Becoming More Confident - Alcohol Pt. II

Alright, I'm fueled up. For those of you just joining, I just wrote part one of my Becoming More Confident - Alcohol post. It's a bit of a private little hell that I have, but I think that it might just help people understand how having a low self-esteem can lead down a few bad roads. These bad roads usually are discovered when the affected person understands that something is wrong with them because of the way that they cannot control the world around them and are looking for some way to change it. This is actually the first glimpse of what living like a confident person is to them.

In my case - I did well in school, excelled in art, and was a sober kid. But, I was a social misfit, and that was ultimately my undoing. I say "undoing", but in reality, I guess I was never anything in the first place in terms of a human being. The world pressed and molded me and I could do nothing about it. People told me what to do or laughed me off tables or street corners. I never had the self-confidence to stand up for myself and fight back. Most likely, I wouldn't have had to fight back but once or twice. Then, I would have had the confidence to know that if I was messed with, I would fight, and that kind of confidence can be seen by outsiders.

Now back to my Alcohol and Self-Confidence post.

After getting in trouble with the stealing, I was afforded a chance to get my life straight and joined the military. I won't go into much about that now, but it was an important part of my life, and probably would have been more important if I had the right tools to make something good out of it.

But I didn't. Soon after I joined, I discovered the joys of alcohol.

Now look - I never wanted to make some kind of AA blog where I spill all my guts to everyone and talk about how alcohol ruined my life. The fact is - through all the B/S I went through, I've always maintained that alcohol was never my problem - I was. I still maintain that to this day. The issue was, however, what was the problem with me? This will all come together shortly as I spin my yarn, so bare with me.

Alcohol and Balls

So I drank a few beers, big deal. We drank a little, we laughed, we threw up, we passed out. That's what beer does to you, right? Your body is automatically adverse to you putting alcohol in it, and I'll find some good places to link to in the future, but for now, let's just say that your body don't like it. This isn't going to stop someone who has low self-esteem or low self-confidence.

Matter of fact, when I would drink the stuff, all of a sudden it seemed like I could talk to the most beautiful girls in the world, and not have a effin' nervous breakdown! I could tell a girl, "Hey, gimme a drink of that!" in front of 10 WWF-hardened bouncers. I got numbers, I was happy, I had a great time. So much so, that I had to have something in my hand to drink whenever I was around females. Orange Juice? No. Screwdriver? Yes.

As such, I began to see what I thought it must be like to be a confident person. Even though I wasn't really like that. A lot of the numbers I got from girls would never be used. A lot of conversations forgotten, and a lot of names confused. But it was a blast. The alcohol had finally given me what I had missed for years.

There were a couple of fights before I got my first real wake-up call. A few of us, laughing, roughhousing, and I'm tackling the biggest person I see. Never remembered it. But I did feel it the next day - I was hit in the jaw and left in the stairwell. No big deal. Boys fight sometimes. But why did I do that? I never remembered charging anyone. It didn't seem like that was something I would do. With all of that self-confidence, would I just charge on anyone? Is there any way I could expect to win while that intoxicated?

Time passed, maybe another small altercation. Nothing too bad. Maybe a small scratch on the eye or something. No memory of it, either. The problem started becoming - I was in the clubs with a lot of guys that were all talking to girls, and it was overwhelming. Many drinks were consumed to talk to these females, and block out the aggressive male population. By the time it was over, I was usually passed out somewhere. If I was lucky - I'd go home with a number and a clear recollection of the night. On my not-so-drunk nights, I would have drank enough to get the ol' confidence level up, and do something wild - call a girl a slut or talk shit to someone because I had a whole group of friends backing me. All of this adding up to "who I was" in mine and others' minds.

I went into a club one night after pretty much drinking a bottle of rum, and woke up in jail with handcuffs on. I came to mid-shit-talk to a police officer, telling him to let me out of the cuffs so I could give him a what-for. Mouth felt funny. I rubbed my tongue across my teeth, and came to a pretty big gap when I got to the front right and the one to the right of that one. Pretty much my front two teeth were cracked in half, showing roots. Nice swollen head, to boot. Or to fist, I'm not sure which.

I never got the details of that night. I was told that I was held down and beaten by police. I was told that I slapped some girl across the dance floor. I was told that another acquaintance of mine got the best of me. Chances are I'll never know, and that was many years ago - I don't care to know.

You would think, after a few grand in dental work, that I would be done with my craziness. You were wrong.

I kept it up for a long time, and I lost a few friends because of it. Even the friends that actually stuck with me were pushed away, and my circle still remained small. Without self-confidence to support me, I turned to a substance that made me violent, and the most likely cause of violence was my lack of self-confidence.

Although there were a few fights I started and won, I never won a black-out fight. I never took any kind of training for fighting, and yet, when I was most vulnerable, I would find fights.


I believe that my self-esteem being so low is the reason that I fought. I think that I would see so many "attractive" and "successful" people that I would file away in my mind, and wonder what it was that they had that I didn't. I would begin to hate them for their natural self-confidence, and try to destroy them once I made the switch to Mr. Hyde. What I should have been doing in the first place is emulating their behavior and trying to be great myself.

This was a road that I had to take to understand my concept of self, and what I needed to do to correct it.

I don't know if I'll have a Becoming More Confident - Alcohol Pt. III, but it might happen.