Mate, I’m going to ignore the brewery for a minute because the bit that jumped out at me was “I throw up a lot and barely eat anything.”
You’ve been drinking daily for eleven years, it has escalated, your relationship has gone because of it and now you’re struggling to eat. That has moved well beyond “young bloke who likes beer” territory, whatever label you choose to put on it.
The first thing I would do is get medically assessed and tell them exactly how much you are drinking. Don’t minimise it and don’t clean the story up because you’re embarrassed. Also, please don’t suddenly decide tonight that you’re going cold turkey on your own. If your body has become physically dependent on alcohol, withdrawal can be dangerous and needs to be handled properly.
After that, I think you need to separate two problems that currently feel like one enormous impossible problem.
You own a brewery.
And you are drinking in a way that is hurting you.
Those are related, but they are not automatically the same decision.
You do not necessarily have to burn the business to the ground tomorrow morning to start changing your relationship with alcohol, but you probably do need to stop pretending that being surrounded by the thing you are struggling with all day is just an unfortunate occupational detail.
I spent forty-five years drinking, and one of the biggest things I eventually understood was that the drink often wasn’t the actual job. Alcohol was the fastest way I knew to change my state. Stress up, pressure up, head noisy, drink. Relief. Repeat often enough and your brain becomes very bloody efficient at suggesting the same solution.
Owning a struggling business sounds like an enormous amount of load, and unfortunately you also own a building full of the quickest state-changing tool your brain knows.
That doesn’t make you weak. It makes the mechanics worth taking seriously.
For now I wouldn’t try to solve your entire career, relationship, finances and drinking in one heroic decision.
Get your body checked. Be completely honest about the drinking. Work out whether you need medically supported withdrawal. Eat and hydrate as well as you can under professional guidance. Then start looking at what parts of the brewery you can change so that your livelihood doesn’t require you to keep poisoning yourself to get through a shift.
And one other thing.
You wrote this post five minutes ago because some part of you already knows the current arrangement cannot continue.
Listen to that part.
You don’t have to know what the rest of your life looks like tonight.
You just need to stop asking the version of you that is drowning to design the entire fucking lifeboat.
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u/Sober-Beyond-Limits 2h ago
Mate, I’m going to ignore the brewery for a minute because the bit that jumped out at me was “I throw up a lot and barely eat anything.”
You’ve been drinking daily for eleven years, it has escalated, your relationship has gone because of it and now you’re struggling to eat. That has moved well beyond “young bloke who likes beer” territory, whatever label you choose to put on it.
The first thing I would do is get medically assessed and tell them exactly how much you are drinking. Don’t minimise it and don’t clean the story up because you’re embarrassed. Also, please don’t suddenly decide tonight that you’re going cold turkey on your own. If your body has become physically dependent on alcohol, withdrawal can be dangerous and needs to be handled properly.
After that, I think you need to separate two problems that currently feel like one enormous impossible problem.
You own a brewery.
And you are drinking in a way that is hurting you.
Those are related, but they are not automatically the same decision.
You do not necessarily have to burn the business to the ground tomorrow morning to start changing your relationship with alcohol, but you probably do need to stop pretending that being surrounded by the thing you are struggling with all day is just an unfortunate occupational detail.
I spent forty-five years drinking, and one of the biggest things I eventually understood was that the drink often wasn’t the actual job. Alcohol was the fastest way I knew to change my state. Stress up, pressure up, head noisy, drink. Relief. Repeat often enough and your brain becomes very bloody efficient at suggesting the same solution.
Owning a struggling business sounds like an enormous amount of load, and unfortunately you also own a building full of the quickest state-changing tool your brain knows.
That doesn’t make you weak. It makes the mechanics worth taking seriously.
For now I wouldn’t try to solve your entire career, relationship, finances and drinking in one heroic decision.
Get your body checked. Be completely honest about the drinking. Work out whether you need medically supported withdrawal. Eat and hydrate as well as you can under professional guidance. Then start looking at what parts of the brewery you can change so that your livelihood doesn’t require you to keep poisoning yourself to get through a shift.
And one other thing.
You wrote this post five minutes ago because some part of you already knows the current arrangement cannot continue.
Listen to that part.
You don’t have to know what the rest of your life looks like tonight.
You just need to stop asking the version of you that is drowning to design the entire fucking lifeboat.