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NYT article - worth a read

Old 01-06-2009, 06:28 AM
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NYT article - worth a read

January 5, 2009, 9:00 pm
The Give and the Take
By Jim Atkinson
I drank booze for a very long time, and I drank quite a lot of it. Interesting, but I never truly thought about why until I quit 16 years ago. There must have been reasons. But what were they?

This is no idle inquiry, since, after a decade and a half of very sober investigation of the neurochemical, sociological and spiritual reasons for both my addiction and recovery, the only way I can get my head around all that is to consider what booze gave me, what it took away and how the balance of power changed.

In my early days of drinking, alcohol gave me something that nothing else in my life — not relationships, not career — could. “It made the whole world come into focus,” a fellow addict once told me of her first drink. Others have cited “peace” and even “peace of mind” from the bottle. Some even describe their first drink as a mystical and spiritual experience. Myself, I always felt that alcohol was the one thing that made me feel safe. And that gave me a particular kind of energy, a fortitude, really. I was more willing to stand up for myself and to take creative risks when I was packing a certain amount of alcohol in me.

I never drank to be the life of the party or to feel sexier and smarter. I was drinking to haul my ego up from its ordinary state of funk to feel “normal.” In this sense, I came to know alcohol as a form of self-medication. Once medicated, I felt, I could then pursue my chosen craft of writing with more confidence, verve and stamina. And it seemed to work.

As I wrote in my first post, I achieved a measure of success in my 20’s and 30’s as a magazine writer and as an author of two books — one of them , “The View from Nowhere,” a travelogue of the best hard drinking saloons in the nation. The way I figured it at the time, maybe some guys had to worry about their reckless drinking. Mine had gotten me a fat book contract and my 15 minutes of fame.

All of this gave booze the aura of a magic potion to me. I wasn’t just that I happened to like how it made me feel — most anyone who has a drink will attest to that. I believed that a certain modicum of it was needed — like food, water or oxygen — for me to lead a happy and successful life. In retrospect, I knew that I was over-drinking by the time I was 30. But I figured that I was a “high performance” alcoholic — an interesting oxymoron, if there ever was one — and honestly couldn’t imagine life without the stuff.

As time went on, this became more or less literally true. I can remember a day when a bartender who’d served me unknown thousands of gallons of booze over the years observed that, “You know, when you walk in, it’s like you’re a zombie until about the third drink. Then, all of sudden, your eyes clear up and you come to life. Amazing!”

The sad thing is, I knew exactly what he meant.

In time, my relationships with loved ones, especially my wife, my career, my health — all began to spiral down in a death dive. Even though I knew booze was the culprit, I just ordered another because that’s what I did when I had a problem: I drank. At the root of this twisted thinking was the absurd belief that I’d just lost my touch when it came to the bottle, misplaced my ability to find that “sweet spot” of inebriation where there’s a perfect balance between disinhibition and control, euphoria and calm. I just needed to get my swing back.

As with a marriage gone sour, I didn’t want to admit that my relationship with booze was suddenly doing me more harm than good. And like a battered spouse, I didn’t know whom else to be with.

If I’d been clear-headed enough to take stock, I could have seen what was going on very clearly: Feeling “normal” was requiring progressively larger amounts of the stuff. And while it had become a kind of lifeblood to me, in the real world, alcohol was still basically just a poison (it’s what we put on a wound to kill invading bacteria, one of the most effective destroyers of human tissue known to biochemistry). The body and mind and spirit could handle a bit of it, even on a regular basis. But I was literally and figuratively drowning myself in it. While once it had given me things that nothing else could, now it was taking away the two things everyone needs to lead a life that even has a chance of being complete: my dignity and my good health.

In retrospect, like many drunks, I had reached a stage with alcohol where I was paralyzed, frozen in time, stuck in a tiny crevasse between what had been my best friend and what had become my worst enemy. I needed to find a true bottom before I could begin to regain control of my life.

It finally came one night in February, 1993, when I found myself in a drunk tank at the county jail with a bunch of guys you really wouldn’t want to meet, wondering how I’d wound up there.

I entered treatment a week after I hit bottom, on February 11, 1993. Alcohol had finally crowded me into a corner from which there were only two escapes — sobriety or death — but I didn’t really realize how literally true that was until my third day of treatment, when I noticed that a particular fellow patient was missing. When I inquired about the patient, who was an alcoholic and a heroin addict, I was told the patient had been taken to the hospital with a severe infection related to the drug and had subsequently died. “This business about this killing you is not just a slogan,” a therapist observed dryly.

At that moment, I finally grasped what the stakes were — what they’d always been. And while, at the time, I still wasn’t sure what all this sobriety business would entail, where it would lead me — whether, indeed, I could do it — I did know that I didn’t want to die. That turned out to be enough of an epiphany, I guess, because I haven’t had a drink since.


The tenth paragraph - about a 'marriage gone sour' really sums it up for me.
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Old 01-06-2009, 02:35 PM
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Man, he nailed that about 200 different ways !!! I'm going to print this one out!!! Thanks least!!!!
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Old 01-06-2009, 03:12 PM
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Brilliant least, thanks!
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Old 01-06-2009, 03:47 PM
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Thanks for sharing that Least!
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Old 01-06-2009, 03:48 PM
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So much he said was too familiar. Was sure others would find it also true. Any fuel to the sobriety fire!
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Old 01-06-2009, 03:54 PM
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For me it is amazing how so many of these stories sound like mine, but we each tell our own story and each person has their own struggles and when we share them it helps others, and ourselves. What an amazing thing to be able to share.
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Old 01-06-2009, 04:00 PM
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I love Jim Atkinson... I can relate to so much of that. Thanks for sharing!
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