Double happiness: a heavy smoker and drinker gives up both habits, thanks in part to coronavirus shutting bars
- English teacher John Lee told himself he was just an ‘enthusiastic drinker’. In fact he was an alcoholic who drank so much he would black out
- At the start of 2020, he decided to give up alcohol and tobacco, and credits bar closures amid the pandemic, a Reddit community and an app for helping him do it
For nearly 20 years, English teacher John Lee was a pack-a-day smoker and a heavy drinker.
A Korean born and raised in Brunei, southeast Asia, he moved to Seoul, South Korea, in 2011 and completed his mandatory army service in 2013. While looking for a job afterwards, he found drinking alcohol was a way to ease his anxiety.
Two years on, Lee, an amateur critic of K-dramas and films on YouTube known as The Korean Foreigner, was working out every morning – and drinking every night. “Even then, I told myself that I wasn’t an alcoholic, I was just an ‘enthusiastic drinker’,” Lee recalls.
One winter’s day in Seoul, in 2017, Lee drank so much that he blacked out. When he came to, he had a gash on his head and no recollection of how he got it. By the time he took his first overseas holiday – to Rome, Italy – in February 2019, he had stopped working out, was piling on the pounds and had to accept that he had become an alcoholic.
The 37-year-old had tried to quit drinking for years, but says his longest abstinence from alcohol lasted six months. “I would cave in because it started with this idea that I could just have one beer. I could, but then it happened the next day, then the next,” he says.
