Tailai - My Story
Three years ago my long time doctor left me a voice mail. My blood work was back & he needed to speak with me right away. He sounded alarmed. Turns out my liver enzymes were way, way out of bounds. We talked & I was honest with him. I was drinking a quart of vodka a day, beginning first thing in the morning & continuing all day, every day. As a self employed accountant I was able to function & get my work done but my hands were shaking & I generally felt sick & looked awful. He referred me to an addiction psychiatrist & I was diagnosed with severe alcohol dependence & severe alcohol withdrawal. He supervised a safe detox, for which I am forever grateful, & we started weekly therapy sessions & daily medication for anxiety & depression. Let me stop here & say that different things work for different people at different times & I know from reading here that medication & therapy can be a big part of sobriety. But this was not working for me. The medications flattened me out, which I hated. We talked, but never connected. I did stop drinking for a couple of stretches which would end when I thought I could moderate even though he said I would have to be the one in a million. I wasn’t adhering to his treatment. Something was missing. I didn’t have the first ingredient in my recovery - I didn’t have the belief that I could do it & the fact that I didn’t like this guy wasn’t helping. After about a year and a half I stopped seeing the psychiatrist.
About this time I did a google search for “sober” & stumbled onto this site. It is not an overstatement to say that it saved my life. I had never done anything like this. At first I just read the recovery stories, sometimes the same one over & over. I had no idea why. A few months later I posted for the first time. I connected. The generosity of the heartfelt sharing, the wisdom, the encouragement, gave me the belief. I could live a better life without drinking. I could do it. I used what I learned here to form a plan, a daily routine. Exercising first thing in the morning, which has been critical to my recovery, practicing daily gratitude, & eliminating negative thinking, adjusting & resetting to the inevitable downturns & disappointments with gratitude & positive energy. I wanted to post on this day of course to brag, but also to honor the SR community of which I have become a small part.