How alcohol built me a neurotypical life
I was around 14 when I tried alcohol for the first time — although that is debatable, as my ‘friends’ back then tried to convince me that their parents had actually switched out my drink for fizzy pop and I was just pretending to be tipsy.
Hey, I was an undiagnosed autistic; we’ll never know the truth on this one.
What I do know is how alcohol made me feel. At that time, I was still in the process of shedding my social innocence and realising that I had to start tweaking parts of myself to be accepted. Until then, I had been delightfully unmasked and seldom particularly bothered about what anyone thought of me.
High School
At first, alcohol almost emboldened me to be even more authentic and silly. I was the friendship group’s clown, getting up to all kinds of nonsense with the helpful buoyancy of WKD to make my friends laugh. Until being the funny friend was no longer cool, and angst was in.
Alcohol then became the blueprint for being cool. I grew up when Skins1 was all the rage, and being a hot mess was a wayward badge of honour. Paired with a raging eating disorder, I willfully dived right down to the bottom of the barrel into being a hot mess. I thought it was cool. It really, really wasn’t.
The girl who was open about her love for flamboyant 70s British comedians, or 00s musician Dido, or the fact she knew every single cat breed and could describe them to you in great detail — she’s the girl who was cool. She cared about stuff that wasn’t just whether some BO-riddled floppy-fringed teenager wanted to kiss her.
University Life
As I got older, alcohol became the catalyst for any kind of social life that I could assemble. During freshers’ week at university, I pre-drank in my dorm room, hesitantly joined the party, took my social temperature - ouch, voice is quiet, don’t know when to speak, was that a joke??? - then hot-footed back to my dorm room to down another inappropriate amount of vodka until I felt ‘normal’ enough to join the group again.
I walked into the freshers’ fair the next day - sober - and walked straight back out again as it was too overwhelming. I didn’t join a single society throughout the three years. I could’ve done it if I’d had a drink. I could’ve gotten around it if I’d known I was autistic.
Interning at ELLE Magazine
One summer, I managed to score an internship at ELLE magazine in London, solely because I’d had a couple of free cocktails at a River Island in-store event and felt brave enough to go up to the Fashion Editor and shoot my shot. Again, wouldn’t have done this without my good pals vodka and orange.
During the internship itself, I thrived, as I spent 80% of the time alone in a fashion cupboard, folding knickers Victoria Beckham had just worn for a photoshoot. I managed to sneak one suggested line into an article. I cried when I left, even though I’d barely spoken to anyone. I adored fashion.
Once I graduated from university, the real test came. It was no longer acceptable to be a teenage train wreck; I was a 21-year-old adult absolutely desperate to get her foot on the corporate ladder (oh god, oh god). I managed to get a job working for a well-known high-street retailer on their digital team, writing pseudo-editorial pieces for their blog, as they didn’t sell online back then.
First ‘Real’ Job
At first, I was so happy there. It was a tiny team - and we were all quirky - where I could rattle off product descriptions, reviews and features like there was no tomorrow. We’d have boozy intro lunches and plenty of prosecco-fuelled parties — in and outside of the office. I used the alcohol-laden moments to cement friendships for the working hours.
This is a tactic that served me well for the 8-9 years that I continued drinking.
Then a new editor joined the team, and we immediately clashed. Not knowing that I was autistic at the time, there were definitely occasions where I suggested to her that she had typos in her work, apparently not something you want to hear from the pip-squeak assistant, almost a decade your junior. In my mind, I was just trying to be helpful.
I had never, and have never since, boozed on my lunch break until a few months after she joined the business.
One particular incident to illustrate the way she spoke to me - most definitely in a manner that wouldn’t be accepted in 2025 - was where, in an in-person meeting of about twelve people, she put her hand on my wrist in a faux-sympathetic gesture and said,
“Would you like to start that one again, Ebony?”
Delivered in the most patronising tone I think I’ve ever heard. I was full of good ideas, but if my brain caught the slightest whiff of lacking support, it reverted to bumbling idiot. If I had a cheeky pint from the ‘Spoons2 on the corner before a big meeting, the afternoon was mine for the taking.
When I eventually crumbled into my first adult autistic burnout and handed in my notice eighteen months after joining, she sat across from me in a coffee shop across the road and asked if it was “because of my anxiety” — something I had never disclosed to her.
God, she was the worst.
I continued to use alcohol to hide my social ineptitude until it got to the point where I was embarrassing myself more in work social settings than making progress with befriending the teams.
In the aforementioned content job, I made a tit out of myself on several occasions — running across a Christmas party dance-floor and jumping on the back of my boss (thankfully, the first one, who was accustomed to my silliness), or declaring to everyone how much I fancied one of the spoken-for guys who worked there. Which obviously eventually circulated to him. I had zero filter.
One time, the original boss had to send a colleague to my house on a random Friday as I’d gotten myself in such a state from drinking on an empty stomach that I hadn’t turned up for work the next day. I was absolutely devastated; my unknowingly autistic insistence at being seen as ‘good’ chipping away each time I opened a bottle.
There were so many learnings from that job. How to be neurotypical. How to rein it the fuck in and be more ‘normal’. Alcohol allowed me to pretend, and it also allowed me to excuse my behaviour if I took it too far, or if someone still misunderstood me despite my best efforts. It was a crash course in the realisation that an acceptable woman must always toe the invisible line between “entertaining” and “too much”.
There’s also so much more to say on this topic - we’ve only really touched on work now - so this will definitely be revisited at a later date. I’m happy to say I’m now fifteen months sober after alcohol inevitably tried to crash and burn my existence on one too many occasions — and this is all a distant memory.
