Let me tell you a story about my alcohol addiction. I started taking alcohol at a young age, even before I hit puberty. Do you wonder how I got access? It wasn’t too hard because I had a number of young men in the compound where I lived who used to send me on errands to buy them alcohol. I would hang around them while they drank just in case they needed me to run more errands. Before long, I became curious about what alcohol tastes like. Thereafter, I started to drink whatever leftovers were in the bottles after the older guys had finished drinking.
Soon enough my appetite grew and I began to slip a bottle from the drinks I bought, would use the change I was gifted to buy a drink and so on. By the time I was an older adolescent, I was already drinking regularly. I was showing signs of alcohol addiction but I didn’t know.
How alcohol addiction affected my studies
I never felt at my best if I didn’t have alcohol in my system. My final year in secondary school was the worst. I hated being in school and always looked forward to hanging around the field with the older boys. I wasn’t always a bright student but even my average scores suffered greatly because of my alcohol addiction. It came as no surprise when I failed my WAEC exams woefully.
I spent my days loitering around the neighbourhood while my classmates went on to get tertiary education. My addiction got the better part of me as I soon returned home everyday very tipsy. As is typical of Africans, my parents tried the beating route but it didn’t work, so they gave up. My father threw me out of his house in annoyance one faithful day, but that gave me even more freedom to indulge in my addiction.
Finding help
I was lost, I had hit rock bottom. Basically, you could say that I was living to feed my addiction. I saw a post by a former secondary mate who had completed his tertiary education and had got a job as an engineer. This was what I wanted to be. I felt sad, took a look at my life and wished I had not taken the path of alcoholism. I rued the day I had a taste of alcohol as tears flowed down my face. At this point, I made a decision to turn my life around. It wasn’t an easy decision to make and an even harder decision to follow but I did it.
The first step I took was to distance myself from acquaintances and friends who were living the kind of life I was living. I continued with my menial jobs but rather than buy alcohol, I saved to rewrite WAEC and then JAMB. It took a lot of hard work and study to pass both examinations but I did it. Luckily for me, my parents took me back into their lives and now they pay for my study. I am a 300 level student of Mechanical Engineering in one of the Federal Universities in Nigeria. If I can overcome addiction, you too can.