View Single Post
Old 06-21-2009, 07:42 PM
  # 1 (permalink)  
Ago
Member
 
Join Date: Sep 2008
Location: The Swish Alps, SF CA
Posts: 2,144
Oh, The Humanity

I thought I would tell you a little about my past, who I am, and where I came from other then the circumstances that brought me here.

I thought I would try to show that alcoholics can be human too, with the same hopes, dreams, pain as anyone else on the planet.

on August 23 1992 I walked into my first meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous and raised my hand and said, "My name is Andrew, and I am an alcoholic"

I was 27

I did the math, and since then I have probably identified myself as an alcoholic over ten thousand times. It was pounded into me that I identify as an alcoholic in order to recover. It is now part of my identity. I am proud to be a sober alcoholic. It is part of who I am. A large part.

I cried when I found out I was a sick person, not a bad person, I had hated, feared, and loathed myself and the only way to not feel that way was to keep drinking, which caused me to feel that way more, causing a vicious cycle. I didn't drink to get drunk, I drank to feel normal, I had been a full blown practicing alcoholic from about the age of twelve or thirteen, and by the time I tried to get control of it I realized I had lost control years before.

I spent the next ten years trying to quit and not being able to. That's my late teens and nearly all of my twenties trying to stop doing the only thing that ever made me comfortable, the only thing that made me not feel terrified all of the time.

There is a quote about "the warped lives of blameless children" in regards to one of the effects of alcoholism, my parents are alcoholics, or at the very least, drank alcoholically, that's what that looked like for me.


My mother left my father, I stayed with my father, he was gone every night until the bar closed. I still have vivid memories of sitting in the truck until two AM on school nights outside the bar, counting buses, Police cars and cabs to pass the time.

I remember driving through downtown San Francisco during lunch time with my father, he was a commercial fisherman, and clothes and a vehicle weren't high on his list of things, we were in a 1949 Dodge pickup full of dead fish wearing old and tattered clothes. I lived on a boat. It was embarrassing to say the least. I remember seeing a woman hurrying somewhere, she had on a gray skirt-business suit thing, gray nylons and white running shoes. She was so beautiful she made me cry. I could smell her perfume from the truck.

I knew if I could grow up and meet someone like her, I would be OK. I would be better then OK, she was the answer to what I had been looking for. I knew this at ten years old.

I was terrified from as long as I can remember. I remember sitting in a therapists office, and she was asking to go back when I felt "safe", as in when did the schism occur, when did I begin to feel the world as an unsafe place.

My answer was never. I wet the bed and had nightmares until I was ten years old, then I discovered alcohol and started drinking. I was in fifth grade. I immediately felt better. For the first time in my life I wasn't terrified, for the first time in my life I stopped wetting the bed.

By the time I was in High School I woke up, got stoned every morning, got drunk every day at lunch, then again every day after school, I was a straight A student in a gifted program, I took trigonometry at age twelve, I had a promising future, I went from a student who made straight A's at twelve to a student lost to alcohol by the time I was 14. I was still making straight A's, I was just nearly black-out drunk every day in school. When I was 16 a kid in my program got a full scholarship to Berkeley, graduated with a Doctorate at age twenty.

I ran away from home, ran into him at age twenty, he was PHD, I was a busboy.

He was two years "behind me" in the program although we were the same age.

In my twenties I was your worst nightmare, well maybe not you, but your mother's, that's for sure. My very first Girlfriend I ever had in my life cheated on me the first week she moved in and from then on it was "Game on".

I was the Dog who had been bitten and was determined to bite back.

Since I had already decided that women were 'the answer" at age ten though I kept looking for "the one".

Through my twenties my life was a big party and all I did was drink and sleep around.

What happened:

at age 25 I met the "girl of my dreams"

I feel completely, helplessly, irrevocably head over heels in love.

This was "her" the woman I had waited my whole life for.

there was only one problem.

I couldn't stop drinking, and when I drank, I slept with other people.

I couldn't stop.

I would wake up horrified, loathing myself with every fiber of my being swearing off drinking forever, only to be drunk again that very same night.

This went on for two years.

Obviously the relationship was a rocky one, and finally due to a " set of unfortunate circumstances" where I had woke up in Florida as Hurricane Andrew was hitting the coast, in response to her "punishment" regarding this "total and complete set of circumstances that wasn't my fault", in a fit of drunken rage I "slept with someone at her" and told her about it for "behavior modification purposes".

Did NOT go as planned.

My thinking wasn't the clearest at that time.

She threw me out, I went on a week long bender, crying and puking uncontrollably for seven days (puking from heartbreak, not alcohol poisoning) finally waking up one morning (Aug23,92) and said to myself, "I can't do this any more"

it was different somehow, there was a shift.

She had been "stalking me" during my week, so "accidentally" bumped into me at the store that day at noon. I told her of my decision to quit drinking and actually go check out this thing some friends of mine were beginning to "wash up" in called AA. We made a decision to see a couples counselor that afternoon, and I went to a friends house and knocked on his door, he answered it, and I said, Bobby, I have two questions, one, will you take me to one of those 'meeting' things"

he said "of course"

I said "great, can I live here?"

I went to my first meeting that night and for the first time in my life felt at home, I felt I was in a room of people that understood me, that I had been extremely sick, but they had a solution for me and I never had to drink again.

I can't begin to convey the sense of relief that coursed through me.

I remember talking to this guy, and saying, "I lost my girlfriend.

Guy was obviously a F'ing moron because he just smiled at me and nodded, determined to get through to this thick lunk I said,

"I lost my job"

He smiled wider

I started yelling at him, I've lost my home, I'm homeless, I've lost everything to drinking don't you understand, a career, the girl of my dreams, EVERYTHING!!!!"

The more I yelled, the more he smiled.

You seem the thing he knew, that I didn't, was the more I had lost to alcohol, the better my chances of getting and staying sober were, that if I had "the gift of desperation" I might get and stay sober.

He was my sponsor for my first run through the steps.

Anyway, if you read this far, I'd like to thank you

I just wanted to say that alcoholics were people too, that we suffer and have suffered every bit as much as you. That, like you, we have feelings and emotions, and like you, we didn't choose this, that, like you, we were put in a situation that we were powerless over, that like you, there comes a day of choice, to admit powerlessness and begin the journey of recovery, or to continue to do further "research" until we either die or get into enough pain to become teachable.

On behalf of Alcoholics everywhere, for all those that haven't made amends, I am sorry

for all those that continue to harm you, for all those that can't get sober, I am sorry.

It's been 17 years now nearly I guess, I have "slipped" twice in that time, once when the relationship with 'the girl of my dreams" went in the crapper after some years of sobriety and once a few years ago now around my "family of origin" issues and untreated codependency.

Truly, my life has been harmed as much by alcoholics and alcoholism as anyone here, and I in my day have done my fair share of harming, drunk and sober, I just wanted to say I understand your pain, for everyone here:

I love you, keep coming back
Ago is offline