Nobody Has Ever Said Anything About My Drinking. Does That Mean It Is Fine?

My mother said one thing about my drinking in nine years. Once. In a supermarket parking lot in 2014, with the trunk open, she said, “You’re drinking a lot at the moment, aren’t you.” I laughed and said something about the year I’d had, and she nodded, and we put the bags in the car and drove home and neither of us ever mentioned it again.

She wasn’t unobservant. She’d used up the one sentence she had.

First, because some people reading this drink daily

If you drink every day and you drink a lot, don’t take tonight’s realization and stop cold on your own. If you shake in the morning, sweat through the sheets, feel sick until the first drink, or you’ve ever had a fit when you cut down, see a doctor before you stop. Alcohol withdrawal can cause seizures and people die of it every year. It’s also treatable, routinely, and a doctor won’t be shocked or make a scene about it. That’s a medical decision and I’m a coach, not a doctor.

Why doesn’t anyone say anything?

Because there is no sentence available to them.

Think about what you’d be asking a friend to do. He has to look you in the face and suggest that you, an adult, are failing at something everybody else manages. If he’s wrong, he’s insulted you permanently. If he’s right, there’s a decent chance you’ll deny it, get cold with him, and stop inviting him to things. That’s his risk. His upside is that you might feel awful and then possibly do something about it, which he can’t count on.

Anybody looking at that trade waits. Not because they don’t care. Because the trade is bad. So they wait for something undeniable, something with a handle they can hold: a crash, a missed christening, a job gone. Then the sentence writes itself and they can finally say it.

Until then, you get silence, and you get to read the silence however you want.

What people actually do instead of telling you

They tell each other.

This is the part I didn’t understand until it was over. There were conversations about me for years and I was in none of them. My business partner and my girlfriend had one. Two of my friends had one on a train. Nobody escalated because everyone assumed somebody closer to me would handle it.

Afterwards, three separate people told me they’d worried for years. Not one of them had said a word to me. When I asked why, all three said versions of the same thing: I didn’t know how to start it.

That’s the thing to sit with. The silence I’d read for nine years as an all-clear was, in fact, a room full of people who all thought it wasn’t their place.

Isn’t it arrogant to think I have a problem nobody else can see?

No. It’s the normal shape of this, and it’s the reason drinking is so different from almost anything else that goes wrong with a person.

Consider what’s actually visible to other people. They see you at dinner, where everybody drinks. They see you at the office at nine in the morning, and you’re fine at nine in the morning because you’ve built an entire routine to guarantee it. They see you at a wedding, drunk, with sixty other drunk people.

What they never see is the interesting part:

• The four in the afternoon decision about whether you’re driving tonight, which is really a decision about how much you’re drinking tonight.
• The counting. Two here, so four at home is fine.
• The first fifteen minutes after the front door closes.
• What you drink alone, which for most people is the actual number.

Nobody has that. Not your wife, not your best friend, not your doctor. You’re the only person in the world holding the whole file, which means you’re the only one who can possibly assess it, which is an unfair job and it’s yours anyway.

If you want the file laid out in a fixed order instead of at random at one in the morning, there’s the honest check on this site. Twelve questions, three minutes, private, no email at the end. It doesn’t diagnose you, because I can’t and neither can a web page. It just asks the things you keep half asking yourself.

Why “nobody has said anything” is the most dangerous sentence in this

Because it’s true, and it’s completely irrelevant, and it survives contact with everything else.

Watch how well it works. You wake up feeling terrible and you think: nobody’s ever said anything. You count the bottles in the recycling and you think: nobody’s ever said anything. You read an article like this one at half past twelve and you think it, again.

It’s not evidence. It’s a fact about other people’s manners.

And here’s the version I use with men who are sitting in front of me. If it’s genuinely fine, the silence costs you nothing to test. Ask one person a specific question: “Has my drinking ever worried you, even once?” Not “do you think I drink too much”, because that has a polite answer and you’ll bank it. The specific version is much harder to dodge.

Most men will not do this. Notice if you’re already deciding who you’d ask, and rejecting each name for a good reason.

What if I ask and they say I’m fine?

Then you’ve learned what they can see, which was never the question.

I could have asked anyone in 2012 and been told I was fine, and they’d have meant it, and I’d have been drinking most of a bottle a night. Reassurance from someone with partial information isn’t reassurance. It’s a nice thing said by a person who likes you.

Your own concern is the higher quality data here. Not because you’re being dramatic, but because you’re the only one with access. If you’re up tonight running the question, the question came from somewhere, and it didn’t come from nowhere.

So what does count as evidence?

Small, unimpressive, specific things. These are the ones I’d look at:

• You’ve tried to cut down on your own and the rule didn’t hold for two weeks.
• You look forward to it earlier in the day than you used to.
• You’ve been slightly untrue about the amount, to somebody who wasn’t even pressing.
• You’ve had a night you can’t fully account for.
• You’ve thought about it enough to be reading this.

None of those is a diagnosis and I’m not qualified to give you one. But every one of them is a piece of information you own, and not one of them requires another person’s permission to be real.

What I’d do with this if I were you

You don’t need to talk to me. Most people who read this don’t need a coach, they need to stop using other people’s silence as a verdict, and that’s free and takes about ten seconds.

If you’re going to do one thing, make it a small one: say the real number, out loud, to one person, this week. Your doctor, ideally, especially if you drink daily. It doesn’t need a preamble and it doesn’t need a plan attached.

Nobody is worried about you. That’s the problem.