Dear papi,

Cans of beer were always drowned in, shrieks of cries and of anger bellowed in the rooms, and the thuds of bodies and furniture shook the house. This was the end of my childhood and the beginning of reality.

Growing up, I never thought of alcohol as a bad thing. I mean you always drank it, and you were fine, so I guess it’s not totally bad?

For a long time after realizing you had a problem, I did not know what to call what you were dealing with. You like drinking beer, and you sure like drinking a lot of it. It just become a routine so normalized in our family that we didn’t know how to solve the problem.

It wasn’t till I became familiar with the negative effects of alcohol in health class, that I found a label for you. Alcoholic.

The problem you are going through is Alcoholism. An addiction to the consumption of alcoholic liquor or the mental illness and compulsive behavior resulting from alcohol dependency.

You didn’t know it before, but you have this disease that you sometimes can’t control or don’t want to control. With this disease, there is a lot of things that start to change physically.

Based on the article, “The Effects of Alcohol on the Body,” on Healthline, the effects of alcohol can range from harming the lungs to pain in the pancreas to shrinking of the frontal lobes.

One day I told you about the serious physical effects, you just laughed and shrugged it off. I did too, because maybe I’m just dramatic. Little do you know that I wasn’t and you are slowly realizing now I wasn’t.

But see, it wasn’t just the physical things I noticed, I was slowly realizing the mental and emotional effects.

It’s like you were a different person when you were drunk. Two different people, one body.

You see, the alcohol was your escape for your stress and anger, you thought this was the best solution. Though this was just the beginning of your addiction, your dependence on alcohol. I tried to understand, cause there was just so much pressure on you in terms of financial situations, but this was not the best way of coping.

Did you know that alcohol alters your brain chemistry? So that aggression and negative moods you would experience, you would only use to lash out on my family and I.

Did you know that alcohol just adds to the stress rather than avoiding it? So that escape you were trying to achieve, was never fulfilled.  

Did you know that drinking heavily affects the relationships around you? So when you see how broken the relationship has become between me and you, you now know the answer why.

I tried to stop it. Maybe stop you from buying it or even create arguments on the emotional and financial burden it has caused, but no luck.

It got to the point, where I stopped trying. My family and I stopped trying. We can only do so much, only you can help yourself now.

I would always love you, but my childhood is gone and I can only keep moving forward.

I have accepted your fate.

Time will tell, when you would accept it too.

From,

Tu querida hija

( Your loving daughter)