Sunday, March 1, 2015

"Are you sure you're an alcoholic?"

   "Are you sure you're an alcoholic?"
   I was recently asked this question after mentioning to an acquaintance that I was approaching my 32-year anniversary of sobriety.
   My first response? I laughed. After a moment, I asked, "Was that a serious question?" Turned out, it was.
   When I am surprised by someone's question, or someone's response, I typically swallow my first reaction, my emotional one. It's an almost unconscious response, and is probably a fear-based defense mechanism left over from my past. My first reaction simmers in my unconscious, then bubbles to the surface a few days later, and I assemble the words I wish I'd said.
   So on that day all I said was yes, I am certain that I am an alcoholic. I explained that I had had an immediate, visceral response to alcohol the first time I caught that liberating, loosening feeling of a light buzz. I explained that I always drank to get drunk, and that even when getting drunk stopped equaling a good time and became a series of frightening incidents of self-destruction, I was unable to stop. And if my own experience wasn't evidence enough, I had been evaluated by an addictions counselor.
   I wish I had spoken more strongly. I wish I had asked, "Are you asking me that because you don't believe I would be capable of staying sober if I were truly addicted?" I wish I had asked, "Why do you think you have the right to question my own self-knowledge?" I know who I am. I know what I am. And I know how I got here.
   I drank heavily - alcoholically - for four years. I experienced my first blackout the second time I drank. By the time I attended my first 12 Step meeting, two months before my 22nd birthday, I had humiliated myself in several local bars, experienced countless blackouts, missed I don't know how many hours of college classes because I'd start drinking at lunch and lose the rest of the day, acted out sexually in a manner my sober self would never be capable or desirous of, and was battling suicidal impulses every time I got drunk.
   Those were the drinking years.
   Sobriety has not eliminated the impulse to drink. I have teetered at the edge of relapse several times in the past 32 years. It's a horrible feeling, desperately wanting - needing - to drink, and knowing that doing so will tear your rebuilt life to shreds. What kept me sober in those tormenting moments was my 12 Step practices, music that soothed and buoyed me, my supportive circle of recovering women, and my spiritual life. When those thoughts flit through my mind, which they rarely have in recent years, I am able to brush them aside with an ease achieved only by rigorous practice of my recovery principles.
   Am I sure I'm an alcoholic? Despite all evidence, I have actually asked that question of myself. An insidious voice in my head will whisper, "Come on, you were just a kid out partying! You're an adult now. Maybe you can have a beer or two..."
   I can definitely have a beer or two. The problem is, there will be a third. And a fourth. And so on, until my money is gone and I am a laughing, weeping, vomiting, intoxicated embarrassment. It has always been so and will always be. I cannot separate drinking from drunk. Imagining myself having being satisfied with a social drink or two is like trying to imagine myself leaping from the roof of my house and taking flight. Drinking is not something to do; drinking is the passageway to drunk.
   My sober life today is bigger than anything I could have imagined 32 years ago when I was a timid, desperate newcomer. Alcohol would have killed me; admitting to alcoholism saved my life.
   Am I sure I'm an alcoholic? Dead sure. And grateful beyond measure.