Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights are when college students come out to play in full force.

For most, the night ends safely, if a little booze‐soaked, back in bed. For others, the night ends in vomit, blackouts and sirens.

“I thought it was just a part of being young and wild,” Seamus Kirst said, referring to his habit of blacking out nightly during his undergraduate years.

Kirst, 24, a graduate of Brown and Syracuse universities — and a former alcoholic and Xanax addict — is well‐acquainted with the battle between sobriety and intoxication. He is a Syracuse local who graduated from Corcoran High School and had struggled with alcohol since he was 15. By 16, he had been admitted to an inpatient rehab program and was taken out of high school. After that, Kirst was part of an outpatient program and went back to school.

Sean Kirst, Seamus’s father, has also dealt with addiction. He knew that his son would have to pull himself out from his downward spiral, he said.

Throughout high school and college, Seamus found that alcohol served as an equalizer of sorts: growing up as a gay teenager in inner‐city Syracuse, it helped him to feel a part of other social circles.

That didn’t change in college, a place where even sober high school kids start pushing boundaries.

Even though he had been hospitalized and part of outpatient and inpatient programs, Kirst’s experiences with alcohol still hadn’t taken a toll on his academic career. He started at Brown University in 2009 to find what seemed like endless parties, along with easy access to alcohol and a culture that embraced the work‐hard, play‐hard mentality.

It wasn’t abnormal to get blackout drunk at college, Kirst said, so he didn’t think he had a problem. He said social media helped reinforce his perception that partying to excess was the norm.

So to him, it never felt out of the ordinary to be so dependent on alcohol as a social lubricant.

After traveling in India, where he developed an addiction to the anti‐anxiety drug Xanax, Kirst came back to Brown and attempted to give up drinking.

“India was the first time I felt (physically) dependent on alcohol,” Kirst said.

And when his father came to visit him two months before Kirst’s time abroad was over, Sean found his son in a “self‐absorbing spiral.” Sean said the son who came back from India was “emotionally beaten down.”

Kirst returned to New York and decided to try to get sober. But he didn’t want to give up the lifestyle. So he turned to cocaine, Adderall and ecstasy, he said.

After a hospitalization due to drugs, Kirst decided to give up all substances and succeeded in being mostly sober between his junior and senior years at Brown. But the resolution did not stick.

For Kirst, a high‐achieving student attending an Ivy League school, his addiction still allowed him to function, which made it harder to give up. Alcoholics are often perceived as being unable to go about their lives, Kirst said, so it didn’t click that his problem was something that needed dire attention.

Alcohol problems in high‐achieving students can be especially dangerous because they’re “smart enough to hide it,” Kirst said.

After his years at Brown, Kirst moved to New York City for a brief time, where it wasn’t long before he had a breakdown that involved him attempting to run into city traffic after breaking up with his boyfriend.

At that point, Kirst saw a substance counselor and put rules in place for himself to keep his drinking under control. But those rules were broken within the next two weeks. He came to the realization that his addiction was all or nothing.

“You have to be 100 percent committed or else it’s so easy to slip backwards,” Kirst said. “Even at 99 percent, that other 1 percent is so powerful.”

It was powerful enough for Kirst that he had to come to the conclusion that alcohol couldn’t be a weekend addiction; it couldn’t be in his life at all.

After making that decision to be all‐in on giving up substances, Kirst found it easier to stick to his regimen, and he hasn’t wavered. Even though it took nearly seven years to make that decision, he hasn’t looked back.

Kirst decided to take his story public in September 2015 and wrote an article for The Advocate titled “Why I Gave Up Alcohol at 22.” The story has been shared more than 1,000 times, and the same post on his own blog has multiple comments expressing support for the writer.

His article, which contained graphic details and inner musings, even took his parents by surprise.

Sean said he believes his son has dealt with the issues discussed in the article in a “powerful and even‐handed way.”

Eric Grode, director of the Goldring Arts Journalism Program at SU, in which Kirst was a master’s student, said he believes that Kirst’s decision to write so openly about his experiences with addiction may be cathartic for Kirst and empowering for others.

Grode said he thinks that the way to overcome student addiction is “to shift the student population away from binge drinking and toward a more sensible model of learning to have fun through moderation.”

During his relationship with alcohol, and especially in college, Kirst said he had been worried that giving up the substance would make him less able to function in social settings, or would make him less interesting.

Instead, he has found that sobriety “is an interesting exercise for someone who wasn’t for so long,” and he no longer feels pressure to “be the loudest and funniest person.”

He suspects, though, that “sobriety may be easier in adult life than in college.”

Editor’s Note: Over the past month, The Daily Orange has collaborated with the Department of Newspaper and Online Journalism at Syracuse University on a series of stories relating to alcohol culture on the SU campus. Multiple stories will appear in The D.O. in the coming days.

Published on April 6, 2016 at 8:30 pm

Contact Sarah: shwolver@syr.edu