Alum opens up about alcoholism

Author: Rachael Jennings

While many students were getting ready to start their weekend, heading out to the bar and meeting up with friends, a former Middlebury party-girl addressed a small crowd about her personal battle with alcohol that began when she was a teenager and peaked during her college years.

Jenn McGuigan '93 presented her lecture entitled "Wasted: A Midd Alum's Drinking Story" on Friday, March 14 in the Chateau's Grand Salon. McGuigan shared her own experiences with the drinking culture at Middlebury in the hopes of raising awareness and providing solidarity for those who feel lost in the whirl of parties.

"Drinking is a short-term answer for whatever ails you," said McGuigan at the beginning of her honest and personal talk.

Drinking was a cure for a new social situation, but McGuigan soon began to feel unmotivated and disheartened. "I would lay in my bed for hours and time would pass," remembered McGuigan. She started to show symptoms of depression as early as her junior year of high school.

When she attended a Christian college in Indiana - Taylor University - where there was no smoking, drinking or even dancing, she felt even more misunderstood and disconnected than she did in high school.

"I'm so much smarter than these cornfield people. No one understands me," McGuigan remembered thinking.

McGuigan had wanted to go to Middlebury, but had been rejected.

Nonetheless, she was determined to get in. McGuigan re-applied and enrolled as a Feb transfer. One of about six transfer students, McGuigan felt isolated and out of place - everyone else had already forged strong friendships.

When she found herself at parties, McGuigan drank and thought, "We're all in this together! We all love each other!" That superficial knowledge was enough to keep McGuigan at the parties, where it was easier to accept a happy and false reality.

"I felt very alone. It was not something I would ever say out loud. I wanted to appear ... fun," said McGuigan. "I would go out, hook up with someone, pretend that I didn't care the next day and hook up with the next guy. I never wanted there to be a last guy," she said.

Often, she recalled ending up outside another student's door, and feeling pressured to go farther with him than she had intended because it was easier than the alternative - making him mad.

"No is a complete sentence," McGuigan cautioned. "You don't have to have a reason or back yourself up. It's just, 'No.'"

Yet, one of these cases brought her a lot more than she had wanted. McGuigan contracted HPV genital warts from the first person she slept with at Middlebury, when she had unprotected sex. "If I had condoms, I would look like a whore," she said about the decision.

"It was a really uncomfortable merry-go-round," McGuigan said, remembering the shame that came with her STI and the fear of telling her next partner.

McGuigan continued her partying habits throughout college. During one incident, after a night of drinking with her friends, she woke up to go to the bathroom and found mint-green toothpaste smeared all over the door and mirrors. Disgusted that someone would disrespect their space so much, she climbed back into bed only to realize that she too was covered in toothpaste.

McGuigan realized that after she had blacked out from drinking, her friends had written on her with toothpaste. "I always felt close to these people while drinking," McGuigan said. "But would they blow me off for dinner? Would they call me if they were going to Burlington?"

"The quality I wanted to have in a friend was vulnerability," she said. "It is what their siblings' names are, where they want to be in five years, not just Friday night fun and drunken political debates."

McGuigan did not express these feelings while at Middlebury, but she believed that getting out into the excitement of real life and the vastness of New York City after college would cure her loneliness.

"I thought the problem was Indiana, then Middlebury. But everywhere you go, there you are," said McGuigan.

Her drinking progressed and her destructive patterns grew to include drug use. McGuigan was diagnosed with manic depression and prescribed medication after seeing a psychiatrist.

"I felt great that she gave me a whole bunch of pills," said McGuigan, "then I did not have to face my problems." One day, in a state of severe depression and hopelessness, McGuigan took all of those pills and all of the alcohol that she could find.

Her suicide attempt did not work, and she was rushed to the hospital, put on suicide watch and forced to join a support group for alcoholism.

"We never tossed around the word 'alcoholic' in college. There was always someone who drank more than me. I only ever drank a few days a week. Alcoholism did not apply to me," McGuigan said.

Finally recognizing her problem and seeking help, McGuigan strived towards changing her life. She faced many difficulties, but brought closer to understanding the real needs of her body and her true priorities in life. Today, McGuigan is a successful professional, surrounded with true friends instead of the "crappy friends" she partied with, happy with her husband and trying to start a family.

The success of McGuigan's story was uplifting, and hearing her speak - relaxed and unscripted - with such veracity touched the listeners and encouraged them to be aware of the too often unspoken-about spiral of alcoholism and depression.

Far from the emptiness of the vodka and Corona bottles that once cluttered her life, McGuigan smiled as she talked about singing karaoke with her husband, jogging and hiking. "I have an ordinary and incredibly fulfilling life," McGuigan said.