I'd blog, but then I'd miss people's responses.
While we're drinking, and even before we start, many of us have trained ourselves to make a big deal of all the terrible things that will happen to us, and what we'll feel around certain people, places and things. And with good reason. A good day at work for me meant I wasn't fired. A good day at home was when my keys still fit the locks on the front door. And not being dead meant I was okay, but only some of the time.
I took most things to the extreme; everything was life-or-death. Life consisted of the continued availability of alcohol and my ability to drink it, and death projected as living life without booze. I was, in a very pitiable way, the center of the Universe, my brown paper bag filled with delusional aspirations and a fractured view of what was and what was not real. No one bounces back from that kind of existence with either speed or grace. And I've since noticed that coming back from the dead is not an everyday occurrence.
And so it remains in early sobriety. I continue to seek validation from the outside, ignoring screams of protest from within. Negative attention is better than none at all. I am always in the process of what I'll eventually be, if only people would just notice. "Hey! I'm supposed to be a famous actor! A published writer! A prodigious scientist! A millionaire! A rock star! A winner of the Nobel Peace Prize! You just have to know me better to know this! You can even ask my friends, down at the bar!"
I usually get in trouble when I imagine that there's a point to my existence. But there isn't, so I'd beat get to work. One of the best things about my getting sober was that no one seemed to care. Took the pressure off and brought my ego down to a more manageable size. Also helped me to learn something that I always knew but never accepted: If I want to do great things, no mater how big or small the scale, then I neede to find something that I loved doing and then stick with it. That I essentially needed to work very hard to get where I wanted to be, regardless of who did and who didn't care, and with much less concern for the outcome of my efforts than previously.
One of the more exquisite moments of Existence is the realization that the Universe, in unequal measures of both terror and a sense of freedom,, is as indifferent to our suffering as it is to our achievements. There are consequences for everything we do, and we influence people more than we know, and that in this way, knowing is never as valuable as believing. Even better is to learn that this is enough to keep on going.