Originally Posted by newrylinus

Thank you Soberhoops. This is encouraging to hear. I very much want to rid myself of the "trainwreck/napalm self" but even at only 7 days I can appreciate his value. Not drinking feels like I have no selves now. I just feel incredibly empty and even more like I am just going through the motions than usual. I am doing good deeds for others and following the rules I have set for myself and that feels good on some mental levels. But at the surface, in my body and brain and gut, all I feel is incredible exhaustion and a desire to do something, anything, to change that feeling. I am not going to drink today but I want to and there is a part of me that is very sad in the knowledge that no relief is coming. I know I will need to find something to genuinely look forward to at some point to replace alcohol but now it is hard to see what that might be.

Thank you for your encouragement.

Originally Posted by newrylinus

Hello everyone. I am new to this site although not to the idea of curtailing my drinking. I have been reading some of the entries and responses in this forum over the last couple of days and have been moved by the outpouring of genuine heartfelt support. I’d like to take a moment to honestly introduce myself and talk about my drinking in a way I never have before. This is a first for me. I have never been to a meeting or openly discussed my drinking with others who share the affliction. I have failed many times to quit drinking but I think I always knew that those attempts were half-hearted. I am hopeful that by sharing fully I can force it to sink in how real and dire my problem is and how essential it is that I do not fail this time.
I am a 40+ single man. I have been drinking heavily since my late teens. At first I drank purely for the joy of experimentation and pleasure and mostly with others. Sure, sometimes I drank for the relief it gave me from both emotional and physical pain but mostly it was just to change the way I felt. I was amazed at how quickly and easily it transformed me from feeling tired or ordinary or bored or unstimulated or all-around uncreative into someone a lot more intuitive, imaginative and entertaining. At how it seemed to completely remove barriers to understanding, both in myself and in matters of the world. At how it seemed to strip away obstacles to real raw-bone feeling. Drinking was something that I viewed as a way in to who I was. There was no doubt that I felt my more authentic, honest and likeable self was the self with a few drinks in it.

In my early twenties I got into a very major car accident. (It was not drinking-related and I was not the driver.) I was lucky to survive. I needed to learn to walk again from scratch and was in a lot of pain. At this time, for the first time, I drank for relief. Again I was amazed at how effective it was. Drinking stopped the pain and still remained an outlet for creativity and intuition. For the first time drinking started to impact my daytime hours. I showed up in public very hungover frequently but was excellent at disguising it and no one noticed. From that time forward I drank more or less every day, often in very high quantities. This is also the time I first truly discovered bourbon. Bourbon was like the magic alcohol. The best for the mind, the best for the body. It has been, by far, the most consistent thing in my life ever since.

Between then and age 30 I continued to explore who I was personally and professionally and had many setbacks. During this period the drinking also became a salve for personal disappointment and failure and overall anger with the world. This was also the period where I (unwittingly at the time) more or less created three separate and very distinct drinking profiles. With others I (for the most part) drank modestly and responsibly. I rarely got drunk in those situations or behaved inappropriately. With a few rare drinking friends (most of whom did not live where I did and I only saw on special, infrequent occasions) I continued to drink heavily. But these times were a lot of fun and I wouldn’t have traded them for anything. I also drank very heavily with the one serious girlfriend I had for a few years during this period, who also, perhaps because of me, became/was a serious drinker. I openly searched for additional local drinking companions I could trust and who got the same energetic and irreverent highs I did from drinking but they were nearly impossible to find. So instead, my drinking became primarily a solitary pursuit. I drank every day immediately upon getting home from work and often did not stop until I went to sleep. I continued to feel awful in the mornings and felt my overall health declining but did not make adjustments. It was during this period that drinking very excessively became absolutely normal.

Around 30 I understood my drinking was at least a minor problem but only saw it as a symptom of a much larger sense of emptiness, aimlessness and purposelessness in my life. I abruptly quit my job (immediately after receiving a major promotion) and devoted the bulk of my time to work as a volunteer for a nonprofit organization. When I was 31 my mother, who was still quite young, developed a fatal illness and wasted away, in terrible pain and without any dignity, very fast. The cruelty of the disease was shocking and it revitalized my sense of the fact that world was an unfair place with endless bad variables lurking, ceaselessly threatening to ruin even the not-so-great status quo. I spent the next two years feeling an acute sense of displacement and anger both personally and professionally, never feeling I was where I should be or doing what I should have been doing. During this period, drinking, for the first time, became almost entirely a way out of life, a way to not feel, to not engage with others or the world. It was my self-medication in a lonely world of horrors. I knew I was drinking too much and did not care. It was one of the few truly good and comforting things in an increasingly unpredictable and terrifying world.

After my mother passed away, I became a hard-boiled realist. I decided to accept that world as it was on its merits rather than continuing to search for the world I wanted. I built up a brand new life from scratch. In a relatively short period of time I built myself a brand new career and moved far up the ladder. I was extremely surprised at the speed of my ascent (I previously had zero “professional” ambition and had always lived hand-to-mouth) and it only encouraged my sense of unspiritual realism. I got little joy from the work and it often left me feeling creatively and emotionally stunted. I needed to behave in a very professional false way that more or less required I develop a fake personality. Drinking was the reward when I returned home, the tonic that helped strip away the false self and get me back in touch with the “real” one. Drinking was now the only consistent, reliable pleasure I had left in my life. The things other people liked just did not appeal to me and I felt increasingly strange and uncomfortable in most non-work social situations. The three drinking selves continued to grow stronger. I drank very little with those I did not know extremely well. I drank sometimes with great pleasure with those I did. And I drink more and more excessively by myself, openly counting hours until I could get home and have the first drink and take a deep, welcome breath of my own genuine air.

Over the next 8-10 years my body grew less and less tolerant of the damage I was doing to it. I had less and less energy to engage with others. My world became divided neatly in two – the sober professional caring easygoing humorous self I was with others in the workplace and then the depressed bewildered angry scared and withdrawn person I was alone. Over the last five years I have spent less and less time with others. I have stopped even trying to date. My life is divided into 4 cycles. I work. I drink (and now often eat) excessively. I try as hard as I can to sleep. I drink lots of coffee in the morning and count the hours until I can come home again. My career has flourished. Other than a few old friends (none of whom live within hours of where I do) no one could possibly guess I have a problem. Drinking has made me very good at keeping secrets. I truly have a double-life.

My father, with whom I had been extremely close, passed away unexpectedly about a year ago and that brought on a new cycle of drinking that for the first time truly scared me. I drank so much upon coming home from work I would often pass out within a few hours. Then wake up a few hours later and drink water until I went to to work in the morning, exhausted beyond belief. I have received many warning signs over this year. A cancer scare. Other various one-off health issues that are likely at least partially the result of my drinking. The failed or seriously declining health of others I know. In spite of all of this I have not stopped drinking more than a few days at a time. Once I get to 3 or 4 days and my mind is truly, completely sober, life becomes intolerable. The intense and serious vow on day one seems naïve on day 4. Even the shame does not have the capacity to stop me once that happens. If it was not so ordinary an occurrence I would be shocked by the acceptance of this shame. Sometimes I have a clear moment at the tail end of a particularly serious binge and just do not recognize how I could have lost this much control over my life. And how I can have so much control and self-restraint and self-will in the professional world and absolutely none on my own. I can act out any role to the letter but I still do not know how to be myself without several drinks in me or on the way.

Drinking has been my best friend for a long time and I have known for awhile now that I didn’t really want to give it up. But I know now that I can’t go on this way much longer or I am going to destroy myself, as well as any hope for a real life that includes other people and the possibility for happy variables to occur. It is amazing how cliché this all is; how cliché I have become that I can write this paragraph and mean it seriously.

Today my house is alcohol-free. I have put all my shot glasses in a box. I ordered 3 books on recovery. I have set up an Excel spreadsheet to track my daily alcohol consumption, level of craving and identify possible triggers. I have signed up for this site and written this letter. I want to believe I am serious about changing my life this time but just do not have it within me to really believe myself any more.

This self is genuine. What worries me is what happens when he disappears and the other self, the one overcome with despair and boredom and the need for escape reappears after a long stressful unrewarding day in the workplace. That self is powerful and has not yet proven he can be controlled.

I am going to do my best to be strong and also humble. To be consistent in my behavior. To try and create new healthy patterns that inspire hope and possibility instead of pessimism and indifference. To be a good person to other people wherever I can. To aggressively seek new avenues for hope. To become less reactive to disappointment. To trust others and in the future at least a little bit. To slowly, steadily, build a path to a new sober life.

Thank you for listening. I wish you all well in your own equally arduous journeys.