn across my bedroom floor along with half of my clothes, which I imagined a friend had removed when they put me to bed. The windows downstairs in the dining room had been left flung open, a couple of candles burned all by themselves, the house long since emptied of guests. I tentatively texted my sister and best friend, simultaneously wanting and not wanting to put together the pieces of my birthday party.

The morning after I went to my local pub with a man who I sort of liked but definitely did not have romantic feelings for, when I woke up to find I had invited him back to my house after several large glasses of wine... that morning was a vacuum of deep shame. Guilt. Self-loathing. Emotional pain that ripped my soul apart. I was 33.

And the morning when I woke up aged 35 in a hospital bed, covered in my own cold vomit, beneath the glaring striplights of an A&E ward, knowing I had pushed this thing as far as I possibly could, knowing that there was absolutely nowhere left to go in proving that I could almost kill myself but not quite... that was shame I didn't even know existed. That shame was visceral. It started in the pit of my stomach and snaked its way all around my body, like a fast-spreading cancer. It stole my identity from me. It hollowed me out, almost finishing off what the alcohol had narrowly missed achieving several hours before. It made me lie heavy in the hospital bed, and rendered me unable to make eye contact with another human being for many weeks afterwards.

The shame we feel in relation to being unable to moderate the alcohol we drink grows exponentially as we age. What was funny in our teens becomes the darkest fuel of crippling emotional agony in later years. What we once laughed off, along with friends who may also have spent nights with their head down a toilet, hooking up with people they don't fancy one bit, becomes tortuous - an unravelling of the soul. Shame as we grow older leaves us on the periphery of humanity; it tears from us the sense of belonging and connection. It wreaks such havoc on our mental health, removes any lingering shred of self-esteem and confidence.

When I cast my mind back over the carnage that alcohol has brought to my own life, and then I think about that multiple times over - all the millions of people who have woken up feeling somewhere on the scale of embarrassed at one end, to wanting to die at the other, I can barely begin to understand how alcohol is allowed to sit so innocently on the supemarket shelves. How it is that we see positive references to it in every form of popular culture. How it is that society accepts it, normalises and encourages it, as if it were as inoccuous as a packet of crisps.

What I do know, with complete conviction, is that no matter what challenges life throws my way, there is nothing that is not made easier by being sober.