If not getting what we want, if not always living the life we imagined we'd live, if feeling badly when we're around other people who seem to have been blessed with the things we'd like for ourselves but that we don't have is selfish or narcissistic, then most everyone on the planet is pathologically selfish with serious narcissistic traits. Why would you not mourn the possibility of not being able to raise your own children? Why would any of us not mourn the possibility of not having in our lives those things that are most important to us, or losing those things that are most meaningful for us? Without mourning, nothing gets accomplished, and only under the best of circumstances does everything remain the same.
I think sometimes that we overreach in our self-assessments about our alcoholic thinking and behavior. In some important ways, this can be healthier than downplaying our distorted thinking and our destructive behaviors. What you're feeling, what you're putting yourself through, only demonstrates that you have a conscience, one that is currently overactive in its harsh judgments about who and what you are. I think it's also important to acknowledge that it would be helpful were you to not frame your health problems as some kind of punishment for the way that you lived your life when you were drinking. There are consequences involved in virtually every thing we do and in some of the ways that we think, but unwanted consequences are no more a punishment than are desired consequences some kind of reward. If this is the way the world worked, then everything in life would be just and fair.
There is a bigger picture or, rather, bigger pictures about life and what it means to be human, pictures that abandon traditional values of "right" and "wrong." None of us is born with an "objective" mind that drives our personalities, or that allows us to view things based on reason and good will alone. No one's heart was ever broken over the Pythagorean Theorem. That we are primarily, or even to a great degree, moved by objectivity and reason is just another fantasy that protects a fragile ego from turning on itself, a fantasy that provokes a great deal of bad faith and dishonesty in what we say and what we do.
I needed to let go of the delusional and irresolvable thinking that told me that I was a bad person because I was not in every instance happy about someone else's success, and not at every moment completely disappointed for them in their failures. Those are only small moments within a larger context, a context in which I don't hold onto those kinds of resentments as being as "real" or enduring as what my overall thinking and behavior tell me who and what I truly am. It's a difficult departure from received and popular wisdom but, for me, it's much closer to the reality that I know. And certainly a much healthier way of being in the world.
I take for granted that I'm not perfect. If I cannot or will not do this, then nothing at all of any personal significance will happen in my life. Or, at the very least, I will be unable to fully appreciate my experiences and my accomplishments. So I also accept that to attempt to make myself perfect is an expedition that will only end in painful failure, perhaps even lasting misery. I hurt when I fail at getting the things I want, and I'm not always gracious in my thinking when I see other people who want things that are similar to what I want and are able to bring those things into their lives. Again, this is, or, with work, becomes only a temporary situation and a glimpse, not into my selfishness as an individual, but one that refers to the human condition generally. If I allow myself to get stuck in those moments to the extent that they overcome other parts of my basic humanity and determine my way of being in the world, then the destruction only occurs within myself.
Consciousness itself is not exclusively a means to understanding things in the world, but a means for self-reflection that, when things go well, is neither overly punitive nor decidedly gratuitous. We need to separate the wheat from the chaff. And this is where it can become, and is for so many people, a burden. People who decline to look within themselves in order to avoid bringing up "bad things that are better left alone" live in bad faith, a way of lying to ourselves so as not to upset an apple cart that, though it appears to be on stable ground, is extremely fragile, ready to collapse at the slightest provocation, in seemingly small ways in our everyday lives and, ultimately, resulting in a personal state of being that is empty even of emptiness . "The unexamined life is not worth living."
It is possible to rework our way of thinking, our way of being in the world. It takes a lot of work, and it doesn't come cheaply. For me, there was no other way in terms of getting sober, building a better life, and living in my own skin.