EndGameNYC

Finally, something that makes sense.

Given your "colorful" history, which you've only just fleshed out today, I can understand why being invisible offers comfort for you. You as much as suggested that significant parts of your younger years were reactions to people and things around you, rather than the choices of a sane and sober mind. This is true for me as well, and I imagine that I'm far from alone in this.

Not a personal criticism, but an observation based on, what for me, is a bias: Body-building (Or is it now called "body-sculpting?") is often practiced as compensation for so much that is missing inside, at least for some, perhaps many. And you seem to have come to learn this over time. A distorted (some would say "disfigured") body with outsized muscles can never replace the loss of love, if love was ever on the table in the first place. Same with wealth, status, and grand achievement in a field that offers virtually nothing of any substance to both its practitioners and to society as a whole. The only people envious of the achievements of body-builders and of the bodies that they've built are other body-builders or people who wish they could follow that same path. I've never met or known a single person who's confided that they wish they had chosen it, as a career or as an avocation.

Out-of-proportion muscles do "hide" the real person, to the extent that the newer look is not only clichè, but also a type of armor, emotionally and aesthetically. It provides the anonymity you now acknowledge that you crave. When being looked at is your source of self-esteem, it has its cost. People are not, in fact, looking at you, but at an artificial "exoskeleton" that virtually anyone with the means and motivation could achieve. Talent or skill is irrelevant, except within the narrow limits of the activity itself. Success is measured among body-builders, not by who they are, but by how they've manipulated their bodies in order to draw attention, much of which is also manipulated by what we're actually seeing.

Enough about that. Again, all this is my personal bias, and I don't imagine that all body builders live unhappy lives without experiencing genuine meaning. We all only get to be who we truly are by what we do to get there.

I don't know much about your marriage, and it's unlikely I'd have brought it up had you not mentioned it so many times, but it's possible that you may be also hiding in your relationship with your wife. Such an imposing presence as a caregiver may offer comfort, but I'm concerned that it may also make you feel incompetent when it comes to caring for yourself, at least in terms of your inner life and the "voices" from your past that you seek to mute by drinking.

I'll say it again: When you first came to SR, you spoke about having everything a person could ever want in life, that life was great, with the exception of a nagging problem around drinking too much on the weekends. I'm not interested in scolding you for withholding information that you've only recently revealed when you've been drinking. No one should feel obligated to talk about things that they'd prefer to remain unspoken. Now that the cat's out of the bag, there are clearly stark differences between the picture you initially painted and what in your life has brought you to where you are to today.

As in your younger days, you have all the external things, the trappings of success that tell us we should be much happier than we are by virtue of having them. They are, instead, perhaps a dismal reminder of the unhappiness of an earlier time, the things that "everybody would want," that only left you feeling alone and frightened. The past is always alive in the present; it's who we are. What we do with it makes the difference. So it only makes sense that you'd search for a partner who'd bring some relief to your inner turmoil. And it only makes sense that you'd feel like a "hopeless case," given that you seem to be repeating an unpleasant past in the present. But the booze, as ever, only makes things worse.

The cutting edge for you seems to be to work through your earlier conflicts, to learn to have healthier emotional experiences with the people in your life, and to find and then work with the courage to become who you are. But none of this can ever happen while you're drinking, or while you're in a state of fragile abstinence that relies on your wife's supervision in order keep it from falling from the mantle.

There is, after all, value in all threads you've been throwing up here the past week. You get to look back and see, under your own name, the stuff that makes you feel crazy, that isn't quite right in your life, that keep you drunk with periods of hold-your-breath abstinence until your wife is again not around. Our behaviors while we're drinking may not always reflect who we truly are, but our nightmares are more often than not grounded in what we've done and what we've been in the past.

As is, or as has been true of so many of us, your past continues to haunt your present. You've got a great opportunity here to set things right in your life. Most of us have a great deal of difficulty in finding our way to confront our fears, so we continue to drink instead, celebrating sometimes brief, sometimes longer stretches of sobriety, as if days and months without a drink will take care of everything.

Even if you survive this latest binge, you'd be doing yourself a tremendous favor by getting yourself into detox (if still needed), and then to inpatient rehab. And yes, therapy. At least make a solid plan to deal with what's killing you inside.