[Brad1eyS]

Let me know what you think...

I admitted I was an alcoholic about 15 years ago. My admission happened over time and in a couple of different ways. The most obvious of which is just one day I simply knew it. You say, *** I am an alcoholic. This can be pretty fleeting, and subsequent doubt is unavoidable. So next came admitting it to other people; saying it out loud and thereby making it more concrete and irreversible. This was then followed by action, I went to meetings, kept admitting it, and told people I was going to do something to solve the problem. It’s those three things together that constitute an admission of alcoholism.

In the beginning however, I was so resistant to the idea, that, when given the choice between rehab and the psych ward, I chose the latter. It was more palatable because being crazy, while pathetic, wasn’t my fault and certainly beyond my control. I saw my using simply as a weakness and personal failure, which I could control if only I weren’t such an enormous loser. A few years later, having graduated from regular and frequent blackouts to crack binges, each measured in an increasing number of days, denial was impossible. There wasn’t anything left in my life that wasn’t some horrible consequence of using. And I said, ‘****’, I am and alcoholic. I couldn’t control it any better than I could the debilitating depression.
So then I said it out loud, to my doctor, to the few friends I had, my sister, my parents and my uncle. Each of whom would pop into my head when in the process of trying to talk myself out of that conclusion. Then I started going to meetings, which began with me saying it out loud, frequently involved citing examples of powerlessness, and listing, in detail, the endless series of things that all added up to a pile of evidence proving unmanageability.

Powerlessness over alcohol is pretty straightforward. It means that there are no circumstances, at any time, under which you can start drinking and then stop of you own accord. It means that every time you get loaded it will always eventually lead to abject misery and collateral damage. It means that you have no control over using once you start.
I do not currently, nor will I ever understand the concept of ‘one’ drink. I will never be able to take one drink without obsessing about the next, and the next, and the last will only be that by virtue of its ability make me pass out, get arrested or jump off a bridge.

Powerlessness, for me, was borne out in the usual things alcoholics do; regular failed attempts to not to drink for a given period of time, even hours and sometimes minutes. I took a tour of some of the finer rehabs in the Southwest, talked about my childhood with shrinks; moved, found relief from the depression, became more successful, etc. and so on. I continued to use in every case.

On my last run, which lasted about 6 years, I decided to impose only the mildest of prohibitions on my drinking behavior -- namely to drink to my heart’s content as long as I could pay for a roof over my head. Without realizing it, I was in fact still trying to control my drinking, albeit barely at all. Not surprisingly even this proved impossible. The frequency with which I missed work, plane flights, failed to answer the phone only increased. Weekend binges spilled over first into Monday, and then into Tuesday and sometimes even Wednesday, vacations became weeklong blackouts. Physically, I was bloated and weighed two hundred pounds; I would sweat, shake and vomit for hours every week.

That my life had become unmanageable isn’t something that can be disputed. I thought I had a solution for this problem; simply remove those things in my life that had become unmanageable. In their absence, they were no longer unmanageable. Remove friends, avoid family, don’t leave the house except to work and buy vodka, there’s not much left to worry about but a paycheck. Except that alcoholism by definition is all consuming and unrelenting. After years of this approach my job was finally in jeopardy, my family thought I had become a hermit, and the police were finally forced to arrest me. Yet more unmanageability with even so little to manage. The worst part, the incomprehensible demoralization part though, wasn’t actually anything one could see from the outside. It was a remarkably painful loneliness coupled with a deep and abiding shame which drove me to think there was no purpose to my presence here on earth.