Talking with other people about certain subjects reminds me of childhood. The conversation being something like this one
“Is”
“Is Not”
“Is”
“Is Not”
And so on…. To me a complete a waste of time to me. If I wanted that kind of conversation, I will go talk to my grandchildren.
After reading Little Miss Short Stuff excellent post Lets Talk About Addictions: Alcohol, I was inspired to write about being an alcoholic. I even wrote two drafts and trashed them.
Why did I trash them? They where good posts but didn’t seem worth publishing to me. Reminded too much of the childhood game.
Reason for that is that in the past, that is what the conversations about being an alcoholic turn into for me. People not believing I was an alcoholic because I didn’t fit into the mold of what an alcoholic should behave in regards to their drinking and recovery. I then assert I was one despite that. So yes it becomes “Is”, “Is Not” type of conversation.
But Little Miss Short Stuff makes an excellent point in her post
No matter what anyone else tells you. It doesn’t matter if you don’t check off all the boxes they assume an alcoholic to be, because they’re not living your life.
Those people didn’t live my life. They had no idea what I went through when I was drinking all the time. They had no idea what I went through in recovery trying to find ways of dealing with what drove me to drink. That way I didn’t turn to alcohol anymore.
So I am going to talk about being an alcoholic and my recovery. Doesn’t matter if you believe if I was an alcoholic or not. I am just telling my story.
At the time I was dealing with a lot of things. A bad decision in joining the military to get away from my father. Lets just say me and the military didn’t get along. My father’s death was something else I was dealing with at the time. I was not sad he was gone. I was happy. That was the problem I was happy about someone dying. But what really pushed me to the bottle was my friend’s suicide.
I didn’t have ill will toward my friend for committing suicide. I knew a lot of what he was going through in life because we would talk about it. It would be selfish of me to say he should have not committed suicide. I didn’t live with what he was going through so whom am I to say either way? But his death left me with no one at all.
I was surrounded by people I didn’t trust and feared. I was in a constant state of anxiety. I didn’t know how to get out of it. I recalled how getting drunk would make me feel more at ease. That is what I wanted more than anything else was a rest from that anxiety and fear. It was either that or get out the knife and cut my wrists.
So I started drinking all the time and I felt good for once. But you would be hard press to tell I was drunk. I didn’t go to bars. I knew that going to bars would be a bad idea. With the angry and hatred I had inside of me, being drunk around other people was a bad idea. So I would rent a hotel room for the night or weekend, go to the store and buy the alcohol and proceed to get drunk by myself where it was safe to do that.
I also had an amazing ability not to suffer hangovers the next day. At the most I would feel a little groggy but nothing some coffee wouldn’t fix. To the people around me I would go out at night and come back the next day and do my job. No one had any idea that I was out getting drunk or that I had a problem with alcohol. To me it was perfect. That is until I hit my rock bottom.
After my father’s death, me and my mother started to reconcile our relationship. She even came up to see me one time. I didn’t see her even though she made the effort to see me. I told her I was too busy. In a way i was too busy getting drunk. That hit me really hard when I realized that I was lying to my mother. That was no way to build our relationship again.
I was meet with shock and disbelief when I admitted to it. No one took me seriously since I didn’t meet the stereotype of being a drunk. It was for that reason I never joined AA or any support group like that. I was afraid that I would get the same reaction. That I would be told that I wasn’t an alcoholic and all I had to do was “man up” and deal with my problems. Something I didn’t want to hear at all.
I tried to find ways to get past my cravings. Some where successful and others not. A lot of the time it seem like time stood still while I try to make it through desire to drink at the moment. One thing that worked for me was thinking about that night when my mother came up and lying to her. Didn’t stop the craving but it gave me something to fight against. A reason to deal with them instead of giving in to them.
Eventually I was discharge from the military. That helped a lot getting out that situation. Coming to terms with my father’s death and not thinking I was an horrible person to be happy about his death. Finding new friends that where supportive of me. Over time the cravings lost their strength with me as I found new ways to deal with what was going on in my life.
But they will never be gone entirely. It is like opening Pandora’s Box. Once it is open then there is no closing it. I still think about having a drink when my anxious or stressed . Even tempted by the idea that it is just one drink and how much better I would feel. But I know from experience it doesn’t stop with one drink. That if I have that one drink then I will have another one and so on. So instead I try to deal with what is making anxious or stressed and if I cannot do it then I turn to people I trust to help me.
Is there a point here, well besides being a cure for insomnia in a thousand words or less? Well that addiction is addiction regardless of how it looks to other people. You know what you went through or are going through. You know what you went through in your own recovery from the addiction. Don’t downplay what you went through because of what other people think. Take pride in what you have accomplished by recovering from the addiction.
Most of all don’t think of yourself a failure or worse than other people because you have an addiction. You are just like everyone else, a human being. We are not Gods and there will be times when we fail or become trapped in the downward spiral that addictions do to us. Seek out help in whatever ways works for you. Keep doing that until you do find a way to move past the addiction.
