Dear Pádraic...
Wouldn't it be wonderful to sit and have a glass of wine with your spouse/partner and not have to "knock a hole in the bottom" of the wine bottle? And what a joy to go to the ball game, toss down a couple of beers while watching the home team take the lead, and not stand during 90% of the game by the vendor. What about having the greatest Mexican dinner, followed by a Margarita and not having the waiter know you by your first name because you ordered so many pitchers of the drink. What if...
I have spent most of my adult life wanting to have this control. And, on an extremely low number of occurrences, succeeded. But the vast majority of times I only end up feeding the obsession to drink and all desire to moderate vanishes like shadows on the ground in an approaching storm. It is an old story shared by most of us on this site. It just never happens. Never. Instead, it fosters the lie inside of us and gives us a false sense of reality, obscuring the fact that because of our propensity to the addiction, we are not able to moderate effectively. Sooner or later we ignore our "just one drink" code and respond to the primal overindulgent behavior of sloshing down as much booze as possible.
I am fully aware I am not expounding on anything remotely new; I am simply reminding myself of a fallacy I fell back upon nearly a year ago and found myself deeper in addiction. No longer was I really feeling the "buzz". I was not able to get that warm glow and sought more volume to bring it back. I turned to the hard spirits in quantities that would shock my family if they were aware. Nearly every morning around 3 a.m. I would awake with the same disgust of my addiction and make the same commitment to cease the action this very day. By 4 or 5 p.m. the determination had disappeared and the cycle repeated. There wasn't any thought of moderation.
I sit here now at my computer, empty of the words I wanted to say to myself. Sometimes I grow weary of repeating the same thing over and over, year after year, waiting to see a sign of it finally sinking inward. Will that ever happen? I honestly don't know. But at least I have been listening to my sober self for the last few days—I know I have to.
—Pádraic