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Crossing out the days

Julie, whose name has been changed, is a research graduate student at Iowa State. She is an alcoholic who has been sober for almost three years. Since giving up drinking, Julie said she has picked up doing crossword puzzles. Photo: Laurel Scott/Iowa State Daily

Dylan Boyle —
April 12, 2009

Editor’s note: This story is about Julie, whose name has been changed in order for her to remain anonymous, and her path to recovery through Alcoholics Anonymous. An important ideal behind Alcoholics Anonymous is it is a place where those who need it can get support without having to reveal their identities.

It’s been 995 days since her last drink.

“People were telling me, ‘Julie you’re going to die,’ and honestly, I was at a place where that wasn’t the worst thing that could happen to me.”

Julie, a researcher and part-time graduate student, is an alcoholic. After years of heavy drinking to cope with stress and family loss, she went into treatment and has stayed sober by attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings in Ames.

This is her story.

Julie grew up on a family farm outside Ogden and said she had a “normal” life growing up. Although she did drink in high school and during her undergraduate years at Iowa State, she said it wasn’t until she became a graduate student that she started having a problem controlling how much she drank.

“My dad didn’t drink when I was growing up,” she said. “I could see kind of a genetic component when you look at it that way. He’s very compulsive and he drank very hard and then he just stopped himself when my sister and I were born.”

Growing up on a farm in Iowa, Julie said she really bonded with her mother and sister because they didn’t live in town. When not farming, her father drove trucks and was often gone on the road.

When Julie was 17, she experienced two losses that would later influence her drinking habit. At 17, she said her mother died of an unexpected heart attack.

“After my mom died, my dad kind of went back into his drinking and he was pretty non-available my last year of high school, so after that my sister and I were pretty close,” she said.

Nine months after the death of her mother, her sister was killed in a car accident.

“I had all the more reason to drink,” she said. “My family had pretty much been taken away.”

Julie came to Iowa State later that year and said she drank occasionally on the weekends, but when she did, she said the point was not to relax, but to “drink as much as [she] could.”

“It seems so normal when you’re in college,” she said. “When everybody is doing it all the time, it doesn’t strike you as something that could be dangerous or that could be a problem.”

Along with the sadness of losing her mother and sister, Julie said she also struggled with an eating disorder until she was in her mid-twenties. When she became a graduate student, she said she started to eat healthier but drinking then became her primary way of coping with stress and loss. Julie said she was a wine drinker because she didn’t like beer and she said she felt if she were just drinking wine she didn’t have a problem, even though she could drink up to three bottles in a night. As a graduate student she said she got a job as a researcher and because she was still getting good grades she never thought she had a problem.

She said weekends started to come earlier because of her drinking habits. Instead of drinking on Thursday, Friday and Saturday, weekends started Wednesday, then Tuesday and eventually she was drinking heavily every night.

“I would get to work and by 9:30 I would say ‘Oh, today already sucks, what am I going to do after work,’ you know, or ‘Do I have something to drink as soon as I get home, is it going to be cold, do I need to run and get something and put it in the freezer’ it became this very weird turn of events,” she said.

Julie said although drinking didn’t really affect her work and studies, it did start to seriously affect her relationship with members of a band she played the keyboard in, and her boyfriend, who “was not a drinker.”

“I started to kind of have an inclining of a problem when my boyfriend would say, ‘Hey why don’t you just have maybe two,’ and I would go in with the idea that ‘Yeah, it’s Tuesday night maybe I should only have one or two.’” she said. “But if I had one, I was going to have a lot.”

As her drinking progressed, she said she became a very “depressed and violent drunk.”

“One time, it was in April, about a year and a half before I quit drinking, I had gotten just totally wasted at band practice, started throwing people out of the house, was in the process of throwing my boyfriend’s shit out on the lawn, and in this drunken stupor it occurred to me that it would be a good idea to take all the pills in my medicine cabinet,” she said. “I really didn’t want to kill myself, I was just in a weird place.”

Julie said she was taken to Mary Greeley Medical Center to have her stomach pumped that night — but that wasn’t the end of her drinking.

She said her relationship with her boyfriend became increasingly strained because she was constantly lying to him and they would argue when she was drunk. One night, during an argument with her boyfriend, she realized how much of a problem she had.

“I had one of those little wine bottles, about the size you can fit in your purse and I winged that, and it smacked him right in the temple, and it just knocked him out on to the floor,” Julie said. “And that was when there was like total clarity, I was like, who is this monster, that I was, because I could have killed this guy.”

Treatment and recovery

After realizing she had a problem, friends convinced Julie to enter treatment for alcoholism. She went into treatment later in the week and completed 10 days in inpatient treatment before doing five weeks of outpatient treatment.

“Treatment was strange for me, it doesn’t matter if you’re a meth addict or an alcoholic, you’re kind of all there together, and I was kind of like, ‘I only drink chardonnay, what’s the problem,’” she said. “It was good for me because I was tailspinning so fast that I was probably only a couple years from being a crackhead.”

In order to get out of treatment, Julie said she was required to attend Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, a requirement she didn’t like because she had a negative perception of Alcoholics Anonymous to begin with.

“There were some early lines in there about God,” she said. “I had some God issues, like when my mom and sister had died, people where like ‘it’s God’s will.’”

When she went to her first meeting after treatment, she said she didn’t like it because the people who attended were mostly older men.

“But what we say is, if you don’t like a meeting try a different one,” Julie said. “We are lucky here in Ames and Des Moines because we have such a wide variety of meetings.”

She said she started attending a different meeting with a bigger variety of people, and overtime, she said it grew on her. Through Alcoholics Anonymous, she said she learned how to cope with things in life without alcohol and she started making friends, which was important because many of her friends still drank. Julie said her goal was 90 meetings in 90 days, and even though making 90 days was all she thought about, she said she still had cravings.

“I remember even having thought that even on day 89, it’s like ‘Oh, tomorrow you have 90 days, you gave it a shot, now you can go and drink again,’” Julie said. “But I remember getting my 90 day chip … and it caused me to think back at the last three months and think about how I was so miserable.”

After 90 days, she sad she realized how she never wanted to go back to living in lies and never wanted to go back to day one of being sober.

Julie said part of the recovery process is admitting you have a problem and wanting to change.

“There was nothing anyone could say to me to get me sober until I was ready to do so,” she said. “One of the wonderful things about AA is the only requirement to go there is a desire to stop drinking, if they’re curious or they think, maybe I should quit drinking, they are more than welcome to come check it out. We don’t tell you what to do, we can’t tell you what to do and we know because we’ve been there.”

Since getting sober Julie said she and her boyfriend have gotten married and bought a house. She also said she has found other things to help her cope with stress, like crossword puzzles and dessert.

She said she has realized she doesn’t need to be as judgemental and take a perfectionist view of herself and sometimes focusing on other people can combat cravings.

Through recovery, she said she has learned that the world isn’t about her and she has started the process of making amends.

In sobriety, she said she has found the sweeter parts of life.

“I’ve eaten dessert every single day since I’ve been sober,” she said.

Ames Alcoholics Anonymous meetings

Ames Downtowners Group – 8 p.m. Wednesday at First United Methodist Church, 516 Kellogg Ave.

Comes of Age Group – 8 p.m. Monday at St John’s Episcopal Church, 2338 Lincoln Way

Fellowship Friday Night Group – 8 p.m. Friday at United Church Of Christ Congregational, 217 Sixth St.

Full Support Womens Group – 7 p.m. Tuesday at St. Johns Episcopal Church, 2338 Lincoln Way.

McCormick Place Group – 10 a.m. and 7 p.m. on Sunday; 6:30 p.m. and 8 p.m. on Monday; 8 p.m. on Tuesday through Saturday; all meetings are at the Ames Alano Building, 1201 McCormick Ave.

Comes Of Age Group – 8 p.m. on Monday at the Collegiate Presbyterian Church, 159 Sheldon Ave.

Noon Groups – Noon Monday through Friday at Unitarian Fellowship, 1015 N. Hyland Ave.

Eyeopeners Group – 8:30 a.m. Saturday at St. John’s Episcopal Church, 2338 Lincoln Way

Grapeviners Group – 7 p.m. Sunday at St. Johns’s Episcopal Church, 2338 W. Lincoln Way

Big Book Discussion Group – 8 p.m. Tuesday at Collegiate United Methodist Church, 2622 Lincoln Way

— Information from the Alcoholics Anonymous Web site

Where to get help

Al-Anon

1201 McCormick Ave.

515-233-6312

al-anon.alateen.org

Alcohol and Drug Medical Detox and Addiction Treatment — 24-hour helpline