findingout

Hey LH,

You didn't ask for responses but then again, you didn't ask for no responses, so...

I realized I that I actually was an alcoholic two weeks into treatment when they passed out a handout with the Jellinek Curve on it. I had been sober for three weeks at that time, the longest I had been sober in over twenty years. I was definitely starting to have the thoughts like "see, I haven't had a drink in three weeks, I really can stop any time I want to." But as I sat there in the room full of people who I was sure were far worse than I was even though I had been drinking just about every morning for the past year because I was afraid to leave the house sober, the smallest moment of clarity happened and I followed the path down that chart all the way to the bottom of the curve, seeing that everything on it applied to me. Applied to me, not to some other person, not to some idea I had of what a real alcoholic was, but to me. I was an alcoholic.

It didn't take too long after for the denial machine in my head to start back up, but I was unable to forget that minute in time when I knew for sure I was an alcoholic. I think what really hit me after that was the old chestnut that alcoholism/addiction is a disease that tries to convince you that you don't have it. I began to see every thought I had about not being an alcoholic, about being able to have just one now and then, in that light. I realized that I was not going to be able to prove I wasn't an alcoholic by drinking.

Can you recover all by yourself without meetings and labels? I am pretty sure people do it everyday. But the thing is, it's not worth more if you do it all by yourself. I believe it might be harder to do it all by yourself but I didn't go that way, so I don't really know. I do know that people who recover all by themselves generally don't walk around with signs that say "I recovered from alcoholism all by myself, ask me how!" So, if you do it all by yourself, you really will be doing it all by yourself.

As far as labels go, I wear one that says "alcoholic" on it today. But I wore that label for years before I could see it and now that I can see it, it's not nearly so obvious to others. In fact, people who didn't know me seven years ago probably don't even know. Here's another label from the other end of the Jellinek curve, after it reaches the bottom and starts back up showing the stages of recovery:
That's another label I wear today