Am I an alcoholic?

Here’s the honest first answer, before anything else: if you’re asking, you already have most of the information you came for. People with an easy, uncomplicated relationship with alcohol don’t tend to sit up at night typing this into a search bar. The wondering is the data.

But I want to take the pressure off the word itself, because the word is where most of these pages go wrong. You do not have to call yourself an alcoholic — not tonight, not ever — to decide that drinking is taking more than it gives back. The label is not the gate. The honest question is.

I’m not going to give you a quiz

Every other page you land on hands you the same thing: ten yes-or-no questions, a tally, a verdict. CAGE. AUDIT. “Score two or more and you may have a problem.” I understand the appeal — a number feels objective, and objective feels safe.

But a checklist can’t feel the thing you already feel, and worse, it hands you an exit. Answer “yes” to two instead of three and you get to close the tab relieved, problem technically unconfirmed. So let me ask the only question that’s ever really mattered here: have you ever gone looking for one of those tests quietly hoping to score low? Because that hope — needing the reassurance badly enough to go searching for it — already told you more than any score will.

What it actually looked like for me

So I’ll skip the criteria and tell you the truth instead. None of this is on any clinical questionnaire. All of it is more honest than one.

You might be in trouble with alcohol if you’ve ever slept with a bottle under your pillow, so you could take a sip the second you woke at 3am without having to get up. If you’ve memorised the shift patterns of the staff across five different shops and built your buying route around which clerk wouldn’t clock how often you were back. If you’ve finished your drink in the security line at the airport, then bought gin and a bottle of water at duty free so you could quietly refill it and keep the edge off at the gate. If a bottle arrived at your door, by delivery, every single day, and you’d half-convinced yourself that was normal.

I did all of those. And here’s the part that matters: at the time, every one of them felt like resourcefulness. A clever little system I’d worked out. It took getting sober to see them for what they were — the daily logistics of someone whose whole life had quietly organised itself around staying topped up.

You have your own version of that list. You know exactly what’s on it. The specifics don’t matter. The recognising does.

There is a clinical name, if you want one

If you do want the medical version, here it is, accurately: doctors mostly don’t use the word “alcoholic” anymore. The term is alcohol use disorder, and the most useful thing about it is that it isn’t a yes-or-no. It’s a spectrum — mild, moderate, severe — measured by how much drinking has started to run things. Whether you drink more or longer than you meant to. Whether you’ve tried to cut down and couldn’t. Whether it’s costing you things you care about. Whether stopping makes you feel physically unwell.

Why does the spectrum matter? Because it dismantles the trap you might be standing in right this second — the one where you tell yourself you’re not a real alcoholic, not as bad as so-and-so, so it doesn’t count yet. Mild still counts. Mild is still worth doing something about. You do not have to drink yourself all the way to severe to have earned the right to stop.

But I still function

This is the one I hear most, because I told it to myself for years. I held down the job. I paid the rent. I showed up. For a long time I genuinely believed alcohol made me better at work — sharper, more confident. It made me anxious, distracted and dishonest; I just couldn’t see it from the inside.

“Functioning” is not the same as “fine.” It usually just means the cost is being paid somewhere you’re not looking yet — your sleep, your honesty, your presence with the people who love you, the version of you that’s quietly going missing. Functioning is what it looks like right up until it doesn’t.

Do I have to hit rock bottom first?

No. This might be the most damaging idea in the whole culture around drinking — that you have to lose the job, the licence, the relationship, the house before you’re allowed to take it seriously. You don’t. There’s no entry fee of suffering. The best day to stop is always earlier than the day you’ve decided you’d have to “earn” it.

You’re allowed to stop simply because it’s quietly making your life smaller. That’s reason enough. It was always reason enough.

So if the honest answer is yes

Then — gently — okay. You don’t have to have the rest of it worked out tonight. You just had to be honest, and you were. That’s the hard part, and it’s behind you now.

Past that, two things I wish someone had put in front of me sooner. The first: there is no single right way to do this. I tried the meetings and the rehab and the pills before I worked that out, and what finally moved the needle wasn’t finding the perfect programme — it was finding my own footing. If that’s a relief to hear, hold onto it. I’ve written more about that here.

The second, and I mean this even though I don’t know you: you are almost certainly more loved than you currently believe. Shame shrinks your sense of that down to nothing. When I finally said it out loud, the people around me didn’t flinch — they’d known, and they’d been waiting for me to let them help. If there’s someone you’ve been hiding this from, you might be surprised who’s still there.

And when you’re ready for the next questions, that’s what the rest of this is for: how to actually quit, and how to stay stopped once you have.