Last night my sister came over and hit it hard. She got absolutely hammered, came onto my boyfriend, picked various fights with me and others, and eventually passed out in the snow and we had to physically carry her into the guest room to sleep it off. Then to top off the evening at some point she woke up and snuck back out to drive herself home and got a DUI after she ran a stop sign.
I find myself judging her pretty harshly, but it's so easy to forget that those are all things I would have done (or did do) just a short while ago. A year ago at a Christmas party I got so wasted I behaved pretty much exactly the same way. I didn't get a DUI but I did come to out of a blackout wandering a snowy street without shoes or a coat trying to figure out where the hell I was and hail a cab at 3am. For weeks after that every night I would tell my boyfriend I had to go back to the office for something and go sit at my desk in the dark and drink until I passed out, wake up in the middle of the night and go back home and crawl into bed, wake up, repeat. It took several more months to finally put the brakes on the runaway train that was my life, but I have a little under four months sober now and I am beyond grateful.
I know there isn't much I can do for my sister or anyone else who is still going through the hell of active drinking other than tell her that it is so worth it, that even after just a few months things have changed so much for me and even though I still have a lot of work to do and a lot of messes to clean up, I feel a sense of ease and well-being and possibility that I haven't felt in many years. I wish that feeling for everyone who is struggling.
