Translated material
I'm 25 and I'm an alcoholic
Ivan (name changed) from Moscow first tried alcohol when he was 12 years old. And already at the age of 14–15, alcohol became an integral part of hanging out with classmates - this is how Vanya had fun and ran away from his drinking father at home. True, by the age of 18 he began to drink more and more often on his own, substances were added to alcohol, and if he drank in company, he drank too much and behaved aggressively. Ivan told Kholod about how he recognized an addict in himself and is now struggling with it.
It seemed like everyone around was drinking and that was normal. I realized the problem too late
In November 2013, I entered the “monkey barn”.
I was in eighth grade. A couple of friends and I were going to celebrate a classmate’s birthday and made photocopies of passports in which we changed our ages using a photo editor. According to this “document,” we were not 14–15 years old, but 18–20.
To celebrate we went to “ToDaSyo” in the center of Moscow, where there was a “1+1” promotion on alcohol. Despite our young faces, the waiter believed the legend that we were supposedly first-year students whose passports were taken by the university dean while the documents were being processed, and served us alcohol without any questions asked.
We started with beer, then moved on to cocktails, and ended up with tequila and hot shots.
One of my friends vomited right in the restaurant - he quickly began to come to his senses and realize what was happening: it was almost midnight, three drunken fourteen-year-olds in the center of Moscow, our parents did not know what was wrong with us. We decided that it was unsafe to take the metro: it was already late, and drunk teenagers would certainly attract attention. It was decided to call a taxi.
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Unfortunately, no one took into account that we would get seasick on the road. First I threw up, then the birthday boy, the drunkest of our group, started to feel sick. The driver did not forgive us for this: after taking two thousand rubles from us, he dropped us off at the Tulskaya station and drove off. I had to go down to the subway.
We were almost loaded onto the approaching train when we were stopped by a police officer named Vera.
“Guys, come with me, look how bad he is,” she said, looking at our friend, and persistently led us to the police station.
Vera put us in a small cell, but did not close the bars and generally behaved very kindly: she allowed us to run out to the toilet when we were sick. Even when I asked Vera why they, the police, imprisoned Pussy Riot, she very gently and kindly said: “Oh, well, let’s not talk about that.” Her colleague brought us tangerines and was very surprised when he found out that we were drinking.
Vera called our parents, they came and took us home - they didn’t draw up any protocols for anyone. They scolded my friends a lot, the birthday boy was completely forbidden to see us and go anywhere except school. But my dad just laughed at me.
Children's pranks
When I first tried ruff (vodka mixed with beer) at the age of 12, I never thought that alcohol could become the main problem in my life.
It all started with harmless pranks: first, at the dacha, my older friend mixed me beer with vodka - apparently to laugh at what would happen to me. I was the youngest and they often made fun of me.
Later, in the fall of 2012, a funny teenage prank appeared - ask a random bombard to buy a bottle of vodka and orange juice at Dixie or Pyaterochka for an extra charge. When I returned drunk from friends, my parents didn’t notice.
When we were 14 years old, my friends and I found out where we could buy strong alcohol without a passport, and began to gather at a classmate’s place on weekends. We competed to see who could drink the most, and drank half a liter of vodka in one gulp as a bet.
It was fun: we talked, played guitar, climbed onto the roof and looked at the night sky.
However, very soon the first alarm bells appeared: for example, I was already experiencing blackouts - in the morning I could forget how the last few hours had passed.
By the 10th and 11th grades it was no longer so fun. When intoxicated, I could become aggressive and insult people - because of this, one of my close friends did not speak to me for almost six months.
One day I was drinking at a friend’s house until the morning and in an alcoholic stupor I went down to the first floor and made a mess in the concierge’s closet: I threw his things and the receiver of a landline phone. For some reason it seemed something innocent, something normal. As well as the fact that I could vomit all over the bathroom at a party, lose consciousness, drink scorched vodka until seven in the morning, break a glass at a bus stop.
It didn’t stop me that once at a party in an unfamiliar company I drank almost a liter of vodka in one gulp and passed out for eight hours. Those guys thought I was dying, and the friend who took me there decided to call my father.
Having arrived, my father called an ambulance, and that company quickly dispersed - everyone was afraid of the consequences. The doctors simply said: “Your boy drank too much.” The father had to give them money so that they would not report this to the police.
No one scolded me at home, although my parents were amazed. They knew that I drank and were okay with it: my mother didn’t really like it, but my father often bought me alcohol.
“Tell me, dad drinks because you don’t love him, right?”
My father drank too . Initially, that’s why I started running away to sleepovers with friends. Every evening dad drank in the kitchen. When I was 14–15 years old, he began to drink more and started arguing with my mother. Often, because I was afraid for my mother, I would come into the kitchen and try to protect her: I would push my dad away from her, push me out of the kitchen. At such moments, dishes broke, clothes were torn, and one day my father, in anger, broke the only laptop in the house.
The relationship between my parents quickly began to deteriorate: when I was in the 11th grade, my mother bought a folding chair from Ikea and moved it into the kitchen of our two-room apartment. My father began to go on full-blown binges for a week or two. At this time, he usually slept a lot, woke up for two or three hours, drank, watched TV and fell back to sleep - and so on four times a day. I was afraid that he would come into my room very drunk, and I installed a lock on the door. This didn’t stop him: he knocked, offered to talk, asked if I loved him. When my father was really ill, he could lose his balance and fall in the corridor.
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When it became clear that my father was needed at work, my mother or I called a narcologist for him: the doctor administered IVs to at least partially bring my father back to his senses.
Sometimes, when my father realized that he could no longer drink, he installed such IVs himself: the once white mattress of his bed, which was already yellow from cigarette smoke and full of holes from burning bulls, was replenished with a giant stain of blood - he smeared needle past the vein.
It also happened that his older sister, my aunt, came from the Moscow region to give him an IV. On one of these visits, when she had already dug out dad and he had gone to bed, we were sitting in the kitchen, and she asked me: “Tell me, dad drinks because you don’t love him, right?”
Ordinary romance
At the end of school I became acquainted with drugs. At first I was just dabbling with weed or hashish, but pretty soon I started mixing them with alcohol. I leaned on them especially often when I dropped out of my first year and was dumped by the first girl I was truly in love with.
After expulsion, in 2017, I began to actively prepare for retaking the Unified State Exam: the exam results did not suit me, and they were not enough for admission to the Higher School of Economics, where I wanted to study. Apparently to “prove” to my ex-girlfriend that I was not a pushover, I also started going to the gym every day. At the same time, almost every evening I either smoked, or drank, or both.
Once, for example, a friend and I drank all night in the center of Moscow, and then decided that it was a good idea to continue drinking in the gazebo near my ex-girlfriend’s house and try to light a fire in it, and it was in February. She lived on the other side of the city, and it was late at night: there was no money, and she had to wait for the metro to open to go home. When the metro opened, I drove to my metro line, got into the carriage and fell asleep after riding several circles along the line.
I really wanted to enter the National Research University Higher School of Economics, but even on my second attempt I couldn’t get into the budget program. I received a tuition discount, but was expelled at the end of my first year for simply not showing up to class. It seemed to me that I was unworthy of studying at HSE, I began to have panic attacks and anxiety: when I got to the university, I was overcome with horror, I turned around and drove back home.
I also released this stress with the help of alcohol. Drinking parties often began to end with me, for example, getting on the bus home, falling asleep and driving in circles along the route before getting off - this is how my phone was once stolen. Or he could vomit right in the subway car. Or getting drunk on 777 port wine, crashing on a scooter and bleeding, bending a barrier in a closed residential complex and barely remembering it the next morning - there are many such stories. So what? The usual romance of the life of a barely adult person.
But at this time my father, on the contrary, gave up. He stopped drinking in 2018, shortly after his mother filed for divorce.
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Shortly before my father finally stopped drinking, I learned from my mother how his problems with alcohol began.
After the 1998 crisis, he had significantly less money and work - and he began to drink phenazepam with vodka. Dad might forget to pick me up from kindergarten, and one day, returning home late from work, my mother saw a pool of blood right at the entrance to the apartment. A trail of blood led to their bedroom. When she went there, she saw my father, covered in blood, lying in an embrace with me in bed. It turned out that my father, having eaten a whole blister of phenazepam and washed it down with vodka, fell while he was walking and tore his ear on the radiator. After that, he went to rehab. The doctors did not believe that he would be able to quit. But he succeeded - he did not drink for almost 10 years. And then he snapped.
Five years later, he was able to return to sobriety, and his home became much calmer.
"Fuck you hatched"
After being expelled from HSE, I completely closed in on myself: I stopped seeing friends, practically never left my room, played computer games, and drank heavily in the evenings. It was in the summer of 2018 that I first felt, leaving the house in the evening to go to the store, that I needed to drink - an obsessive thought arose, and in order to get rid of it, I had to make an effort. Subsequently, these thoughts appeared more and more often.
I no longer had the desire to study, so I went to work at UNIQLO. The shifts lasted until two or three o'clock in the morning - I came home late, and on the last break I bought a couple of cheap bottles of white wine at the store so that I could get drunk when I returned home.
One day, after returning late at night from my shift, I drank two bottles of wine and began to feel sick in my sleep. The father, who was no longer drinking at that time, came running to the sounds, took him to the bathroom and threw him under hot water. I came to my senses, but showed up to my next shift at the store with a terrible hangover—which is how I ended up doing most of my shifts, actually. Plus, it was normal for me not to remember how I fell asleep.
In August 2019, I took unpaid leave and went to St. Petersburg to visit a friend. There I met my future girlfriend. We were in a long distance relationship, but the plan was that at some point I would move in with her.
I quit my job in order to re-enter the university in the second semester of my first year - subsequently I thought about transferring to St. Petersburg. But this time my studies delayed me - the girl and I saw each other on short visits: when she went to Moscow, when I went to her. Basically, she didn’t see me drinking, but we broke up because of my problem.
Once, when she came to see me, the three of us were drinking wine with my mother, and I was cut off - some trifling phrase offended me. Then it snowballed: I thought I was righteously angry at them because they had offended me, and I behaved more and more aggressively. It got to the point that I was about to go to a convenience store at night to buy vodka, and my mother, girlfriend and father tried to stop me and dissuade me. I remember that on the way out of the apartment I insulted them and almost threatened everyone with physical harm.
At some point I looked at my girlfriend - she was scared, she was almost crying. The pitiful expression on her face infuriated me so much that, looking straight into her eyes, I shouted: “Have you lost your mind, you whore?” - and left the apartment.
I didn’t make it to the 24-hour reception and quickly returned home—but not out of shame or because I felt sorry for the girl and my parents. I was simply turned around by a friend who I wrote to about what happened: he convinced me to go back, but at that moment I was just upset that he did not support my intention to drink more.
When I returned home, I realized that I had messed up. When I entered the room, the girl was just lying in bed in complete darkness. I started to apologize, but she remained silent. And this also infuriated me: shouting “sorry,” I grabbed a tall floor lamp and began to hit it on the floor until I completely broke it. Soon we parted.
I'm an alcoholic
After the breakup, I didn’t even think that I needed to stop drinking—on the contrary. I drank with friends, other girls, alone in the evenings.
What happened stressed me out: it was obvious that that aggression was caused by alcohol, and I didn’t want it to happen again. But I couldn’t control myself, and it only got worse. Blackouts became more frequent, and I began to learn about how I behaved only from the stories of people who were at the same party with me. For example, one day a group of university friends and I went to a barbecue in the park. We started drinking beer early in the evening and only around nine o’clock did we get strong alcohol. Just a little bit was enough for me to break away.
All I remember is that at about 10 pm the guys and I went to visit one of the girls living nearby. I remember going into her house and calling her dog names. Next thing - I wake up in my bed and find out that no one wants to talk to me. According to the stories, at first I behaved aggressively, and at some point I got up from the common table, pulled down my pants and showed everyone my penis. Then it didn’t seem to me that I was to blame for anything - on the contrary: I thought that the guys were too sensitive. I just had too much to drink - who doesn't?
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A similar incident occurred in 2021. I got drunk again - and I had to learn everything from the stories of my classmates. It turned out that when everyone was about to leave, I stood in the center of the street and began to relieve myself in full view of passers-by. To prevent me from getting hit, one of my comrades held me by the armpits, and some passers-by men of strong build threatened to “fuck me for what I’m doing.” Then they put me in a taxi and took me home.
After that, I tried to give up alcohol for a while. True, it lasted only eight months - until March 2022. The war started, I quickly got a foreign passport and left Russia. Due to the terrifying news from Ukraine and emigration, stress went through the roof. One of the first things I did in a new country was go to a store to buy a bottle of beer.
Double life
Right now, the period from March 2022 to June 2023 feels like pure madness. My neighbors and I drank a lot, and it was normal to leave about $150 at the bar, go home, and continue drinking. Conflicts with neighbors began to resemble conflicts between drunks on the fence.
At the same time, thanks to forced emigration, I managed to get a good job that gave me meaning. The position was insignificant, but it was a chance for a normal future.
I was a very responsible employee and did my tasks well. At the same time, I tried very hard so that my “alcoholic life” did not overlap with my “working life”.
But alcohol made itself felt: at some point, for example, my health began to deteriorate. I gained excess weight, excessive sweating, sleep deprivation, frequent and intense headaches, gastrointestinal problems, constantly inflamed lymph nodes and severe pain - especially those near the jaw and chin.
The situation reached its peak between April and June 2023. Then the psychiatrist diagnosed me with anxiety-depressive disorder and prescribed antidepressants. When I started taking the pills, I tried to avoid alcohol, but it lasted about three days - after that they told me that drinking was not prohibited, and I began mixing antidepressants with alcohol.
Doctors do not advise drinking alcohol while taking a course of antidepressants. Alcohol is a depressant: together with antidepressants, it can significantly worsen the effect of treatment, increase depression and anxiety, ruin the quality of sleep, increase the side effects of the drug, and much more.
I continued to be hyper-responsible at work, but at informal meetings many people asked if I was okay. No wonder: in the evenings I drank about five cans of beer, and then went to the store for a refill - most often I took a couple of bottles of wine. The next morning I felt physically ill, but the depressive episode that comes with a hangover disappeared - all thanks to antidepressants.
Everything changed when my life as an alcoholic began to intrude into my work life. Although I had no doubt that I had problems, I finally decided to quit in June 2023 - after I was rude to my manager while drunk. The thought that I could lose a job that I love very much scared me.
The very next day I started a calendar in which I painted one month of sobriety, starting from June 21, and reduced the dose of antidepressants to stop drinking them completely. It seemed that pills seemed to not allow me to feel guilty and shame for my actions - along with anxiety and depression, the mechanisms that allowed us to normally regulate behavior.
Addiction
The first three to four months are the most difficult. It was not as easy to abandon alcohol as I thought: triggers constantly arose, because of which I wanted to drink, and the old habits made themselves felt: I had to not meet in an informal atmosphere with colleagues, dissuade yourself from obsessive thoughts to drink. It’s not easy not to go to bars - especially when this is your only leisure. Attempts to get distracted by normal activity - like watching a movie, a series, reading a book or playing video games - did not bring pleasure at all. I pulled a drink.
Soon I signed up for a psychotherapist. Talking with her helped to restrain himself. At first, any “contact” with alcohol was a hard trigger. I constantly had to remember why I deny myself the pleasure. It was difficult to follow rational arguments, but gradually I stopped thinking that I was losing something if I did not drink in a common company, but the feeling that you are sober have turned into a very valuable feeling.
After these three to four months, I got sick of drinking: it began to order soda or juice at a meeting, where there is alcohol. I was sure that I should not drink like me at all, and promised myself that I was throwing, if not forever, then indefinitely. True, the idea that I will never, for example, will try beer again, has still caused bewilderment.
I lasted a year. He broke in July 2024-against the backdrop of problems at work. I did not create some game, but health problems returned a month later. It was struck that I seemed to return to the same point from which I started: for example, it again happened that I drank a lot of days in a row, and the hangover did not stop drinking again the next day.
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For a while I thought that I could again tie at any moment, that I would postpone for tomorrow, and today I would drink that, in the end, I am a changed person, and the consequences of alcohol remained in the past. And when I tried, I realized that this was not so: I beat myself on the head, stood under a cold shower, brought myself to his senses - and reminded himself that he made me tie. It turned out that the previous motivation is not enough to drink now.
At the same time, I did not like the effect of a hangover, nor the time spent on a drink. But dependence continues to live somewhere inside and make decisions for you. I began to gnaw at the feeling of guilt, because I realized that I could not stop again - it only fueled the desire to drink, and it was a vicious circle.
Fortunately, three months later, the will and the realization that the “experiment” got out of control won.
On September 27, I managed to tie it again. Now I feel that the “denouement” was a big step back, and I regret that I had completely broken. This time I could spend on making it better for me - both physically and psychologically.
Yes, I do not have cirrhosis of the liver or cancer of the esophagus, I did not laid my mother’s TV or father for the sake of alcohol, but I have already trodden part of this path and brought a lot of suffering to relatives and just familiar. Honestly, I am very afraid of how I am drawn to alcohol and that I can’t stop me if I drink. I am sure that it is dependent - and if it depends, then this is forever. And if, in order to make life better, you need not to drink all my life - now I agree.
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Author: editors of the "cold" Illustrations: Anna Ivantsova