Alcohol was part of the landscape of my life long before I understood what it could mean.
I came from a broken household, and I grew up around beer and liquor. It was familiar—part of socializing, part of relaxing, part of getting away from whatever was happening. In the world I knew, drinking was normalized. My dad enjoyed beer and liquor in settings that ranged from dive bars to exclusive social clubs. On the other side of my family history was a painful legacy: my alleged birth mother’s parents struggled with alcohol, and she was exposed to sexual exploitation and violence at an early age. These were very different stories, but both were part of the background I inherited.
Before my parents’ divorce, alcohol was simply around. During adolescence, it seemed like a social thing, something adults did at home or when they got together. I didn’t have the perspective then to question that normalcy. I only knew what I saw.
My first real taste of beer came when I was about twelve, on a cruise with my dad after the divorce. I tried it and thought it was disgusting. That could have been the end of the story, but alcohol would return in a different form—not as something I was curious about on my own, but as part of the social world I moved through.
Growing Up Around It
After the divorce, I chose to live with my alleged birth mother, after some coaxing from my dad. In high school, the neighborhood became a gathering place for parties and get-togethers, LAN parties, and Warhammer gaming nights. We were a group of boys who could move easily from console games to tabletop campaigns, including Dungeons & Dragons. We would scrounge up money and convince people from the gaming hobby store to buy alcohol for us. Sadly, it was often Mr. Boston’s vodka in a plastic bottle.
At the time, the important thing was being together. The games, the jokes, the shared excitement of the night—that was the center of it. Alcohol was part of the setting, almost like another item someone had brought along. Sometimes there would be leftovers, and anything we didn’t finish might get hidden inside my eMachines desktop computer. Looking back, that detail feels strange and telling: alcohol was present, but it wasn’t something I thought deeply about. It was something to tuck away and keep around.
That sense of normalcy followed me into my military career. Beer and liquor were just… normal. In Japan, I was a regular at a local bar just outside the gate of Futenma. Karaoke filled the room, and I got to know the bartenders. When the night was over, I’d catch a taxi or walk back up the hill to the barracks. Later, at Camp Lejeune, beer and pizza seemed like a natural pairing—a familiar part of the routine.
After the Marines, I worked at a full-service Brunswick Zone XL. It had a full bar, servers bringing pitchers to the bowling lanes, and everything else you might expect: laser tag, an arcade, and a restaurant. Alcohol was woven into the place, not set apart from it. It was part of the experience people came for.
I also started visiting breweries, sampling what they made, and going to liquor stores to figure out which craft beers I liked. Belgian tripel became a favorite. My relationship with alcohol wasn’t only about drinking; it also became about taste, understanding the history, the artistry, variety, and learning what went into making different beverages.
In college at Kennesaw State, I took a course on alcohol that I found fascinating. Our professor would bring in the spirit or beer we were studying, and we young adults would taste it while learning about its ingredients, processes, and the work involved in making it. The subject had history as well as flavor. We learned about beer reaching back to ancient Egypt, and about spirits made from fruits or vegetables through fermentation and distillation. Alcohol wasn’t just something people drank. It was a product of agriculture, craft, culture, and time. Even with all those cuties in my class and lowered inhibitions I would head home to smoke a bowl in my lonesome.
Alcohol Across Cultures
Recognizing the Pattern
Looking back on my military career, I would call myself an alcoholic. At Camp Lejeune, stopping for a six- or twelve-pack and then going home to get on the computer seemed like a regular part of life—sometimes daily, sometimes weekly. At the time, I didn’t always stop to ask what role alcohol was playing. It was routine, and routine can make a pattern hard to see.
After the military, alcohol wasn’t always my main vice. Marijuana became more prominent. But the food-service industry has its own drinking culture. If you’ve worked in restaurants, you know how alcohol can become part of the atmosphere: the shift, the staff gathering afterward, the sense that having a drink is just what people do. Even when my habits changed, alcohol remained close by.
After the marriage and legal troubles in Blairsville, Georgia, I knew I needed to keep an eye on my relationship with drinking. I became reclusive while trying to manage the legal matters. At the same time, I was grieving the divorce and the loss of contact with a child, with a pregnancy also part of that painful period. While RVing, I would sometimes want to get out, see a new place, and be around people. I’d try a local spot, but I often felt watched or followed. That feeling made socializing more complicated, especially when I was already in a depressed state.
I usually didn’t buy alcohol to take back to the RV. Sometimes I ordered water; sometimes I had one or two alcoholic drinks, or chose something non-alcoholic. Part of me wanted company and a change of scenery, but another part knew I had to be careful. I was worried about how other people might interpret or portray me, and I didn’t want drinking to give anyone—or myself—more reason to misunderstand what was happening.
I’m grateful that I was able to recognize the urges and keep them from taking over. Looking back, I can also see how much of my relationship with alcohol was shaped by childhood experiences and abuse. Understanding that doesn’t erase the harm or settle every question, but it gives me a clearer place to begin. I can acknowledge the pattern without pretending it was harmless, and I can recognize the choices I made to protect myself when I knew I was vulnerable.
Alcohol has occupied a complicated place in human history. People have made fermented drinks from grains, grapes, honey, fruit, and other local ingredients for thousands of years. In some societies, these drinks were part of everyday meals. In others, they were tied to ceremony, hospitality, medicine, trade, or religious observance. Alcohol has been celebrated, regulated, restricted, and condemned—sometimes by the same culture in different periods.
Wine, especially, has carried layers of meaning. In ancient Mediterranean societies, it could be a staple of meals and a sign of hospitality, but it could also symbolize wealth, excess, and social status. In Judaism, wine has a meaningful ritual role, including blessings and its use at Shabbat and festivals such as Passover. That role does not mean that every Jewish person drinks, or that wine is beyond criticism; it reflects how a substance can become part of a religious tradition while still requiring care and moderation.
Christian traditions have also treated wine as both ordinary and sacred. Wine is used in the Eucharist or Communion in many churches, and monasteries became important centers of winemaking and brewing in parts of Europe. Monks cultivated vineyards, refined brewing practices, and produced drinks that could be consumed within religious communities or sold to support them. Their work helped preserve agricultural and practical knowledge. Yet monastic life also emphasized discipline and restraint. The presence of alcohol in a religious setting did not make intoxication the goal.
Islam offers a different example. The Qur’an describes both benefits and harms associated with intoxicants, while ultimately directing believers to avoid them. Across Muslim communities and history, that prohibition has shaped religious practice and social norms, though experiences and interpretations have varied. The contrast is striking: wine and other fermented drinks have been woven into some religious rituals, while in Islam the avoidance of intoxicants is a central religious commitment.
Alcohol has never had a single meaning. Culture can explain why it is present; it cannot make its harms disappear.
These histories remind me that alcohol has never had a single meaning. It can be food, craft, ritual, business, celebration, or a marker of belonging. It can also become a way to escape, a source of conflict, or a force that takes more than it gives. Culture can explain why alcohol is present; it cannot make its harms disappear.
The Other Side of the Story
For all the history, craftsmanship, and ceremony, alcohol is still a drug. It is a psychoactive substance that affects the brain and body, and it can impair judgment and coordination. It can also harm health, contribute to dependence, and make existing problems harder to face. Calling it poison may sound stark, but it captures an important truth: alcohol is not harmless simply because it is legal, familiar, or traditional. The amount and pattern of use matter, and the risks are real.
It has also been destructive in families. In some homes, alcohol is just a drink at dinner or a feature of a celebration. In others, it becomes part of a pattern of broken promises, fear, arguments, neglect, or instability. Children may grow up learning to read the room—to notice the tone of someone’s voice, the way a door closes, or whether a night is likely to remain peaceful. They may learn that drinking is normal before they have the language to ask whether it is safe.
Alcohol does not explain every painful thing that happens in a family, and it does not excuse violence or mistreatment. But it can intensify harm, blur boundaries, and make it harder for people to respond thoughtfully. Its effects don’t stop with the person drinking. They can travel outward, shaping relationships and memories for years.
I’ve also come to think about why people reach for alcohol. Sometimes it is about taste, tradition, or sharing a meal. Sometimes it is simply what everyone else is doing. But often, people drink because they want to change how they feel. They want to quiet their thoughts, loosen their inhibitions, soften anxiety, numb grief, or make an uncomfortable moment easier to endure. In that sense, alcohol can become a shortcut to a different state of mind.
People may describe that as lowering their “vibrations”—dulling their awareness, their energy, or their connection to themselves. However someone chooses to phrase it, the impulse is recognizable: to turn down what feels too loud inside. The trouble is that temporary relief can come with a cost. The feeling may return when the alcohol wears off, sometimes accompanied by regret, conflict, or a stronger need to escape again. What begins as an attempt to feel less can gradually make it harder to feel clearly.
That doesn’t mean every person who drinks is trying to avoid something, or that every drink leads to harm. It means the reasons matter. There is a difference between enjoying a drink as part of a meal and relying on alcohol to get through the day, a memory, or a feeling. The substance may be the same; the relationship to it can be very different.
Looking Back at My Own Story
My relationship with alcohol is tangled up with family history, childhood, social life, military service, work, and education. It began in an environment where drinking was normalized, and it continued through places where alcohol was simply part of a culture. For a long time, I didn’t have much reason to separate those experiences from one another. They all seemed like different versions of the same familiar thing.
The more I learn about alcohol’s history, the clearer it becomes that context matters—but context is not the same as a verdict. A drink can carry cultural meaning, religious significance, or the work of a craftsperson. It can also be a substance that changes the way a person thinks and acts, and sometimes causes lasting harm. Both truths can exist at once.
Writing about it now gives me a chance to look at that history more carefully—not to reduce it to one label or one conclusion, but to recognize how many influences shaped my relationship with alcohol. It was around me early. It became part of how people gathered. It followed me through major chapters of my life. And along the way, I learned to see it not only as something to consume, but as something with a history, a culture, and a place in my own story.
I’m still making sense of what that place is. What I know is that “normal” is not the same as harmless, and tradition does not erase consequences. Alcohol can bring people together, but it can also pull them away from themselves and from one another. Understanding both sides is part of understanding my relationship with it. Vices and excuses, entertainment and different thoughts. I preferred flower but the socially acceptable thing was the liquid.