Darin this is a fascinating post. If you stick with sobriety you will have fast forwarded in a week what took me probably almost ten years to get.
It started, for me, with a curiosity about whether I had a problem. Like you, I drank 360/365 days a year. In retrospect, the fact that I managed to actually remember the five days (one year it was two and another none, another closer to ten) I didn’t drink should have been telling but I didn’t know what the alcoholic voice was yet (called AV here). So I took the AA questionnaire. The first time I wasn’t terribly honest. I actually changed some answers and resubmitted, then changed more. Went outside, had a smoke, poured another glass of wine, and took it again. I’m not kidding. I remember that so well. When my computer was on the website the next day, I closed the page and deleted my browser history. That was in 2009.
I took the test again, in the same way, in 2010. In 2011, I took it and was honest. That was the year when in January, I had a friend who was in AA, and after we hung out and he went home, I pulled the wine that usually lived on my counter out from it’s hiding place behind the pots and pans, and got going.
I started to realize I wasn’t drinking normally. The test made me very upset. I did know, from my exposure to AA and a family member who had raised me who was an addictions counselor, that there really is only one choice when you get those answers wrong. It *might* not be AA, but it definitely means total abstinence. That’s what led me here initially.
I was angry inside. How could I socialize? How could I go to bars? How could I sleep? How could I enjoy sex? How could I write? How could I be myself? I’m in some kind of purgatory. I’m not like the people in AA, or the people on the SR forums. I’m not that far gone.
I quit for a few weeks and started posting here.
Then a friend from work wanted to go out for margaritas. I’d just bought a new car, after crashing my old one three weeks before (not alcohol related, which was a crapshoot) -which was what made me sign up here, oddly enough. She said I was being too hard on myself and I should stop second guessing myself. Well she was right but it wasn’t in regards to booze. I vanished from the forums for awhile, because I wasn’t like everyone here, I was just being hard on myself.
Rinse and repeat, over five years, with varying stages of realization intermingledwith “sobriety” attempts and a whole lot of moderation.
What is it to moderate? You choose the terms, choose when to change them, allow flexibility.... I “moderated” for that whole five years. Shout out to @lessgravity for his amazing moderation post. Moderation is alcoholic drinking, period, end of story. Non alcoholics don’t moderate. They just don’t really drink a lot.
Inherent in the word moderation is the need to control something. You don’t need to control something that isn’t or won’t be a problem.
In 2012 I met some friends who introduced me to shamelessly drinking in the morning - brunch! It felt so cosmopolitan. It was another check mark on that old test, but I was moderating and this is brunch - it’s normal, and something people with slightly over average incomes just do.
When I drank with pneumonia, I was willing the sickness away! If you moderately act like you’re not gravely ill, which includes a modest glass of wine (not multiple, just one, or two, or two and a splash) you’re willing it away. When I felt bad the next day, my friends recommended whiskey instead. It kills the germs. God they were smart. It’s so much better to think outside the box than be rigid like those weird online forum people.
I came back a few times. Other times I tried to stop without a plan, and without coming here, but it was no fun going to the bar and not drinking. Going to (voluntary) work events and not drinking. Flying and not drinking. Visiting family and not drinking. Impossible.
It took a long time for me to accept the truth. Ignoring it doesn’t make it go away. Wishing it wasn’t true doesn’t make it go away. Moderating doesn’t make it go away. My gf would stop drinking and go to pour her beer out. What blasphemy is that?! Give it to me, crazy woman!
What a waste of time. The longer I delayed the worse I got. Maybe I wouldn’t be dead, maybe I wouldn’t be homeless, but I wouldn’t be the happier and healthier person I am now. Ending my relationship with alcohol was very hard. When I think about it, I was grieving during that period of time 2009-2016. It’s really hard: coming to terms, stopping, staying stopped, learning to live, getting to know my actual self and accepting, then loving and forgiving my actual self. But it happens faster than you think at the time, yet, the beginning feels like forever. I drank alcoholically for at least a dozen or so years, and when you match that up to two years sober now, two years is a very short period of time. I’m a math person so these types of analyses and logic work for my brain.
It’s fascinating to see that you came in a few days ago with the same idea I had and have come to a place that took me two years to get to. I hope you skip my next five years and stop now. I will never get that time back; I hope you can take it. I hope you stay stopped. Dumping it down the drain was a very good move. Don’t buy more, stay away from the socializing for awhile, post here, and ask for help. This place is an invaluable resource.
In Gratitude
bexxed
PS: I quit scary daily cocaine use cold turkey on the first try, too, also a long time ago.