By Dimitri Monnin
Hello, readers, my name is Dimitri Monnin. I am 23 years old and three years ago my life took a whole different turn. The cause? My alcohol addiction. In this article I will describe my story and I am going to try to warn you all on how alcohol can change your life forever.
My addiction story started in 2018 after I graduated high school. I was admitted to a French Business University an hour away from Paris. The city I was committing to was called Amiens, a city known for its famous cathedral, its hockey team and its student life, along with all their bars and student parties! I never drank a single drop of alcohol before I moved to this town for the simple fact that I was a professional junior athlete and that I was always putting sport first.
During my first week at the university, all the seniors were inviting us to party and do all kinds of fun stuff to make this college life memorable. One of these activities was called the “barathon” which is a mix of bar and marathon. You have to understand now that we were moving in groups between every bar in Amiens to drink in each one of them. I am not going to lie, it was fun, especially when all the seniors push you to drink your first cup of liquor and hype you up all together; it makes you feel special and you absolutely do not want to refuse their alcohol offers to not seem like a “loser”. I got pretty drunk my first night and drinking and being drunk was definitely something fun to me.
The only problem is that it started becoming a habit. Students in the University were throwing parties two to three times a week and absolutely nobody wanted to miss them. I was drinking all the party nights and even after class on a normal day, I was going to the bar with my friends to drink some beers. Little did I know my biological mother (yes, I am adopted) was a drug and alcohol addict and was drinking while pregnant with me. I didn’t end up having any fetal alcohol spectrum disorders, but my tolerance to alcohol was extremely low, meaning that I got addicted really fast and my body was accepting alcohol much more easily than all my friends. After tow cups of liquor and one beer, my friends were throwing up and had stopped drinking. In my case, my body could accept way way more alcohol without feeling sick at all, which pushed me to drinking more and more until I blacked out.
Now that I am reminiscing about it, my passing out was always something funny to everybody, even to me. I was the party clown, happy to get drunk and make everybody laugh. Nobody really got worried about my health when passing out every single parties, and me neither. My body was still fine, and I wasn’t waking up with headaches every morning. This was probably one of my biggest addiction problems. I wish I could have gotten sick, threw up and stopped drinking after two cups. I wish my body could have sent me some sign, but I never had one and kept drinking and drinking without knowing what was waiting for me at the end of the tunnel.
Time passed where I kept drinking two to three time a week until the COVID-19 pandemic arrived. The whole French country was under lockdown for two months. All our classes were online and you had 30 minutes per day to go out with a permit to buy groceries. A small grocery store was right across the street from my building, and, if you go with the logic, you already know that they were selling alcohol. The lockdown was the perfect occasion for me to drink freely without caring about any outcomes, such as school or my parents. I was buying two bottles of cheap tequila every day to drink them at night with some of my school friends that were living in the same building. We were throwing small parties, movie nights, video game nights every day, and of course we were drinking. After a week into quarantine, most of my friends realized that they were drinking too much and settled down to only one drinking night a week. As for me, my addiction told me “do not care and keep drinking”. Most of the time I was doing the same thing, but by myself. I would go to the store, buy a lot of liquor, put on a show or a video game and finish my bottles of liquor without mixer anymore. The taste of alcohol became so basic to me that I could drink it like water at this point.
I was playing with my life every day, passing out in my own room floor without anyone aware of it. I was feeling some sort of pain on the left side of my belly that came and went, but I blame this on the food I was eating. You might think that I went too far at this point, but I hadn’t hit the rock bottom yet. After a month into the pandemic, I lost the perception of time, and that’s when I really started degrading my health quickly. I was starting to drink in the middle of the afternoon, passing out at midnight, waking up at 10 a.m. still drunk and finishing the bottles from the day prior. My everyday addiction switched to a every-minute addiction. Being drunk 24/7 was something that I loved and that I couldn’t get over; my belly’s left side pain was getting worst but I was at a stage where I didn’t care anymore. I was lonely but alcohol helped me feel like I could have the most fun with myself. I became a whole different person that nobody could recognize. For some people, I was an even funnier person, which didn’t help but make me drink even more because I was happy being the clown of the group.
But one day, my body said Stop! to all this mess. I woke up one morning with an unbearable pain at the same place of my body. I barely could stand and walked to the bathroom and started throwing up black liquid (sorry for the visual, readers). I took some pain pills that I mixed with liquor thinking that it will make it better. I ended up folded in my bed for 24 hours without closing my eyes due to the pain that wouldn’t go away. It was 7 a.m. the next day, after swallowing a dozen of pills in the past 24 hours and throwing up couple of times, I finally decided to drive myself to the emergency room. They thought I was a normal student that drank too much one night and felt sick the next day, nothing alarming for them.
That is, until the doctor asked where my pain was and looked at my blood results. I could see the confusion on his face. When I ended up throwing up black next to the hospital bed, he directly sent me to the urgent care department of the hospital. I ended up in a bed with infusion bags attached to my arms surrounding me. A nurse was coming every two hours to collect a ton of my blood. I couldn’t eat and was drinking salty water every day. I was woken up every two hours during the night. My arms were skinny and tired from all the times they poked me. I got me first real meal after two days and stayed for a total of seven days under control at the hospital. My pain went away and the doctor came back with the final results. I was diagnosed with acute pancreatitis.
How long have you been drinking? Usually an acute pancreatitis is found in life long alcohol addict patients, not after two or three years of binge drinking. I was told that I must stop drinking completely otherwise it could turn to an incurable cancer. I thank this doctor for being that direct and honest because his words scared me for life keeping me away from making the same mistakes and dying.
The aftermath of this hospital trip were troubling and life changing for me. All my friends were happy that I got out of there. Not being able to be drink was a little disturbing at first, but I overcame it slowly. The quarantine was over and my friends decided to invite me to their party, but I wasn’t myself anymore. I had learned how to live drunk all the time that I forgot who my real self was. Before my addiction, I was a naturally funny and outgoing person. After my addiction, I didn’t know who I was anymore. I became antisocial, shy and unfunny. At this party, all my friends got drunk. I was the only one sober and it sucked. They looked at me weird, like “Why are you staying on the couch? Come and dance!” Easy to say coming from a drunk person. I left the party pretty quickly. Nobody even realized that I left.
Over the next few weeks, they threw parties that I wasn’t even aware of and to which I wasn’t invited. I wasn’t their drinking clown anymore and I realized that they only liked me for that. I was a nobody for them now that I became sober. I spent most of my time by myself, learning who I originally was, finding new hobbies, learning new stuff.
When school was over, I moved back to Paris, back to my roots. I played football with my old teammates and started hanging out with my hometown friends. All my friends were Muslims and it helped me a lot finding myself. They weren’t drinking at all due to their religion, which was a plus.
Nowadays, I feel like I overcame all my problems. I am finally happy with who I really am without being under the influence of everything. I have friends and a wonderful wife that accepts me with my positive and negatives traits. After being sober for almost three years, the doctor told me that I am finally able to drink soft beverages (containing under 5% of alcohol), so I only drink a fresh beer while watching a football game on Sundays, and I love my life.
I hope my story will help some of you and your love ones push the brake pedal on your alcohol consumption, because I’ve learned that during an addiction, it is you against you. As an addict, I know that no matter what everybody tells you, you will not listen. Only you can stop yourself from an addiction. For me, my health stopped me from continuing, but I wish I could make the right decisions faster than my body did. As I said, I love my life but I am now living with a lot of restrictions. I still feel a little sad when somebody is sipping their liquor next to me and I can only look at it.
If you are recovering from an addiction and you are having a hard time, what may be helpful (and what helped me the most) is to find role models. Back when I was sober and by myself, I remember looking up at Darren Waller and Maxx Crosby, both football players for the Las Vegas Raiders that recovered from their alcohol addiction and are now making the best of themselves. They were my heroes and still are today. I end this article with the lyrics of a song from Eminem where he talks about his addiction. They made me cry the other day because they reminded me so much of myself during this hard period of my life.
I wish the best for you all.
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Chorus from “Deja vu” by Eminem:
Sometimes I feel so alone, I just don’t know
Feels like I been down this road before
So lonely and cold, it’s like something takes over me
As soon as I go home and close the door
Kinda feels like déjà vu
I wanna get away from this place, I do
But I can’t and I won’t, say I try, but I know that’s a lie
‘Cause I don’t and why, I just don’t know
