onlythetruth

No, there's nothing wrong with the fact that you enjoy drinking. If I were to venture a guess, I'd say most of us have a bit (or even more than a bit!) of ambivalence about whether or not alcohol is a net negative or a net positive thing in our lives.

In case you are interested, SMART Recovery has a tool specifically to help people see where the balance lies. It's called a Cost Benefit Analysis, or CBA. VERY simple. All you do is grab a piece of paper. At the top, write "good" on one side and "bad" on the other. Draw a line down the middle of the page. Now, draw a line across the page. On the right hand side, above the line, write "short term" and below it, write "long term".

Now, in the "good" column, write down everything good about drinking--but put each thing next to the row indicating whether the good thing is a short term or long term thing. Do the same thing for the bad things. The key is to write it ALL down, everything you can think of, and put it in the right place.

Then you look at your sheet of paper and you can see....whatever it is you see. It can be very enlightening.

davaidavai

I used to think I was having fun binging, but now I'm not so sure of my perceptions in regards to this. I mean, I was a drunken boor, but I'm not even sure if I was ever really enjoying things on the level I thought I was. I was a lonely person who did not know how to connect with people. At times, I think I felt hints of connection while drinking. Then again, I felt the same hints while sober. I didn't often put myself in social situations where I wasn't scanning the room for the wine or the booze, measuring poors, wondering if there would be enough. I was immature and insecure and credulous, ready to believe a whole number of things.

This notion developed that booze was a way out of my shell, although strictly speaking, this mostly remained in theory. Where were the experiences? The group of drinking buddies? The hook ups? Outside of the dramatic, humiliating meltdowns it produced, it didn't really change anything socially.

I really enjoyed it though for the the 10 minute crack glow and the escape it produced. This idea of social possibilities was part of the escape. I would hide in the bottle and view the world at a distance. And so I drank and so I imagined social venues on the horizon, meaningful encounters or chance encounters. I looked forward to that, although strictly speaking in terms of numbers I don't think I met more people drunk than sober. A lot of the time, at my particular extremely liberal college, those keg parties were really anti-social functions where friends met friends only. I got drunk as a last resort, and then I got angry. I was trying to fix a watch (the watch being a complex social situation) with a hammer.

When it became a glaring aspect of dysfunction, I developed strategies for keeping it around as in 'drink slowly' or stick to wine or beer or only do it once a week. I became more introverted on it than off. I was not growing, not confronting myself and society. I was gutting out a life where the only certainty ever was failure. I believed in vision warped by my own insecurities, by pain. Alcohol and binge drinking was kind of like a condoment at this particular buffet of confusion.

I think my perception of booze those days, during college I guess, was extremely faith based and irrational. It has been so only until recently. Plato says: "For a man to conquer himself is the first and noblest of all victories."