courage2

It's hard for me to be more specific in this medium. A couple of things I notice:

You rarely write in detail about the mental/emotional and interpersonal aspects of your own experiences with alcohol, drugs, and sobriety. I have a pretty good idea, I think, of what your drinking looked like -- feeling depressed in the a.m., getting coffee, feeling manic, thinking the only way to resolve that was with wine, drinking too much, vomiting, repeat -- is that about right? But, other than physical, you never write about the impact that had on your self or your interpersonal life. Do you think that because you were high-functioning, your drinking only caused you physical problems? I find that odd. Until the last year or so, my drinking didn't take much of a physical toll. But the mental, emotional, and interpersonal effects of it on me were profound, and I realized that practically as soon as I quit, and acknowledge it more and more all the time. Clearly there's an interaction between your depression and drinking, which I had as well, but most of the really bad things I experienced and did were not due to depression, they were due to my primary overriding relationship with alcohol and drugs.

Also, you don't seem interested in getting into the "why" of your more-or-less lifelong substance abuse problem. I don't think any of us can ever answer the "why". But I don't think I know anyone with good, relatively peaceful and longterm sobriety who hasn't grappled with the question over and over again, deeply. It isn't enough to say you were molested as a child and had an overdose. There are many people who can say exactly the same who are not living and using the way you have done. From those inputs, your current state is far from inevitable. Before I was 20, I'd been raped by multiple men and been addicted to and withdrawn from speed and daily use of tranquilizers. Knowing that tells me precisely NOTHING about why I became an addict and later an alcoholic.

I'm not expecting you to find answers, there are no answers, but I urge you to write, here, about these things. Perhaps you don't feel well enough yet, but pushing yourself to write here where you not only put your thoughts out but you'll get a variety of responses, and not all just hugs -- that may push you to feel better, faster. It helped me Maybe the Cow persona can't figure out a way to do that in the Cow voice, and it's protective that way, which is why you have it, and you want to keep it that way. Or -- and I hope this is the case -- maybe you're dealing with yourself in therapy, and just don't want this to be the place where you do that.

I respect your choices about what to post. I'd like to see you step up and engage and grapple with your own drunkenness and your own quit here, on this forum, but if you don't want to do that, I still like you.