Jekyll & Hyde

I have a few days left until I go into ******.
I don't worry so much about ******** itself as I do about what comes after.
I will have to cut a good number of people out of my life once I'm on the other side.

I've gone long periods without drinking, it's more the fear that I'll become lazy and slip and put myself in a situation and the cunning disease will convince me that I'm past it, that it can be controlled.....that it wants anything less than everything that is good in my life that remains.
It wants everything. I think of The Jungle by Upton Sinclair and its characterization of alcohol and the sinister hand clawing and clutching at the men in the meat packing industry and what begins as a drink with friend after work turns into a coping mechanism with the horrors of the grind of poverty.

I'm reminded of F. Scott Fitzgerald and his quote something along the lines of "First the man takes a drink, and then the drink takes the man".
I come from a long line of alcoholics and I shudder to think of how many relationships and how much money this addiction has cost me. I see myself at the edge of the precipice, standing alone, looking down into the depths of the abyss and the leviathan sitting just beyond sight but I know it's there.

I think of Stevenson's Jekyll and Hyde and know that he must have known something of addiction and the reality of what it does to people.

I don't care what historians or literary critics might suggest from their offices, anyone who has grappled with addiction, knows the words and remorse of an addict when they see it.

I've been reading online about treatment, only to be disheartened by the suggestion from some physicians that long term sobriety is seemingly nearly impossible to attain and that period hospitalization/treatment is the best case scenario for many.

I reject this characterization as I know that to enter treatment with the expectation that a relapse looms on the horizon is only to deep down enter with a mindset of failure.

At any rate, just as I once didn't believe in myself in training, I have to alter my frame of mind and become a different person in some regard.
It's this or lose everything.

It's a new challenge I have accepted and once I choose to take on a challenge, I won't quit until I am successful. It's a fear I once rationalized b/c I still enjoyed drinking, but more and more, I rarely enjoy it, and my buyer's remorse now completely outweighs any short term fun I have whilst drunk.

Wish me luck,
       - Yrs. in Christ