lessgravity

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.

tekink

Well said. It was around the four month mark for me when I suddenly realized I had no idea who the man I grew into was because I'd been sauced since I was 19.

I had literally no idea, it was kind of terrifying.

Now I'm finding out being sober is actually enjoyable. It took me a while to adjust, pretty much everything in life triggered my "grab-a-drink reflex" and that was hard to deal with for a while.

I never gave being sober a chance a single time since my first college bender back at the turn of the 1990s. No wonder the idea is kind of scary, it's completely new!

Congrats on breaking 100 days!

Ladysadie

No Less, no one is coming to save you/me/us. But you saved yourself, which is the key here in your message. That is pretty awesome. Thanks for sharing your thoughts with us.

Hawkeye13

I think for me one of my biggest regrets was not giving even close to 100% in anything in my life.

The drinking was a kind of escape to no pressure land, and I could blame my failure to live up to my potential on the drink and all the dysfunction I scripted as the causes.

It is a tragic dynamic, and as you point out, you become a slave to the cycle sometimes without a true self-Self awareness that you've lost your agency.

Sounds like you like this Self you've found lg.
We like him too

Dee74

Discovering the real me again was one of the joys of my recovery less

D

rascalwhiteoak

This is spot-on. I'm also learning that the self I spent years trying to avoid is actually an okay self to be with.

(Also, I gotta say that "No one is coming to save me" would make a pretty epic tattoo )