Originally Posted by
Dee74 
Hi Incognition
I drank for 20 years and did other drugs for longer than that. I wanted to feel better immediately but from this side of the fence I can see how unrealistic that expectation was.
As for the ;'wasted years' - yeah I think everyone can identify with that - but I've done more in the last ten years sober than I did in the 20, maybe even 30 years before that.
There's nothing I can do about the time I've lost but my gravestone is not going to read 'he wasted 20 years'...I've done more important things since y'know?
If I can leave you with just one thought it would be that this is not the best it's gonna get - it gets a lot better
Don't lose heart
Thanks Dee. I really hope you're right. It's hard to be hopeful right now when I'm forgetting the simplest of things on a daily basis, but one of the reasons I signed up here was for support....and hope. I used to post on all sorts of message boards in the past before I started drinking, and the only ones I ever posted on when I got drunk were really bad, and I got banned from half of them.
I guess, in particular, this is hitting me really hard because this is the first medical problem that I've directly done to myself. I've had mental issues before, but none of those were really my fault. I just can't help beating myself up lately over this one, particularly because it's so severe and the consequences were directly caused by my actions. Add to that the guilt over what I could have been doing with those 6 years (which should have been the prime of my life) besides killing my brain and...well....the self-loathing is hard to stop some days