I recall hearing a while back that there is a new word, frenemy, an enemy that poses as a friend while secretly undermining. I was just thinking that it is a pretty good description of what alcohol was for me. When I started drinking, it seemed like a new found friend and something close to a panacea. It took away the dis-ease I'd felt all my life, making me comfortable with others, myself and situations. It took away my fear and anxiety and shrank mountains back into the molehills they really were. It changed my perception of reality from a paranoid and negative version to seeing the bright side of reality, and stoked my sarcastic, sick sense of humor to find the real negatives of life amusing. Even then, there were some unfortunate side effects but they seemed of little consequence then. Over time my drinking became more of a problem than a solution, but, no matter how things got, drinking made is all seem bearable, becoming the only part of my life that gave me any real satisfaction. Alcohol helped with hangovers and the nervous shaking that, which surprisingly ceased to be problem after I stopped drinking. I recall a saying that, "The only ways to avoid hangovers are to stay sober or stay drunk." and thought the latter was the obvious choice. My embarassments, including wet beds, blackouts and things I did while drunk, seemed funny and quite excusable after having a few drinks. Even after getting to AA, it took me a while to start thinking of alcohol as the enemy, and then a bit longer to work it out that alcohol is only a symptom, with my real enemy being alcoholism. I suppose that was always an frenemy, but, at the time, it was just the way I was, and something that resurfaced when I stopped treating it with alcohol, I felt for a while that I'd been stricken with some sort of mental illness, having mostly forgotten what I was like before I started drinking. The 12 Steps can't make anyone a better drinker, although I guess I did learn in meetings that closing one eye while driving reduced the number of lines in the middle of the road. But it can make living sober a lot better. When I got to AA, sometimes a chairman would close a meeting with, "You can leave this room and never need to drink again." That seemed like a curse when I first heard it, and hoped it wouldn't happen to me, because I thought about not being able to turn to the only source of relief I knew, and not about no longer needing relief. I have heard that, when that is used in meetings in Sydney now they say, "You can leave this room and never need to drink again, AND BE HAPPY." |