I drank because for a few minutes it made the noise go quiet.
That is the sentence people often refuse, especially founders. We prefer bigger language. Stress. Pressure. Burnout. A difficult period. We talk around the glass because the truth sounds smaller and more humiliating. I was drinking gin because I could not bear the full volume of my own mind, and I wanted relief that arrived faster than honesty.
I remember one late afternoon when the office had gone still in that false way offices do after people leave. Not silent. Just emptied of witnesses. The photocopier light was off. Someone had left a mug in the sink with a brown ring drying at the bottom. My laptop was still open on a table full of documents I had not properly absorbed. I poured gin into a water glass because the ordinary shape of the glass made the act look less serious. My mouth was already dry. The first swallow burnt, then spread that familiar warmth through my chest and neck. I felt my shoulders drop by a few millimetres, as if a hidden screw had been loosened.
Nothing had been solved.
A creditor was still waiting.
A client matter was still exposed.
My own judgment was still less reliable than I wanted to admit.
But the drink created a short corridor between me and the truth. That was its real function.
It did not make me happy. It made me less reachable.
That distinction matters.
For a while, drinking was doing the work that I should have done in cleaner, harder ways. It was reducing noise. It was muting anticipatory fear. It was flattening shame before I had earned the right to feel better. It was giving my body the impression that something had changed when nothing important had changed at all.
Alcohol can look like comfort when what it is really offering is distance.
Distance from fear.
Distance from self-knowledge.
Distance from the exact size of the mess.
And distance, for a founder already losing proportion, is dangerous.
Because the problem is not only that you feel less. The problem is that you govern less. The line between one more drink and one more delayed decision becomes thinner than you think. You reply tomorrow instead of tonight. You review less carefully. You tolerate ambiguity that should have been confronted. You start confusing emotional survival with operational control.
Long before I studied governance, risk and compliance properly, I was living the opposite of it in my own body.
That is not a clever sentence. It is an indictment.
A founder can keep moving for quite a long time while already becoming structurally unreliable. That is one of the ugliest truths I know. You can still attend meetings. You can still speak intelligently. You can still send emails that sound competent. You can still look, from the outside, like a man under pressure but broadly in command. Meanwhile, inside, your judgement is narrowing. Your tolerance for complexity is dropping. Your honesty with yourself is deteriorating. And because many entrepreneurs are rewarded for endurance, people may even praise the surface while the foundation is warping underneath.
Drinking helped me preserve that surface for longer than was good for anyone.
That includes other people.
This is where the moral question begins. A business collapse never hurts numbers alone. Behind every unpaid invoice there is a person, a household, a plan, a level of trust that may have taken years to build. A delayed payment is not just a financial event. It may be a rent problem, a childcare problem, a marriage problem, a sleepless night for someone who did not choose your chaos. When I speak about drinking now, I do not speak only about my pain. I speak about the way self-numbing can make a person slower, smaller, and less available to responsibility precisely when others most need clarity from him.
I was not drinking to celebrate success.
I was drinking to make internal collapse feel temporarily manageable.
That is a very different thing.
And it is why simple moralism misses the point. Telling someone to stop drinking without understanding the job the alcohol is performing is often useless. If the drink is acting as anaesthetic, pause button, sedative, shield, false companion, and emergency exit, then removing the bottle without confronting the function will only leave the original pain standing in brighter light. That pain may be fear, humiliation, panic, loneliness, public judgment, or the slow horror of knowing that your own company is no longer responding to your hand the way it once did.
In my case, gin was not solving distress. It was helping me postpone direct contact with it.
But postponed contact becomes accumulated consequence.
That is the part people do not like because it sounds so dry. Yet dryness is exactly what this requires. A drink taken to take the edge off rarely removes the edge. It moves it forward. It sends the bill to the next morning, and the next decision, and the next relationship. It takes today’s unbearable sharpness and redistributes it across tomorrow’s work. Founders are especially vulnerable to this bargain because we are trained to mortgage the future. We do it with time, energy, sleep, attention, and then, if we are not careful, with our own nervous system.
I also need to say something less elegant and more bodily.
Drinking was teaching me to distrust my own natural signals.
Fatigue no longer meant rest.
Fear no longer meant stop and assess.
Shame no longer meant repair.
Everything became something to soften, dilute, delay. That is what frightened me most when I understood it. Not that I was drinking, but that I was reorganising my inner life around avoiding direct contact with reality.
For an entrepreneur, that is not a private eccentricity. It is a governance failure.
Recovery did not begin when I felt better. It began when I stopped defending the function alcohol had in my life. When I admitted, without romance, that it was helping me disappear in place. I was still present in rooms. I was still speaking. I was still signing. But part of me was already absent, and absent people cannot be trusted with too much power, not even if they are clever, articulate, or well-intentioned.
That truth hurt.
It still does.
But it also gave me a clean lesson. If you are relying on something to make you temporarily less aware of what your life or business has become, the first question is not whether it is technically manageable. The first question is what it is protecting you from seeing. Name that with brutal precision. Because once you know the real function, the fog starts to thin.
I used to think the drink was there to help me cope.
It was there to help me not fully know.
There is a difference.
And for a founder, that difference can become the whole story.