How it feels to go cold turkey
Your skin crawls. Your tongue swells. You dry heave into a dirty toilet bowl until cloudy water comes back up. You go to the kitchen to gulp down more. It is 10:30. AM.
The truth is that withdrawing from alcohol — liquor, in my case — makes you feel like the world’s ending. No other way to explain it. The world’s ending, and the hum of the refrigerator’s excruciating.
Alcohol’s one of the few substances you can die from withdrawing from. I won’t get into the details — you want blood and guts.
Here:
Being hooked on liquor makes you feel like you’ve got a demon inside of you. Or, it did for me. A demon that was trying to kill me, laughing all the way home.
It’s well beyond the shakes. It’s seeing stars, smelling phantom smells, smelling no smells, feeling the crackling of your nervous system as it sputters to a halt trying to collect itself. A neurotoxic poison — that’s what produces drunkenness’ effects. You can look it up. Something to do with the liver or something.
Alcohol brought me closer to hell than I ever thought possible.
For three years, immediately upon being able to purchase it, buying it every day, sometimes as soon as the store opened. Drinking in between classes. Drinking during…
