I know that this is an old thread but it comes up on search engines so folks may still be reading it, a lot. I've had a lot of trouble trying to relate my type alcoholism, so this is my story:
You’ve heard the scare mongers, you’ve read the sob stories. You’ve seen the drunks who can down a quart of liquor before noon. You’ve heard and disregarded all of the psychological mumbo-jumbo. You’ve heard about the guy from Pennsylvania who had his driver’s license revoked because he told his doctor that he drank a six pack daily. The world has become a bunch of adolescent teenage girls whose histrionic behavior you find unattractive and just plain childish. The politicians are weak and liars. The scientists grub for their grants with the integrity of a used car salesman, or worse, not wishing to so deeply insult the used car salesmen. The NAS, AAAS, Nature and most other publications are so rabidly liberal that they would sell their soul to advance the global warming scare. And these folks are going to tell you about drinking? Right. But I will.
You are strong and relatively successful. You work for a living, always have and always will. You’ve had addictions before, good and bad. Exercise, work, cigarettes, coffee, hobbies, sex, drugs, rock and roll. You’ve quit when you had to, sometimes when you didn’t. You drink because you like to drink, period. There’s no deep psychological meaning or underlying neurosis. Knowing why you drink is not going to make one whit’s worth of difference. You don’t drink to escape, to deny to forget or to ease the pain. You can handle pain just fine. You drink for the same reason that you have sex or go skiing, it makes you feel good, great sometimes. Dump the psychological mumbo-jumbo, drinking is pleasurable, period.
You can hold your liquor and it’s been a long time since you got rip roaring bumbling drunk. You are a controlled alcoholic and you know it. You don’t drink at work and rarely or ever drink before 5pm. You drink what the little girls would call a lot but your buddies would call a few. The alcohol hasn’t ruined or taken over your life, you work, you exercise you carry on. But there is doubt.
You’ve been drinking a long time, almost as long as you can remember. It started with beer and wine, but it has progressed to hard liquor. Beer and wine won’t do it anymore, you need a stronger kick. You still drink beer and wine, just add the whiskey. You attribute it to age but you’ve noticed that you can’t drink as much as you used to. You sometimes get confused but most often just tired and go to sleep. The old Redskin, John Riggins, is a classic example. Strong, successful, lay down and went right to sleep after a few drinks with Supreme Court Justice O’Connor, after telling her to lighten up Sandy. You laugh.
So you’ve quit drinking a couple of times, no big deal. No shakes, no hallucinations, but you didn’t feel any better either. Actually, you’ve been quitting every day of your life. After going to bed at 9, 10 , 12 o’clock, you go through withdrawal. You’re hot and sleep without blankets. Your blood pressure goes up, eventually you wake up and can’t sleep for an hour or two. It wears off and you go back to sleep. The next day your vision is affected, spots, blurriness. Blood pressure is elevated, mild headache. Sometimes you get burning patches on your skin that last for a day or two. Subtle neurological problems like ringing in the ears. Memory problems. Almost everything can be attributed to aging, and indeed some of it truly is. You’re going to get tinnitus not from drinking so much as the all of the noise. Memory loss will come, drinking or not. We’ve seen our kind make into their late eighties and beyond. They’re strong.
But the stomach problems are worrisome. Chronic cough and runny nose. It is the alcohol. Acid reflux is probably to blame, the stomach is letting some of its toxic brew into the windpipe when you pass out at night and this is irritating and infecting the lungs and sinuses. You completely understand how Jimi Hendrix died. You have woken up coughing, unable to breath? Had to stand up for a few minutes and get some water. You haven’t slept through the night in years. It’s time to quit.
Quitting is harder than cigarettes, the urge is stronger and lasts much longer. It always erupts right around sunset and subsides before bed. No problems what so ever in the morning or afternoon, it’s the 5 o’clock happy hour that calls with such intensity. After three days your blood pressure stabilizes and lowers. Your stomach problems clear in a week. But your vision goes bad, hard to describe but blurry and spotty. Ringing in the ears increases, those burning patches return. You don’t feel good, weaker and older, your concentration wanes, you drink again. But it’s no good, the alcohol makes you feel bad. Not at first, at first you clear right up, but thirty minutes later it comes back, the tiredness. You know it’s time, you quit, for good, you’re strong and it’s not that hard. What’s hard is letting go, no more wild drunken parties, no more getting high, no more hanging out at the bar and the babes and the booze. But it's time, we all change, we grow and we grow old and we grow up. We find love and we find meaning. We find that life is defined not only by its pleasures, but by its sacrifices. Anybody can handle the good times, what defines you is how you handle the bad times. There’s so much more to life than that adolescent partying. Time to move on, time to quit drinking, time to say goodbye to another piece of our life, like an old friend you used to know, and look ahead.