Grace Adams spent her first six months of living in Manhattan drinking it all in — literally.
Fresh out of the COVID-19 lockdown and a newcomer to NYC, the 25-year-old brunette was soon guzzling cocktails and downing glasses of wine with friends every weekend.
She assumed it was a necessary evil of big-city life when she moved from her hometown of Baltimore into her Gramercy Park apartment in February 2022.
It’s what every fun, single, and carefree NYC woman appeared on social media to be doing.
“I was in the city, in my early 20s, partying and drinking,” Adams, who had a penchant for gin and tonics, told The Post. “New York is a nightlife, party environment. I thought I wouldn’t have any fun if I wasn’t drinking — I loved it.”
Adams is sharing her personal story after a new study revealed the rising number of women are suffering alcohol-related deaths, according to research published in JAMA Network this week.
Researchers from NY’s Hofstra University, Harvard Medical School, and the University of South Carolina analyzed nearly 606,000 deaths linked to alcohol between 1999 and 2020, based on Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data.
While men historically have been more than twice as likely to die from alcohol-related conditions compared to women, the gap is narrowing, researchers reported.
The male mortality rate increased by 12.5% between 2018 and 2020, while the rate among females spiked by 14.7%, the researchers found.
Social media inspiration
Adams — a self-proclaimed “party girl” who failed to give up binging after graduating from Southern Methodist University in 2020 — relocated to NYC for a job in client services at a major advertising agency in Midtown.
Every Friday, she would anxiously watch the clock, waiting for it to strike 3 p.m. That’s when her drinking commenced.
She’d rush home to knock back some spirits before meeting up with her pals to sip a little more, and then booze the night away at bars and clubs. Her liquid indulgence spilled into her Saturdays and Sundays, when she’d suck down at least 10 servings of hard alcohol each day, rendering her blackout drunk until Monday morning.
“Drinking is what we’re told we are supposed to do on social media and [the movies] when you have no responsibilities,” said Adams.
And she’s not wrong.
TikTok happy hours
Beneath buzzy TikTok hashtags like #NYCDrinks and #NYCParty, which have garnered 71.7 million and 55.6 million views, respectively, high-spirited Gen Z and millennial women are clinking glasses filled with colorful mixed drinks at happy hour, popping bottles of champagne at posh lounges and chugging beers during summertime outings.
Hitting the bottle after a hard day of dominating the Big Apple is a common theme in flicks like “How to be Single” and in the “Sex and the City” franchise.
However, heavy drinking among ladies in their 20s and early 30s is becoming less of a cathartic life hack and more of a life-threatening problem.
In fact, a June 2023 study on women’s binge drinking habits in the US, conducted by researchers at Boston University, found that childless women age 35 are at the highest risk of binge drinking and Alcohol Use Disorder — namely due to the recent uptick in women who’ve chosen to postpone parenthood until their late 30s and beyond.
“Alcohol industry messages around drinking for stress relief and enjoyment have always been part of the industry’s advertising strategy, and we’ve seen this emerge on social media platforms,” said study senior author Katherine Keyes, professor of epidemiology at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health.
“Stress plays a major role in the development and maintenance of disordered drinking,” added Dr. Shana Johnson, a physical medicine and rehabilitation physician in Scottsdale, Arizona. “It is not a big leap to look at soaring food and housing costs and think that chronic stress is taking its toll in the form of increased alcohol use to cope with today’s hardships.”
The report also noted that women who turned 35 between 2018 and 2019 were nearly 60% more likely to binge drink or report AUD symptoms — including blackouts, dizziness, vomiting, and anxiety — than women who turned 35 between 1993 and 1997.
And after months of nonstop swigging, those symptoms became the painful norm for Adams.
“I’d go in and out of blackouts throughout the weekend. I’d wake up hungover and with all this anxiety about what I might have said or done the night before,” she said.
“I’d have pounding headaches and would feel extremely nauseous,” continued Adams. “But the mental gymnastics of trying to remember what had happened [while I was drinking] was so exhausting. I literally couldn’t get out of bed.
“I was depressed because I felt stuck in this toxic cycle,” she added.
Embracing the label
But on Aug. 3, 2022, she made a call for help.
“I called my mom and said, ‘I’m in pain and I can’t stop drinking,’” Adams recalled. Days later, her parents checked her into rehab at Ashley Addiction Treatment Center in Havre de Grace, Maryland, where she received specialized care for 28 days.
“It was the best decision I ever made,” she told The Post, noting that recovery didn’t come without its hurdles.
“At first, I couldn’t even say ‘I’m an alcoholic,’” said Adams. “The best I could do was say: ‘I’m Grace, and I’m powerless to alcohol,’ because I didn’t think of myself as an alcoholic.
“When people hear that term, they think of some old guy drinking in the park, not necessarily someone young [who looks like me],” she continued. “But after a while, I embraced the [alcoholic] label because it helped me I understand that I had a problem.”
Following her stay, Adams returned to Manhattan, quit her job, and moved into the Release Recovery sober living house on the Upper East Side.
She resided there for four months alongside a group of other 20-somethings overcoming addiction.
“I met all of these young, cool, beautiful women who were living the life I wanted to live,” she said of her sober-living roommates. “Maintaining your sobriety in a city where you used to party was hard at first. I cried for hours when I moved in, but everyone was so supportive.”
And now Adams had dedicated her life to offering that same support to other women.
She currently works at Recovery Release and shares the daily triumphs of her sobriety journey with her growing “Sober Not Boring” audience of over 10,000 followers on TikTok.
“Before getting help, I didn’t realize that young women in New York City were getting sober and staying sober because the binge drinking culture is so prevalent here,” said Adams, who now enjoys juicy mocktails and soft drinks when she hangs out with friends.
She’s also begun training for the New York City Marathon — her first-ever long run, scheduled for November.
“I’ve learned that there’s no need to dilute your life with alcohol,” she said, just two days shy of her one-year sobriety anniversary.
“This has been the best year of my life.”
