Last year, my cousin died unexpectedly. She was a first cousin I barely knew, who had never lived in my town and only rarely appeared at family gatherings. I think I met her two or three times, and by the time we were teens, I could already see she was on a different trajectory. She was binge drinking and smoking at a family barbecue when we were fourteen.

Maybe her death was not so unexpected. She’d had a stroke already, before she was fifty, and even my heavy drinking family members chalked that up to her extra-heavy drinking.

She and her partner had been on an alcoholic death spiral for some time, it seems. He died of organ failure just a week or so after he found her dead on the floor.

A few days before her death, she had lost the ability to move her arms and legs. This was perhaps another stroke, but we’ll never know because she refused medical care. Her partner offered to call an ambulance, and when she refused, he left her in a recliner and went to a bar.

This story is a double tragedy. When someone is drinking their way to an early demise, they probably don’t care much about themselves or the impact of their risky behavior. But their partner could care enough about them to at least try to pull them off of the downward spiral. In this case, neither of them cared enough, and they both died in their early fifties.

Just recently, my husband got the news that a childhood acquaintance had died in her forties. She had two young children who lived with her on the weekends, and unbeknownst to those close to her she had taken up drinking heavily after her divorce a couple of years ago.

Her friends noticed that she had gained some weight, but her drinking seemed normal. She didn’t drink more than any of her peers when she was with them. Her brother had noticed an accumulation of whiskey bottles in her apartment…but she seemed fine.

She was not fine. When her mother found her, alone and unconscious, her organs were already shutting down. She was hospitalized, but she was past the point of no return and they could not save her.

My favorite morning DJ lost his sister a couple of years ago—also a GenX woman who drank herself to death. What is happening to women of my generation?

It could have been me

My heavy drinking has consumed most of a couple of decades of my life. It started in the mid-nineties when I was 23 and my first serious relationship ended. I learned to love a martini as my life fell apart. I lost a first love and gained a few drinking buddies, spending Friday nights drowning myself in Long Island iced teas.

This was normal for GenX women. We drank like men. We did drugs like men. We got the jobs that used to be for men, from contractor to chef to CEO. We got angry and fiercely protected our rights and bodies, never seeking a man to protect us.

We had to grow thick skins along with our high tolerance for alcohol. Sometimes those went hand in hand… a drink is a good numbing agent when the skin isn’t quite thick enough. Better to be drunk than vulnerable or weak.

So, by the time I was forty I guess I probably had a drinking problem. I had quit drinking and doing drugs for a year in my thirties, after my divorce and a couple of years of rebound partying. I knew alcohol was no longer a good tool for me, but it was hard to form an identity that was not the hard-drinking, fun-loving GenXer. Who was I, if not that girl?

I got off the downward spiral, slowly but surely. In 2019, I took a 100 day break from drinking, and it was one of the hardest things I’ve done. My new marriage had been born in bars, over a series of cocktails. Who was I in this marriage if I wasn’t the happy hour buddy?

That 100 day break showed me that there was something on the other side of the drinking. There was a smart, creative, and above all healthy woman living in this body alongside my inner drunk. I contained multitudes.

In 2020, the world got a pandemic and I got breast cancer. I could have gone either way at that point. I saw the “quarantinis” on Instagram, and the idea of day-drinking my way through this sounded like a pretty good idea.

Instead, I stopped drinking and started walking. I started meditating, journaling, and daily yoga. I started riding our Peloton bike. I went briefly Keto and started cooking every meal at home. I let the healthy, creative, curious one lead the way, while treating my inner drunk with empathy.

You might think I’m sober

But I’m not. Part of my empathy for my inner drunk includes giving her room to have a few drinks from time to time. I know this is a proverbial slippery slope, and the better choice would be teetotaling, but that’s not the choice I made. At least not for now.

I’m sober most of the time now, but more importantly I am no longer at risk for drinking myself to death. I no longer have physical symptoms of addiction. I no longer have a hangover every day. In fact, I have reduced my drinking to almost exclusively while on vacation. I have a limited number of drinking days each quarter, and I save those up for trips and celebrations.

So I’m not sober, but I’ve gone from 100% drunk to 99% sober. Why was I able to change my relationship with alcohol, while these other women drank themselves to death? I’ve never been to an AA meeting. I don’t spend any of my time talking about or digging into the reasons for my drinking, outside of therapy.

There’s a narrative that you cannot do this yourself, and if you do need help you should definitely get it. I would suggest Annie Grace’s programs as a great starting place if you struggle with drinking. I did her 30 day alcohol experiment as part of my 100-day break, and it helped me break out of the false cultural narrative that drinking is a fun and necessary part of adult life.

Beyond that short, online program, I have managed my relationship with alcohol on my own. Only I can decide how much I should drink or not drink, and I’m one of those oddballs who is not motivated by social support. I’ve always been proud of my ability to do things by myself, for myself.

At some point I made the decision that I care about myself enough to treat my body with love. I don’t think that was an overnight decision, but rather a long process of discovery. First, I had to become aware that how I was treating myself was a form of abuse, then I had to find my own path out of that abusive relationship (with myself).

That path is built on healthy habits. Rather than making alcohol the enemy, I made myself my own friend, teacher, and health coach. I studied up on nutrition, cancer prevention, longevity, brain health, biohacking, and mental wellbeing. Alcohol is a known detriment in all of these areas, so if I really take health and self-care seriously, I have to really limit my exposure to it.

Building a healthy lifestyle has left no room for the kind of drinking I did in my twenties, thirties, and most of my forties. My daily practices of meditation, yoga, journaling, long walks, and workouts eliminate my need for self-medication every evening. My depression and anxiety have evaporated, I’ve lost most of my unhealthy weight I gained during my heaviest drinking years, and I am cancer-free.

I am a bit lucky to have a stable relationship, home, and job to provide the solid ground on which to build a healthy path. Without that stability, I may well have continued down the spiral that is killing other women of my generation. I am also luck to have learned in childhood how to be resilient and take care of my own needs. Those are skills that not everyone comes to adulthood with.

I hope this is not a trend for a generation that has never quite fit in. I don’t want to see more of my peers dying in such a lonely and preventable way. I hope we can be inspired by the younger generations who are largely avoiding alcohol. Maybe drinking will become more like smoking in our culture, given how dangerous it is. I hope we can all find better ways to have fun.