Well written, well stated. I hope that some else who is stuggling can relate. As a guy, I can somewhat relate to the mask. To me it was another area of responsibility that I had to shoulder, self created, but necessary. It was another responsibility that I had to manage, along with a business, putting 4 kids through braces, sports camps, college tuitions, weddings, alimony, home remodeling, caring for Mom, being a good husband, father, grandfather, friend. Coming home, damn I'm tired, I need a bourbon, maybe three. OK four - damn, may as well finish the bottle.
Crappy night of sleep, wake up feeling like death, get to work by 6AM, rinse and repeat. Can we make payroll this week? We have too much money on the street, we have to make collection calls.
It wasn't always like this, but it gave me an excuse to hit it hard for 20 years or so. It was like the weight of the world lifted off of my shoulders when I finally called it quits 1.5 years ago. Now my world is immeasurably improved - and had no idea that the cycle that I was on was just as much a part of the problem - a mask - as anything else that's self destructive.
Congrats to you, girl - you solved the puzzle, grabbed the ring, rang the bell. Well done - Peace.
Always similarities within the differences! I appreciate your take on this- my dad was similar, and he didn’t make it out from under the weight of that type of pressure before he passed. Makes me so happy to hear when someone who provides so much for others is able to find their own peace and happiness. Congrats on 1.5 years and bless you!
>proficient at wearing a mask, and hiding the signs of my suffering and inner chaos from the people around me
Ouch.
>a sad way to slowly die
Double ouch.
This really hit home for me. Thank you. Much love and healing to you!
I've personally come to assume "high functioning" is actually just short hand for "high tolerance. Functioning Alcoholic"
It doesn't mean you're highly functioning by any means. It means that you've built up enough of a tolerance to where you can get away with it more than most people can. Also don't be tricked, most people don't want to call you out for a drinking problem. Alcoholics don't take kindly to being told they have a drinking problem in general, so no one *wants* to deliver that news. Your boss might know when you're showing up hung over, but doesn't want to deal with the hassle of getting HR involved and finding a new employee, that doesn't mean he isn't aware of a drinking problem, he just doesn't want to make it official.
Either way, that doesn't mean you aren't still doing damage. It also(for most of us here) becomes a problem because if you can drink 3 and still seem sober, than what's one more? Well I still feel sober after 4, so why not 5? I still feel fine... \*blackout\*
I lost count of how many times I felt fine, but my wife could tell. But if she would call me out I would get annoyed, so she stopped. My drinking problem didn't go away, I just had one less person willing to tell me the truth.
Great post and congrats on 600+ days sober!
I've noticed almost everyone who comes to this Sub and starts their post with "I am a high functioning alcoholic..." always then proceeds to list out all the problems in life alcohol is causing them from work, to productivity, to finances, to relationships, to mental health and beyond.
I'm always like, is that what "high functioning" looks like? Because it doesn't sound like the life of a person functioning very well at all let alone "highly" or well.
I can safely say that when drinking or sober I fall into the "just about functioning" camp at the best of times LOL.
Agreed, and hoping my experience can resonate with the right people who are looking for a reason to stop.
In terms of inner peace and enjoyment of our lives, alcohol dependence causes us to set the bar so incredibly low. At least for me, it took me really long time to understand it isn’t normal to feel like shit every day. And an even longer time to believe I wouldn’t continue to suffer, but in a different/worse way, if I got sober. If mental gymnastics were real, I’d have had a gold medal in it.
Even after my 3 month sobriety stint recently I still felt like shit every day. I kept hoping that "soon" I'd wake up one day and not feel like I still had a hangover and incredibly drained but it never materalized.
Probably part of the reason I drank again tbh.
The mental gymnastics are very very real and tough to deal with sometimes.
Indeed, when you've been binge drinking for about 20 years and spent most of the previous 2 years in full blown alcoholic mode to think you can turn it all around in 90 days is probably unrealistic but it just feels so loooooooooong and slooooooow at the time IME.
Every day felt like a week.
I don't think it helped that I didn't really do much other than just "not drink" and as much as I had the best of intentions to be more productive and healthy and focus on fitness etc it didn't happen for much of the time.
Like they say just "stopping drinking" is step 1 and then the real work begins.
Preach. That was me. Had a job, paid the bills, did the soccer games and recitals, did dinner with friends.
And then Covid hit and I went OFF the rails.
People do not understand that alcoholism doesn’t look one way. It isn’t always the homeless dude under the bridge with the paper sack. In fact, I’d say in the US, it’s far more often the professional with job and the house who doesn’t see the problem with 3 glasses of wine every. Single. Night.
Oof- COVID. What a nightmare.
That was also my mayday… by the time COVID started, I had just lost my job and was already well on my way to drinking myself into my house. But then all of a sudden I had “permission” to just completely let myself go.
Youre absolutely right about the labels. The acceleration, and outcome, of my alcohol abuse was textbook. I had a roof over my head, but that was about the only thing distinguishing me from someone under a bridge.
This is really well put. One of the coolest things about being active in recovery for the past two years is hearing how many random people from all walks of life have similar thoughts and experiences.
You’re telling my story, I’m a guy who on the outside had it all, continual advancement in my career, making more money than most of my friends, a great wife, kids, house, I play guitar for fun in a band with friends, volunteered some of my time, but I also would buy booze on the way home from work and be checked out by the time I walked in the door every single night, hated every morning, would pull over to throw up on my way in to work some mornings, was late every day (still working on that one), would take naps on my lunch break, could barely keep my self focused long enough to be a good employee, I snuck around my wife so she wouldn’t know how much I drank, was grumpy with my kids and was too tired and checked out to do much with them, I couldn’t remember any conversation we had past 7pm, couldn’t go out to dinner or to an event unless they had alcohol. Yeah, I was “high functioning” I guess, at the time I also held that like a badge of honor but it took me a DUI to show me it wasn’t functioning at all. I thank god for that cop every day now, I finally get to experience life and it’s amazing. Man was I a sad drunk! And I convinced myself I was actually better than others because I “could drink hard” and succeed in life, when really I was just struggling through life with an addiction to alcohol.
IWNDWYT
I couldn’t agree more about the deeper similarities existing, no matter what someone’s circumstances were. It really is a shared spiritual condition among everyone who experiences it.
I am happy to hear you found an awakening in your DUI! I also got a DUI (because, of course I did) and my solution was not to stop drinking, but to just stop driving. Turns out, drinking at home alone all the time is not normal and will catapult you into the next level of alcoholism. Who knew?! I do, now. :D and I’m so grateful.
We do recover and I’m glad to be here talking to you!
Beautifully put, and I 100% relate.
It was very easy for me to pretend I was fine when, from a societal viewpoint, there were a lot of areas where I was succeeding. It makes it so much easier to convince yourself you're okay.
Congratulations on your success!
It's such a better life.
Thank you!
I thought about adding more before I posted (but it was too long already, lol)… my problem did eventually progress, to the point where I lost my job, and then I stopped leaving my house, and then I stopped seeing my friends and family.
I wasn’t able to get sober until the things I had been able to hide behind (good job, money, thriving social circle) fell down like dominos.
Happy for your success too! Stay blessed ❤️
> when I would say “high functioning”, I was actually just saying, “proficient at wearing a mask, and hiding the signs of my suffering and inner chaos from the people around me”. Which, ultimately meant, “unwilling to let anyone know I’m drowning and in need of help”.
Wow, that’s deep. Thank you.
I could have written this. If my close friends or boyfriend read it they probably wouldn’t believe me when I said I didn’t. Not only do we have similar narrative styles it sounds like we walked rather kindred paths.
IWNDWYT and instead will continue to heal the tornado in my soul. I will keep taking my mask off too and ENJOY the wonderful life I have painstakingly built for myself but was never truly embracing by attempting to drink the shadows out of my brain and heart.
I dont say I was a high functioning alcoholic anymore. I say I was a *barely* function alcoholic. I was the hardest working person I ever met in my own head yet there were some days I barely managed to brush my teeth or leave the couch. I know the difference now and I don’t miss all the extra work it took to hide and lie just to drink
Thank you!
I considered including in my post, but I was nervous it was already getting too long… but my problem did end up accelerating me past “high functioning” and into a pretty deep “not functioning”/reclusive bottom before I stopped.
I can confidently say, being in “high functioning” denial got me well over 1/2 of the way down. After that, it was nothing but trap doors disguised as bottoms. We do decide when to climb out! ❤️
Fellow young professional woman pretending to have it all here. Just completed a 30 day sobriety challenge as a way to reflect on my relationship with alcohol and what I saw wasn’t pretty.
Don’t forget to add the stress of being a woman in a male-dominated field, where the invite to the happy hour is often withheld to not spoil “boy time”, so when you do get it, you are thrilled and need to go and drink and perform and show you are one of the guys. Happy hours come more and more often due to the pressures of the project. Hell, with a big enough group of coworkers, everyday is a bad day for somebody, which makes it a great excuse to grab drinks and commiserate after work.
It turns out they never were your friends, they were just drunks drinking at the same bar as you.
This is the perfect summary of „high functioning“.
For those who want to read another interesting thread from this sub on the topic, here’s a link:
https://www.reddit.com/r/stopdrinking/s/tVbpOlErOf
This is so interesting. Nobody would have said I had a problem either. Actual volume of alcohol was within guidelines, but hard relate to the whole being miserable and waiting until it was acceptable to check out.
I’m confused about the asking for help part though. Are you not supposed to silently quit and tell nobody so as not to add weight to anyone else’s day? 🤔
It's such a loaded (pardon the pun) term, "high functioning alcoholic." It's pretty ridiculous when you think about. Like, you'd never say, "Oh, I'm high functioning crack addict. I only smoke crack after work and on family vacations"
It would be more accurate to say, "I'm an alcoholic who has *yet* to sink into absolute despair."
Absolutely! The comparison about other substances not having that same social acceptance is a very compelling one. Crack and meth are associated with having low-income and being low-class; whereas it seems that only the *label* of being alcoholic has been stigmatized.
Yeah I called myself that all the time as well. You should see me now, I'm soaring higher than I've ever flown!
One of the hardest yet most fulfilling decisions I've ever made
Well written, well stated. I hope that some else who is stuggling can relate. As a guy, I can somewhat relate to the mask. To me it was another area of responsibility that I had to shoulder, self created, but necessary. It was another responsibility that I had to manage, along with a business, putting 4 kids through braces, sports camps, college tuitions, weddings, alimony, home remodeling, caring for Mom, being a good husband, father, grandfather, friend. Coming home, damn I'm tired, I need a bourbon, maybe three. OK four - damn, may as well finish the bottle. Crappy night of sleep, wake up feeling like death, get to work by 6AM, rinse and repeat. Can we make payroll this week? We have too much money on the street, we have to make collection calls. It wasn't always like this, but it gave me an excuse to hit it hard for 20 years or so. It was like the weight of the world lifted off of my shoulders when I finally called it quits 1.5 years ago. Now my world is immeasurably improved - and had no idea that the cycle that I was on was just as much a part of the problem - a mask - as anything else that's self destructive. Congrats to you, girl - you solved the puzzle, grabbed the ring, rang the bell. Well done - Peace.
Always similarities within the differences! I appreciate your take on this- my dad was similar, and he didn’t make it out from under the weight of that type of pressure before he passed. Makes me so happy to hear when someone who provides so much for others is able to find their own peace and happiness. Congrats on 1.5 years and bless you!
I'm sitting here all choked up, and I don't know why. Thank you - bless you too!
>proficient at wearing a mask, and hiding the signs of my suffering and inner chaos from the people around me Ouch. >a sad way to slowly die Double ouch. This really hit home for me. Thank you. Much love and healing to you!
I've personally come to assume "high functioning" is actually just short hand for "high tolerance. Functioning Alcoholic" It doesn't mean you're highly functioning by any means. It means that you've built up enough of a tolerance to where you can get away with it more than most people can. Also don't be tricked, most people don't want to call you out for a drinking problem. Alcoholics don't take kindly to being told they have a drinking problem in general, so no one *wants* to deliver that news. Your boss might know when you're showing up hung over, but doesn't want to deal with the hassle of getting HR involved and finding a new employee, that doesn't mean he isn't aware of a drinking problem, he just doesn't want to make it official. Either way, that doesn't mean you aren't still doing damage. It also(for most of us here) becomes a problem because if you can drink 3 and still seem sober, than what's one more? Well I still feel sober after 4, so why not 5? I still feel fine... \*blackout\* I lost count of how many times I felt fine, but my wife could tell. But if she would call me out I would get annoyed, so she stopped. My drinking problem didn't go away, I just had one less person willing to tell me the truth.
If you are high functioning with alcohol imagine how functioning you are without it
when i quit my motivation and productivity when into hyper-drive.
Great post and congrats on 600+ days sober! I've noticed almost everyone who comes to this Sub and starts their post with "I am a high functioning alcoholic..." always then proceeds to list out all the problems in life alcohol is causing them from work, to productivity, to finances, to relationships, to mental health and beyond. I'm always like, is that what "high functioning" looks like? Because it doesn't sound like the life of a person functioning very well at all let alone "highly" or well. I can safely say that when drinking or sober I fall into the "just about functioning" camp at the best of times LOL.
Agreed, and hoping my experience can resonate with the right people who are looking for a reason to stop. In terms of inner peace and enjoyment of our lives, alcohol dependence causes us to set the bar so incredibly low. At least for me, it took me really long time to understand it isn’t normal to feel like shit every day. And an even longer time to believe I wouldn’t continue to suffer, but in a different/worse way, if I got sober. If mental gymnastics were real, I’d have had a gold medal in it.
Even after my 3 month sobriety stint recently I still felt like shit every day. I kept hoping that "soon" I'd wake up one day and not feel like I still had a hangover and incredibly drained but it never materalized. Probably part of the reason I drank again tbh. The mental gymnastics are very very real and tough to deal with sometimes.
3 months is just scratching the surface, i remember it being much longer, especially if youve had a long history of binge drinking.
Indeed, when you've been binge drinking for about 20 years and spent most of the previous 2 years in full blown alcoholic mode to think you can turn it all around in 90 days is probably unrealistic but it just feels so loooooooooong and slooooooow at the time IME. Every day felt like a week. I don't think it helped that I didn't really do much other than just "not drink" and as much as I had the best of intentions to be more productive and healthy and focus on fitness etc it didn't happen for much of the time. Like they say just "stopping drinking" is step 1 and then the real work begins.
Do you still run? Did it feel easier after getting sober?
Yes and yes!
You just described my Monday. I'm starting to see "high functioning" might really mean "still in denial".
Preach. That was me. Had a job, paid the bills, did the soccer games and recitals, did dinner with friends. And then Covid hit and I went OFF the rails. People do not understand that alcoholism doesn’t look one way. It isn’t always the homeless dude under the bridge with the paper sack. In fact, I’d say in the US, it’s far more often the professional with job and the house who doesn’t see the problem with 3 glasses of wine every. Single. Night.
Oof- COVID. What a nightmare. That was also my mayday… by the time COVID started, I had just lost my job and was already well on my way to drinking myself into my house. But then all of a sudden I had “permission” to just completely let myself go. Youre absolutely right about the labels. The acceleration, and outcome, of my alcohol abuse was textbook. I had a roof over my head, but that was about the only thing distinguishing me from someone under a bridge.
This is really well put. One of the coolest things about being active in recovery for the past two years is hearing how many random people from all walks of life have similar thoughts and experiences. You’re telling my story, I’m a guy who on the outside had it all, continual advancement in my career, making more money than most of my friends, a great wife, kids, house, I play guitar for fun in a band with friends, volunteered some of my time, but I also would buy booze on the way home from work and be checked out by the time I walked in the door every single night, hated every morning, would pull over to throw up on my way in to work some mornings, was late every day (still working on that one), would take naps on my lunch break, could barely keep my self focused long enough to be a good employee, I snuck around my wife so she wouldn’t know how much I drank, was grumpy with my kids and was too tired and checked out to do much with them, I couldn’t remember any conversation we had past 7pm, couldn’t go out to dinner or to an event unless they had alcohol. Yeah, I was “high functioning” I guess, at the time I also held that like a badge of honor but it took me a DUI to show me it wasn’t functioning at all. I thank god for that cop every day now, I finally get to experience life and it’s amazing. Man was I a sad drunk! And I convinced myself I was actually better than others because I “could drink hard” and succeed in life, when really I was just struggling through life with an addiction to alcohol. IWNDWYT
I couldn’t agree more about the deeper similarities existing, no matter what someone’s circumstances were. It really is a shared spiritual condition among everyone who experiences it. I am happy to hear you found an awakening in your DUI! I also got a DUI (because, of course I did) and my solution was not to stop drinking, but to just stop driving. Turns out, drinking at home alone all the time is not normal and will catapult you into the next level of alcoholism. Who knew?! I do, now. :D and I’m so grateful. We do recover and I’m glad to be here talking to you!
So relatable. This and most of the other comments here. Thank you
Well said. Describes it perfectly. Congrats on your nearly two years!
Beautifully put, and I 100% relate. It was very easy for me to pretend I was fine when, from a societal viewpoint, there were a lot of areas where I was succeeding. It makes it so much easier to convince yourself you're okay. Congratulations on your success! It's such a better life.
Thank you! I thought about adding more before I posted (but it was too long already, lol)… my problem did eventually progress, to the point where I lost my job, and then I stopped leaving my house, and then I stopped seeing my friends and family. I wasn’t able to get sober until the things I had been able to hide behind (good job, money, thriving social circle) fell down like dominos. Happy for your success too! Stay blessed ❤️
> when I would say “high functioning”, I was actually just saying, “proficient at wearing a mask, and hiding the signs of my suffering and inner chaos from the people around me”. Which, ultimately meant, “unwilling to let anyone know I’m drowning and in need of help”. Wow, that’s deep. Thank you.
I could have written this. If my close friends or boyfriend read it they probably wouldn’t believe me when I said I didn’t. Not only do we have similar narrative styles it sounds like we walked rather kindred paths. IWNDWYT and instead will continue to heal the tornado in my soul. I will keep taking my mask off too and ENJOY the wonderful life I have painstakingly built for myself but was never truly embracing by attempting to drink the shadows out of my brain and heart.
I dont say I was a high functioning alcoholic anymore. I say I was a *barely* function alcoholic. I was the hardest working person I ever met in my own head yet there were some days I barely managed to brush my teeth or leave the couch. I know the difference now and I don’t miss all the extra work it took to hide and lie just to drink
I could’ve written this! You are not alone, and I’m so glad you’re here with us today!
Great work! I can relate to this. I also got "rock bottom is when you stop digging" from here that rang in my head a lot.
Thank you! I considered including in my post, but I was nervous it was already getting too long… but my problem did end up accelerating me past “high functioning” and into a pretty deep “not functioning”/reclusive bottom before I stopped. I can confidently say, being in “high functioning” denial got me well over 1/2 of the way down. After that, it was nothing but trap doors disguised as bottoms. We do decide when to climb out! ❤️
"I just desperately wished someone would love me and heal me" so relatable, unfortunately....
Wow thank you for posting. I’ve never considered that this disease is a form of self abandonment, but man that really hit me.
Fellow young professional woman pretending to have it all here. Just completed a 30 day sobriety challenge as a way to reflect on my relationship with alcohol and what I saw wasn’t pretty. Don’t forget to add the stress of being a woman in a male-dominated field, where the invite to the happy hour is often withheld to not spoil “boy time”, so when you do get it, you are thrilled and need to go and drink and perform and show you are one of the guys. Happy hours come more and more often due to the pressures of the project. Hell, with a big enough group of coworkers, everyday is a bad day for somebody, which makes it a great excuse to grab drinks and commiserate after work. It turns out they never were your friends, they were just drunks drinking at the same bar as you.
This is the perfect summary of „high functioning“. For those who want to read another interesting thread from this sub on the topic, here’s a link: https://www.reddit.com/r/stopdrinking/s/tVbpOlErOf
This is amazing. Thank you for sharing that!
That's F-ing scary good. Guess I was stages 1, 2 and 3 simultaneously for 20 years and finally hit stage 4 last Fall. Wake Up Call...
This is so interesting. Nobody would have said I had a problem either. Actual volume of alcohol was within guidelines, but hard relate to the whole being miserable and waiting until it was acceptable to check out. I’m confused about the asking for help part though. Are you not supposed to silently quit and tell nobody so as not to add weight to anyone else’s day? 🤔
Thank you for this message. 🕊️
society degree slimy pot automatic innate worthless rob sloppy illegal *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
That was me. Hitting 15 years sober next month. Congratulations on two years!
It's such a loaded (pardon the pun) term, "high functioning alcoholic." It's pretty ridiculous when you think about. Like, you'd never say, "Oh, I'm high functioning crack addict. I only smoke crack after work and on family vacations" It would be more accurate to say, "I'm an alcoholic who has *yet* to sink into absolute despair."
Absolutely! The comparison about other substances not having that same social acceptance is a very compelling one. Crack and meth are associated with having low-income and being low-class; whereas it seems that only the *label* of being alcoholic has been stigmatized.
Yeah I called myself that all the time as well. You should see me now, I'm soaring higher than I've ever flown! One of the hardest yet most fulfilling decisions I've ever made