102 days - the chance to find out who you are...
So I am 102 days sober this morning. I have never been this sober in my life. Takes work, so many, many failures, trips and falls. lt took finally figuring out a way to give myself a chance to live a life worth living.
In the end the worst part about giving in to the addiction to alcohol, for me, was the pain that my psyche or soul went through. Truth is that you don't have to get sober. You can get away with being a drunk. I don't even mean this facetiously. You really can live an entire life drunk, as many of us have seen or even have done. Of course you havd to endure the shame, and the pathetic repetitious madness. You have to be willing to sacrifice everything of value. But you can do it. And like most of us, I made the necessary sacrifices to keep drinking.
What I've come to realize I was really sacrificing more than anything was my Self, with a capital S. I've come to realize that I don't even know who I am, how could I? All of my adult life was a vacillation between being wasted, recovering from being wasted and then lying, cheating, and conniving to get wasted again. Every event was an impediment to my ability to remain completely wasted. My Self was being sacrificed over and over again order to get drunk. So who am I really? Yes, I have the trappings of a moderately successful man in his early forties - I have a professional job, I have a beautiful family, I live in a big American city, I even got myself a haircut last week. But the psyche knew over all these years that it was being lied to, cheated, and denied. I think the pain expressed on these boards and in all the posts on SR has more to do with the pain that we put our psyches through than anything the physical withdrawal from alcohol can do to us. Doctors can anesthetize the pain, even if the physical damage of being a drunk is horrid and can kill you. But the true damage I believe is done the psyche.
In this very finite time we have on earth, only by giving up alcohol, can we give to our Selves the chance to be free to find out who we really are and might become.
I'm thankful to finally have given my self that chance.
No one is coming to save me.