Alcohol became my refuge from the violent maelstrom of anxiety and confusion that inevitably resulted from my trying to make sense of things. I had been through so many different attempts with therapy and treatment…rehabilitation always seemed to boil down to somehow exercising my own ability to believe that I was worth something, and to choose to be motivated by the excitement of what life could become. It always seemed like there must be a piece missing, though, and so I would wind up over and over again at the same dead end of what was, for all intents and purposes, an absolute inability on my part to actually get a firm grip on that kind of inspiration. It would spring up suddenly, now and again, and then slip right through my fingers somehow, leaving me powerless to believe I could be anything other than an absolute failure.
I played it off like this wasn’t happening. Maybe I even convinced others. I could never convince myself, though. Inside, I was always little else other than absolutely certain I would soon end up fully and finally ruined. It was like a broken record that just wouldn’t go away, no matter how many other versions of reality I could manage to superimpose on top of it.
Alcohol offered an especially ironic solution to this particular kind of hell; it would bring me to a place where I felt like I could actually believe in myself, believe I was worth something – even if only for a few hours…and it would do this while simultaneously accelerating a breed of spiritual and psychological degeneration that ultimately served only to cripple and reduce my ability to lay hold of any and all personal potential. Drunkenness would greatly amplify the positivity of the lens through which I saw the past, present, and future, but it did so while eating away at parts of my soul, and the ritual of forever cycling into the state of inebriation and back again (the habitual chasing of instant euphoria) itself likewise ate away at my various mental strengths, and so eroded the probabilities of my ever maturing into a place of character and discipline necessary to build that big, happy, positive future that I would spend those hours gazing at, all stupid eyed and giddy faced.
I knew full well that it was doing this to me, robbing me in this way, and yet I continued, always telling myself that this would be the last time, or at least one of the last few times. As soon as the bottle ran out, I would quit, and then I would start making necessary strides. Fellow addicts will be reading this nodding their heads. It’s a pattern we know only too well, all of us…
