He cannot picture life without alcohol. Some day he will be unable to imagine life either with alcohol or without it. Then he will know loneliness such as few do. He will be at the jumping-off place. He will wish for the end. ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS, p.152
Reading the big book was one of the most profound and strange experiences of my life: I was reading a biography, a perfect description, of my own brain. This passage in particular both hurt and soothed me, being so familiar.
It is a point of complete insanity, and I’ve never found anybody but an alcoholic who gets it.
My first year sober was very bleary, often weepy, so full of change that I never really knew up from down but just kept going forward. It was only at about the year point where I realized I no longer wanted to die. The profundity of THAT continues to rattle me. I still have thoughts of drinking, and accept that I maybe always will. But I don’t want to die any longer. And I don’t have to drink any longer.
Only alcoholics, too, really understand how a thing like that can completely turn you to a laughing, singing idiot all by yourself walking the dog at night.
Cheers, all. It’s so cold out the stars actually cut. One of them was falling. Call it a wish, or luck, or cosmology. I think I’ll just call it gratitude.
My reality at a year sober is a little different, but comes from the same place.
I was sitting at dinner with friends and said, with complete honesty and surprise, that I felt happy. And that I often did. I never thought I’d be happy again, ever. That place of sorrow had reached so far in to myself that I was just resigned to always being sad. Of course, for most of the time I’ve been so sad I drank to not feel that, to gloss over it, to pretend it wasn’t so. But when I stopped drinking and saw it for real, I just accepted it as forever. I would be sad forever.
In the last month or so something changed, shifted.
I can be happy. Really happy.
And I don’t have to drink.
I call that gratitude too.