Wisdom of the Rooms August 24, 2009
"I'd rather go through life sober believing I'm an alcoholic, than go through life drunk, trying to prove I'm not."
I love it when newcomers share at meetings that they don't think they are alcoholics. Sure they like to party, they admit, and perhaps they had a DUI or two, or lost a job or made a bad scene, but they can control their drinking when they have to. Eventually someone points out that people who don't have a drinking problem are rarely at meetings trying to defend or explain their drinking!
For a long time I also resisted the idea that I might be an alcoholic. The longer I stayed sober and learned about the disease, and the more I compared my behavior with the alcoholics around me, the more I had to admit that I probably was one, too. Rather than be a sentence, though, this turned out to be the key that set me free.
Today, I've stopped debating whether I'm an alcoholic or not, and I choose to live a sober life. It's kind of like that saying about whether to believe in God or not: "I'd rather live my life believing that there is a God and find out in the end there isn't, than live my life believing there isn't a God and end up finding out there is."
In the end, it's about living a good life, and that's what sobriety allows me to do.