The room was dimly lit, smelling of stale cigarette smoke and burnt coffee. Twenty-some people were there, sitting on folding chairs, or the overstuffed navy blue couch. Almost everyone was drinking coffee from styrofoam cups, legs crossed, listening intently to the speaker. During the talk, a couple of people went to the coffee maker for refills, or grabbed stale donuts.

I was sitting on the floor, legs crossed, Indian style .The shag carpeting felt comfortable under my bottom, and I was enjoying listening to the speaker. When he was finished, everyone clapped and someone else started talking. After several more speakers, it was my turn. I cleared my throat and looked nervously around the room. The words were coming out faster than I could think: "Hi, my name is Sophy, and I am an alcoholic."

I’m an alcoholic. I haven’t had a drink since September 26, 1996. It’s something that I never thought about until I was reading a book on bipolar where the author stated that 60 percent of all people with bipolar have had a problem with substance dependency. My drinking was different. I wasn’t drinking to control my moods; I was drinking because I was hell-bent on destroying myself. They say that alcohol is a depressant, but I can tell you when I drank, it was for the initial buzz of euphoria and sense of well-being. I loved the way it made my insides melt. What I didn’t like was the sad feeling that always came out after the first initial numbness.

Every alcoholic has a story. I had my first drink in college - the first weekend away from home. My roommate and I crashed a frat party. This was in the fall of 1980, and I had just turned 18 that weekend. Animal House was out the previous year, and every frat on campus was having a toga party. We went to one of the frats, thinking we were all grown up. I recall when I got there, I didn’t want a beer. Someone handed me a glass of purple Kool-Aid, I found a couch inside, sat down, and drank that. Pink Floyds’ Dark Side of the Moon was on the stereo, and I just remember the music never sounded so good.

People kept refilling my glass. Finally the inevitable happened, my bladder was full. I tried to make my way upstairs to the bathroom, and couldn’t make it. Instead, my roommate found me and we left the party, walking back to our dorm room cross campus. I recall I could barely walk, and neither could she. When we got back to the dorm, and signed back in, it was clear to my RA that I was very drunk. I couldn’t understand why, I didn’t have any beer. We somehow collapsed into bed, and I recall the bed spinning. Then I got sick. Exorcist sick. I ended up in the infirmary. The next day the nurse told me I had been drinking grape Kool-Aid with grain alcohol in it. All I knew is I felt sick, hung over and ashamed. I vowed never to drink again.

And I really didn’t. Oh yes, I might have a beer in the rathskeller with my friends, but one was always my limit. Somehow, I sensed my birth family had a long line of alcoholics and I knew not to drink.

Fast forward to 1996. I had come back from California a year before, broke. I had the misfortune of letting a friend’s sister come to stay with me when her apartment was getting fixed from the Northridge Quake. No one told me she had a coke habit, and I had never met anyone who did anything stronger than a joint. In the two months that she lived with me, she totaled my car, she totaled the rent a car too. She figured out my ATM number, went into my savings account and wiped it dry, stole all my jewelry and pawned it. I lost almost $40,000 that went up her nose before I realized what she did. At that point, I had the police come and evict her, involuntarily putting her in rehab. And with no money left, no furniture, I moved back home to mom and dad.

It wasn’t a good situation; I found a job at a bookstore and moved out into an apartment. It wasn’t a nice apartment, it was in a bad neighborhood in the states capital, but it was mine, and it was better than nothing.

I didn’t like working in that bookstore. I love books, I own close to a thousand in my own personal library. But this was a mega bookstore. I had worked in a "Mom and Pop" bookstore ten years earlier, which I loved .But this was different, it was less emphasis on the customer and more on just selling books. The guy I was dating was really disliked by my parents, and much to my chagrin my father told him he would give him money to stop dating me. He took it.

I'm sure he felt he was acting in my best interests, but I felt like I was a failure. One day a friend came over with a bottle of red wine as a housewarming gift. We drank the bottle and the next morning I wanted some more. I went to work and on the way home, bought a bottle of the same vintage, and drank that in the evening. I did this every night for a week. And discovered something. By the end of the week I wasn’t getting buzzed on the wine. Instead I was drinking vodka, pouring it into the wine to get drunk faster. I knew it was wrong, but I didn’t care. I didn’t have the courage to kill myself outright, so I figured I could drink myself to death. Besides, some of the best writers were alcoholics, and all I wanted to be was like Hemingway, or Fitzgerald. A genius that no one understood. My muse was telling me it was romantic to be a drunk like them.

The only problem was what I was writing was absolute crap. Alcohol might have made Faulkner or Hemingway more creative, but it was having the opposite affect on me. But I loved the warm feeling I would get when I drank, how the walls dissolved, and I felt at one with the universe.

In two months I was a full blown alcoholic. I was drinking every night, first pouring vodka in my wine coolers to get drunk, and when that didn’t work I graduated to wine and vodka. When that no longer worked, I began to pour pouring grain alcohol into my wine to get buzzed faster.

That would make me wake up in the morning with the shakes, and I needed an eye-opener. So I would have a glass of wine by itself. I didn’t care; I figured I would be dead within six months. I figured I didn’t have anything to live for; after all, I was persona non grata in my family, I had no boyfriend, I mean what kind of boyfriend would choose money over me? My self esteem was out the window, and I felt like shit. The alcohol had bloated me up by thirty pounds; I was the heaviest I had ever been in my life. I knew I shouldn’t be doing it. At the time I had an idea I had bipolar, but wouldn’t acknowledge it. My moods were going from manic – days without sleeping, to suicidal despair where I would try to top myself off with drink and Aspirin. One time I fell asleep tripped over a bottle, broke it and wound up with glass embedded in my kneecap. Cute. Blood all over the carpet. I didn’t care, I laughed as I saw the blood red streaks melt into the off white color. For months I had glass embedded in my skin.

And one day came when I woke up covered in vomit from head to toe, shaking so badly the bed was moving, I knew I had to stop. After all, didn’t Janis Joplin die when she vomited in her sleep? Maybe something woke up that day inside of me, and I knew I needed help. I had to stop. Something primal in my brain told me the next time this happened I would be dead like Janis. And suddenly I didn’t want to die anymore.

I cleaned myself up, did the laundry. I felt awful. I was shaking, but poured the rest of the booze down the drain. And went to my first AA meeting that day.

I guess what made me stop drinking was the people in AA who were the first real friends I ever had. They didn’t judge me, they didn’t point out my shortcomings. One woman went so far as to buy me a coat for winter because I didn’t have one.

I realized that I did want to live. I didn’t want to be a drunken writer. All of a sudden Hemingway and Fitzgerald as the troubled dipsomaniacs with the tortured souls weren’t appealing. I didn’t stay with AA. Instead, whenever I get a craving I just think of my last drink and where it took me, and treat myself to a Pellegrino or Perrier. The reasons I left were my own, I believed I made myself stop drinking, not God. I miss the kinship though. Maybe I should go back. Or maybe I should look for the same kinship with the bipolar group I attend sporadically since it’s so far away.

So 60 percent of people with bipolar have a lifetime substance dependency problem. Maybe in my case it was just from feeling the pain of being different, feeling different from everyone else, feeling like a failure because everyone I knew was married and having babies and I was still single. I was in so much emotional pain then I didn’t know how to cope. I’ve learned since then to make closure with a lot of the issues I had back then. I have also learned that yes, I have bipolar. It’s something I still have issues with dealing with, understanding and accepting. Even now. There are days where I wish I was normal and don’t want to take my meds, thinking there is nothing wrong with me. And I feel great until I go manic or depressed. I know now I have to take my meds daily. I know now my birth family has a long line of Irish alcoholics - my genes didn’t escape that. I know if I have one drink, I die. Simple as that. And simple as that, I don’t wish to die - not now. I still have some more living to do.

Aug 10, 2003

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Tallyhoholly (Aug 13, 2003):  You mean your father gave a man money to quit seeing you, yet you didn't even have a coat?  How bizarre.  No wonder you drank to excess.  Probably more familial problems than because your friends were all married, as you stated.  Glad AA has worked for you, though.  Good luck.

Amy (Aug 28, 2003):  Thank you for that article.  That helped me today.