#alcoholism mention
What people who don’t listen to country think is wrong with country music: “This song is about my dog, my truck, Jesus, my ex-wife, and the rash on my inner thigh.”
What’s actually wrong with country music: every single guy in the songs copes with breakups through casual alcoholism?? and nobody talks about it??? seriously these poor men are going to get themselves hurt, none of them are talking about a rash, stop laughing about their trucks they need help
“we need to stop the stigma towards drug users and addicts” and “we need to challenge the idea that being sober makes you boring” and “we need to stop acting like binge drinking to the extent you’re doing medical damage is fun and normal for young people” are all ideas that can and should coexist.
just so we’re clear, the threshold for “binge drinking to the extent you’re doing medical damage” is waaaay lower than you think.
I work in an obstetrician and gynaecologist’s office. we have to tell patients on a regular basis that they are binge drinking weekly when they think they are simply consuming a normal amount of alcohol on the weekends.
having more than 3 drinks in a single sitting if you have an estrogen based endocrine system is a binge that is medically significant.
having more than 5 in a sitting is a medically significant binge for someone with a testosterone based endocrine system.
every time you do this, it significantly impacts your risk of getting breast cancer, and damages your liver. it takes time to recover from that liver damage. if you’re having a 3-5 or more drink binge on a weekly basis, you are an alcoholic, medically speaking, and your liver is not recovering.
again: the bar for what binge drinking is, medically, is so much lower than what you think it is.
alcohol is a really toxic substance and not something you should fuck around with.
again: if you have an estrogenized hormone system (common for most women), then 3 drinks is a binge. if you have a testosteronized hormone system (common for most men), then 5 drinks is a binge.
anything above that number, consumed as frequently as weekly or more, and you’re medically a binge drinking alcoholic.
also, if you’re drinking any quantity of alcohol 6 days a week or more, that’s another threshold at which, medically speaking, you meet the definition of alcoholism. your liver needs more days without alcohol in your system than just one a week to recover and be healthy.
I don’t say any of this to shame anyone—to me, alcoholism or substance use disorders aren’t a sign of weakness or moral failing. and most of us genuinely don’t know this stuff.
rather—I point this out because it’s important to reduce harm, and find ways to live healthier, happier lives. there is a life outside of constant binge drinking. it’s not always easy to find it. but it’s out there. you deserve a life where your emotional needs are met by something other than alcohol, and a life in which your liver is healthy, and the ways you cope and celebrate and find joy don’t put you at increased risk of cancer.
also–even if alcohol is the only way you can self-medicate, or if you choose to go on with your alcohol usage anyway regardless of other options–you still deserve to know what it’s doing to your body.
information is key. you don’t have to stop drinking, but the utter lack of education on alcohol + the normalization of binge drinking in current society leads to many people drinking without any idea of what it’s doing to their bodies.
addicts deserve accurate medical information regardless of what they decide to do with it. for some people, losing liver function is worth the benefits they get from binge drinking, but they can’t make that choice if they don’t know what the consequences are to begin with.
addicts deserve accurate medical information regardless of what they decide to do with it.
Fuck the French gov that refuses to support Dry January or forbid ads for alcoholic beverages.
The “best wines country” ? Yeah, the best alcoholist lobby’s country too.
looked through H2G2 fic yesterday, which is not a thing I really actually read (or, like, fic in general), so I don’t know what the state of fanfic is like despite me spending a lot of time writing it. Other people write Ford very differently than I do. I’m not even talking about the taking-his-alcoholism-seriously stuff, because of course I don’t expect anyone to do that, but like. In fics, he uses a lot of sarcasm/rhetorical devices that someone who didn’t understand sarcasm likely wouldn’t use either.
However this also really affirms my writing, because like here I am writing this character rather differently than everyone else writes him, but everyone loves how I write him anyway, and they tell me the way I write him is in-character. so like. if I’m getting this character down really well and I’m doing it differently than everyone else, I’ve clearly struck upon something that most other writers haven’t. Which is an exciting feeling to me.
“So everyday, after work, I’d drink myself to sleep. I slept in my bathtub with the shower running. It was the only way I was able to get the scent of blood off me…”
