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SocietyOctober 2, 2018

Here’s what will happen when you are a functional alcoholic

Guest writer
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After almost 20 years with a drinking problem, newly sober Baal Caulfield* knows a thing or two about the lies you tell yourself as a ‘functional’ alcoholic.

Sweet sweet liquor, nectar of the gods. Bringer of joy the world over. Whether it’s a glass of your favourite Pinot with your wife over dinner or drinking four shots of gin through your ear (yeah…I did that once for reasons I’m still not sure about), alcohol is the world’s lubricant. And hey, we can handle it, right? We are never going to become that guy down at the mall who wets his pants and shouts inanities at long forgotten gods.

No, we’ll be functional and able to drink and maintain our careers, friends and family while spending the majority of the time drunk and happy.

Well guess what? Up until recently I was a functional alcoholic and after almost nearly 20 years I knew a few things about being “functional”

You are going to smell

No matter what you do, you’ll smell. And I don’t mean of just liquor, I mean you will smell in a variety of different ways. Alcohol smells, we all know this. Whisky smells of whisky, vodka smells of vodka, beer smells of beer. But underneath it all is that persistent chemical odour of alcohol. You can wash away the smell of the particular type of liquor you may have drunk, but the stench of alcohol will remain, no matter how many showers you take or how many times you roll yourself in a blend of aromatic herbs and spices. It creeps out of your pores over many hours and covers you in an unctuous film which hangs heavy around you. It attaches itself to your clothes, to your bed covers and to any loved ones who can stand to be hugged by your greasy drunken self. I have been in meetings where I was sure the smell of a crazed weekend was pouring from my bloodshot eyes. It is an insanely difficult smell to rid you and your house of which leads to…

People will notice

That smell will turn heads and will get you noticed. No matter how hard you try to hide it, people will notice. And it isn’t just the smell – it’s everything about you. Frequently tired, bloodshot eyes and malodorous clothing are just the start – all that tells people is that you may have had a big weekend or night out. But then people will start to notice you are frequently tired and grumpy in the mornings but miraculously chipper after “lunch”, which might mean eating and having a beer – but also, as the alcoholism progresses, popping down to the supermarket, buying a bottle of wine and necking most of it unceremoniously in a public bathroom. Some mornings your hands will shake, your breath will be 80 proof and people will start saying things like “big night last night was it?” on a Wednesday morning. First they’ll say it with surprise (you were drinking on Tuesday night?), then with resignation (You were drinking on a Tuesday night…’protracted sigh’…). And because people are going to start noticing, get ready because…

You are going to lie. A lot.

We’ve all told our significant others that we ‘had a few’ when in actual fact we drank our body weight in alcohol, set ourselves on fire in a nightclub, then scaled a building to get through the bathroom window of drug dealer’s apartment to get our bag which we’d left in the lounge (yes, sadly that is one of the more tame situations I found myself in). But get ready to be more than just a little white liar; as a functional alcoholic you’ll wind up being a devious little shit…about EVERYTHING. How much you drank, where you have been, why you are missing your tie, what time of day it is, why you slept on the floor – you will lie about everything to avoid anyone questioning your drinking habits.

You’ll hide bottles around the house, you’ll have stashes in the garden, and the guy at the bottle shop will start eyeing you suspiciously when you return for your third bottle of wine that day, explaining you’re ‘having a party’ at 11am on a Monday morning. You’ll make excuses about the amount of money you are spending, you’ll call in sick to work, you’ll blabber to your partner about ‘being tired’ when your sexual organs stop working properly, your whole life will be a huge ball of lies and if you’re clever enough you’ll be able to maintain these lies for years however…

You’re going to get caught out

Sooner or later the lies on top of lies are going to collapse like a house of cards. Why are you slurring after one beer and ‘popping outside for a cigarette’? How come you stink of liquor when no one saw you drink anything and you claim to have been sober all day? Why are you behaving in such a strange manner all of a sudden? After months or years of being an alcoholic you will be caught and the gossamer fibres of bullshit you have hung around yourself will fall to pieces. Your significant other will be upset, your employer will be wary of you and your friends will start getting tired of you. Worst of all, the bullshit you have told yourself about being “functional” will collapse. It isn’t just those around you who fall for your crap but suddenly you catch yourself out – you weren’t just lying to others, you were lying to yourself.

Sooner or later you are going to screw everything up

I’m 37 years old. Not 50, not 60, and not 40. Thirty-seven years old. At 37 I have been arrested, written off cars, am divorced and have seriously compromised my health. I’ve been in hospital four times in the last 12 months with acute pancreatitis, a pain which is almost indescribable and only ebbs with a huge combination of morphine, fentanyl and ketamine. Yeah, sounds like fun right?

I am not Hunter S. Thompson and neither are you. Sooner or later it gets you in the end. You’ll lose relationships, money, the respect of your peers and your health. And I consider myself lucky despite all this, because it could be a hell of a lot worse. The one thing no one tells you is that you can’t be a functional alcoholic – because being an alcoholic is a dysfunctional state of affairs. Lying to your family, throwing away money, not remembering vast chunks of every weekend isn’t functioning. Sliming around the office after forgetting to shave for the fourth day running isn’t functional.

I ‘functioned’ for nearly 20 years as an alcoholic but in the end it all just falls apart.

And you’ll stink.

Where to get help

Alcohol and Drug Helpline – 0800 787 797 or online chat

More Reading

    livingsober.org.nz

    alcohol.org.nz

    *Baal Caulfield is a pseudonym

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    Photo: Getty Images
    Photo: Getty Images

    SocietyOctober 1, 2018

    Universities’ pitiful response to gender inequality isn’t good enough

    Photo: Getty Images
    Photo: Getty Images

    The chair of Universities New Zealand appears to think that training programmes alone will solve the gender imbalance in the academic workforce. But we need to stop trying to fix the women and focus on fixing the system, write Sandra Grey, Cat Pausé and Sarah Proctor-Thomson, representing the Tertiary Education Union.

    One of the key messages to take from last month’s suffrage celebrations is that equality is achieved through changing the rules of the game, not the players.

    In a recent letter from Education Minister Chris Hipkins university vice-chancellors were recently asked to explain their poor record at reducing gender inequality in our universities.

    The minister’s letter was prompted by publication of 2017 data on the shape of the tertiary education sector workforce, which shows that women make up nearly 50% of the academic workforce but only 26% of the senior academic positions in universities.

    Public institutions have a responsibility to be the champions of equality, in everything from pay to working conditions to gender, and the minister wanted the mostly male leaders of these institutions to explain what they are doing to reduce gender inequality.

    Writing on behalf of his colleagues, chair of Universities New Zealand Stuart McCutcheon’s reply to the minister was disappointing to say the least.

    Rather than acknowledging that the rules of the system are rigged against women, McCutcheon took the view that a training programme would be sufficient to reduce gender inequality in the tertiary education sector.

    Hipkins had rightly expressed his concerns about the under-representation of women in senior academic roles, noting “the continuing gender inequality that is being signalled to students, who will be New Zealand’s future workforce and community leaders”.

    McCutcheon would have been wise to acknowledge that he and his colleagues are, partially at least, complicit in this – by upholding the rules that so often prevent women from reaching the highest levels of the academic profession.

    Instead, he said the solution lay in the Women in Leadership Programme run jointly by universities, as this will “help women to aspire and gain senior positions in universities”.

    The idea that women just need more training, or that they need to find out how to play the rules of the game better, or learn to be more ‘like the men in their department’ if they want to reach the top is tiresome – and something all of us have heard.

    As women working in tertiary education, we just don’t buy the myth lazily advanced by some of our institutional leaders.

    Ministry of Education data, and the findings of the third state of the sector research commissioned by the Tertiary Education Union, is absolutely clear: gender inequality is caused by the system within which we work. It shows that our market-run tertiary education system, which is rife with individual and institutional competition, is more harmful to academic women than academic men – and more harmful to Māori and Pacific women than to Pākehā.

    At the recent Women Studies Association conference in Wellington we shared the first glimpses of this latest state of the sector research.

    We wanted the incredible women gathered at the conference to know that people like McCutcheon are wrong. It is not that women need to be more aspirational – we already have aspiration, passion, and commitment in bucket loads. It is that the market-driven rules of the game are rigged against us.

    Half of all women surveyed in 2018 said they had been bullied at some time when at work. Academic women across the tertiary sector report stress levels higher than those of their male colleagues. And more women than men who responded to the state of the sector survey report they have experienced pressure from institutional leaders to publish specific types of material, despite academic freedom being legislated in New Zealand and giving academics high levels of autonomy.

    With data like this, the conclusion is clear: the rules of the game are impacting more negatively on women. This is not a problem of individuals, it is systemic. There is clearly something gendered in the way a modern university is run.

    Minister Hipkins reminded vice-chancellors that “universities have a legislative obligation to act in a manner consistent with the highest ethical standards.” This means examining all of the staff survey data, research projects, and ministry-held information in order to unpack how the rules are impacting on gender equity. Once we know this, then we need to change the rules.

    For starters, we need to change how ‘success’ is measured. What we currently think of as a successful academic is laden with gender-biases. The idea that we simply need to ‘fix’ women so they fit the mould of these male-dominated measures is nonsense.

    We’re not prepared to wait another 16 years to get gender equality in the top jobs in our institutions. And we are not prepared to have the myth perpetuated that women need more training to be successful in universities, given there is no doubt it’s the rules that are broken, not us.

    Note: Researchers Sarah Proctor-Thomson, Charles Sedgwick, and Charles Crothers are currently preparing a report on the state of the tertiary education sector using responses from nearly 3,000 staff. A full report on the well-being of the tertiary education sector and its staff is due to be released later this year.

    Dr Sandra Grey, national president of the Tertiary Education Union; Dr. Cat Pausé, senior lecturer at Massey University and TEU women’s vice president; Dr Sarah Proctor-Thomson, senior lecturer at Nelson Marlborough Institute of Technology.

    Society