Alrighty then! Let's not expect an answer in a single post but more in a conversation. I mean, we hardly know each other, hahaha.
Uncaring self is a position taken which embraces zero tolerance for owning responsibility of whatever. Its no secret many of us authentically drank and drugged ourselves no matter what anyways and so to hell with the consequences. I'm more than guilty of being drunk by my own hand back in the day. Sure, we can blame being under the influence for some specific times, but this does not mean that years of addictive abuse can be blamed on whatever substances are being abused. Being a chronic drunk required my complete participation. Sure, I'm an alcoholic drug addict by definition, and my alcoholism is not my fault as much as its my responsibility when I'm being sober, and not my responsibility when I was being drunk. Yup. I really didn't care about responsibility while drunk. Not so much as escaping into my drunk. More like being drunk brought my most uncaring sides of my personality into being top-dog. I hated the consequences of being drunk of course, but I didn't hate being uncaring while being drunk.
Nonetheless, my accepting my deep uncaring for having been drunk helps me to no end in my accepting my real responsibility to my keeping sober. Importantly, I'm the same drunk sober as I was drunk. I'm a *different person sober* than I was drunk, but as an alcoholic nothing in my alcoholism changed. A drunk is a drunk is a drunk. Importantly I changed as a *person to keep sober.* I'm sure others can chose to play the semantic card on me and dismiss my views. No worries for me. My 33 years of unbroken sobriety speak best for me. Why is it when we returned to drinking its eventually not better no matter how long we might previously have stayed sober? Obviously because as drunks nothing in our actual relationship with alcohol being drank changed just because we quit... so for me to be a caring person I can't be a practicing drunk because by my own hand I couldn't have cared less about myself when I drank. This not caring attitude can be useful when I need to be more than just a drunk who doesn't drink. being sober requires me to do a lot of not caring about this, that, and the other thing, if I expect to stay sane and sober. I have a responsibility to mind my own self as much as possible else I risk getting in over my head and wanting to be less than responsible which means entertaining a return to drinking.
So I don't care if God is real or not I just care that I have made my choice on God being real. I don't care about my family and friends any more than I ever did but now I do care if they are harmed by me in my carelessness. I don't care about my misfortunes in life enough to drink over them and yet I don't care about my fortunes enough to drink over them either, lol.
The bottom line for me is I'm the same drunk, and I use all the tools and tricks I can use to live my life as a person who is a sober drunk and not simply as a person who doesn't drink anymore or doesn't have a drunken past life. I'm informed now of my personality being sober compared to my ignorance while being drunk. I thought I knew myself drunk. I was delusional about myself when drunk. Now, not so much, lol.
I reached an alcoholic tipping point in my early teens about my darker side of not caring about consequences and responsibilities. Back when, taking a long ride on the hell train into crazy land offered a gratification that can't be realized by being all good and proper and moral. Lying and cheating and doing whatever it takes is an acquired taste which can become as sophisticated as needed to justify whatever effort - like wasting a life as a drunk for example.
It takes real skills learned in stupidity to destroy a life over a span of years and then dissociate from the trail of garbage left in the wake of said destruction. Alcohol and drugs readily makes the job so very doable, and so naturally addiction abuse is ideally suited for living a wrecked life down the rabbit hole.
Nonetheless, making out like being the walking dead is a lousy way to live even while drunk, and so I eventually couldn't drink enough to escape from myself. When even being drunk is as useless as not being drunk then clearly there is no where but up if being dead is authentically not on the menu.
There are consequences for wasting a life, and it becomes a real matrix of challenges to change things around remarkably enough to not fall back into abuse of alcohol and whatever else.
I understand how commonly hatred works against the so-called good life far more than I know how truly love always trumps when the game of alcoholism is finally ended. You know, I don't need to know how gravity works to not float off into space, and I don't need to know how planes fly to buy my seat and get from here to there. Its remarkable just how much we don't need to actually know about whatever to nonetheless get enough out of life to make it all worthwhile and even livable.
I'm a different person now then when I was lost in my addictions. I'm different because of what I do with myself. Quitting was just the beginning of being different. Quitting wasn't enough for me. I just suffered when I didn't also change. Even today with decades of sobriety, its still the same game: keep changing in real life or suffer a harvest of outcomes and fates worse than physical death.
Still though, it takes more than lipstick on a pig to make things intelligently right, and my knowing how to be dishonest with myself far more than my knowing how to be honest gives me pause. I've learned not to leap and simply hope for the best. I come from a place of real life gone wrong, and such wrongness can't be denied and if denied I thereafter can't keep my sanity. The denial itself becomes the force of destruction. To live the good life I have now I had to embrace just how incurably bad it had already become. We can't escape our past doesn't mean though we have to succumb and drown in our own flotsam.
I believe in the awesomeness power of imagination. Imagination is easily the best remedy to the absurdities of life. Imagination is the real deal bar none. I would be disingenuous to suggest I'm a victim in my own life. I'm the captain of my fates if nothing else and when I finally quit drinking and drugging I made a true promise to go down with my own ship in sobriety same as I had promised myself in drunkenness.