JeffreyAK

I didn't want to stop, either, not until the very end when I was utterly miserable and had been drunk non-stop for several weeks. Bills piled, not working and on disability, on the verge of losing everything good in life and, no doubt, life itself. It took me going that far down the hole before I understood that there was no bottom other than the grave, and dammit I was going to climb up no matter how much hell I had to go through to get out. I knew deep down, even through the alcohol haze, that this was it, my last chance before I slipped too far down the hole to ever get out again. It would have been easier to just stay drunk and wash it all from my mind, but I knew that would amount to suicide.

Not everyone has to go that far down the hole before they climb back out and stay out, and I hope you don't. But many people, like me, are so stubborn that they just won't listen to other folks and won't take the action necessary to get out of the hole, until they are so far down that it becomes a heroic effort to climb out.