Hi
 

Hi everyone, hope you had a good weekend (and are probably having a good sleep now at least here in Eastern time).

I've been bouncing in and out of sobriety lately, I used to be Backbeat on here but I changed my name (because I'm neurotic basically). Today I'm on day 3.

The biggest hurdle I've been trying to climb has been the fact that I feel like I'm not a bad enough drinker to deserve the help and support of AA (which is my chosen path to sobriety). I go to a meeting and then just drop the whole thing. So I decided to write my story out as a blog post. It's currently still just a draft for now, taking me some time to write, but wow has that been an eye opener. It's making me realize that my problem is much, much bigger than how much I drink lately. It's my whole past and my life. It's how I grew up, it's how I cope, it's all these bad mechanisms I have in place that I accumulated over time. It's my self esteem, it's how lousy things happened to me growing up because the people who were supposed to take care of me and parent me were too preoccupied with alcohol and other substances, and also how I learned to be too preoccupied with the same things to care for myself. It's about how I'm dishonest, how I always have an excuse for everything, because I can't keep up with the world and everyday obligations to care for even just me, because now I'm too preoccupied with whatever feel-good thing I have going on at the moment.

So, a very worthwhile thing to do, I'm finding out, is to write out my story. It's not about whether I drank four beers or twelve beers and three bourbons last Tuesday and whether or not I made it to work. It is about that, but that's the end result of a lot of things put in motion years before on a daily basis. There's a much bigger picture full of so much dysfunction and hurting and frustration and pain and I didn't realize that was all part of the package until I started writing.

That's it. I hope that helps somebody. Have a good night all. Sweet dreams.

Hi Jackie

I could always find someone worse than me. I was a quiet, solitary drunk, who considered his neighbours, never got in legal trouble or got a DUI - but I was drinking all day everyday.

I nearly died.

Guys I knew who didn't drink as much as me actually did die.

None of us really know when we might push things too far.

Alcoholism is not a competitive sport. The only thing that really matters is you have a problem and you want to fix it.


You're doing yourself a great favour to fix things sooner rather than later :)

D