To the Rebels, and the Daredevils....and those who have come out on the other side

The world as we know it comes from risk-taking.

Not all are well calculated risks nor well-advised.

I had to sit down ask myself in the dead of night why I wouldn't stop drinking.
My alibi system had collapses. No rational person could look at the mounting personal cost and pretend I had any license to drink any longer.
That being determined, why was I so reticent to decide to legitimately try and stop drinking.
Fear.

Fear is the great paralysis and panacea of the human condition. It keeps us alive at an early age, but it can metastasize and run our emotional lives as we grow into adulthood.

Imagine me, grown man, relatively self-sufficient or so I thought, looking back on my life and realizing that destructive emotional patterns ingested during my childhood subconscious. At any rate, I'd rather not wax psychology.

I had to face my fear, my greatest fear is that of failure. I've read that alcoholics are egomaniacs with low self-esteem. Adroitly put, I'd say. I was afraid that if I chose to try and stop drinking I would fail b/c I had in the past. The reality being, I had never legitimately tried to stop, only that tepid, half-assed, college-try version where you ask for Santa or wish upon a star rather than take responsibility for attaining that which you desire.

I've always sought out those things which I feared b/c fear has always felt corrosive to me. I loathe the way it feels sitting, eating me inside. It never sat well with me, since I was a child and then later in school with bullies, I didn't understand fear so much as I understood the anger with which I responded to it.

Soundtrack

 

 

I've found there are so many hours in the day with this whole "sobriety" thing.
I wake up by * and I'm oft at work early. I'm grinding in the gym and my body and my strength are returning to better than they've been in ages, unhampered by poison, fatigue, the emotional rollercoaster and wild-hearted sorrows and elations of an alcoholic/addict.

 

I still have wreckage to clear and some jail time I'm facing, but somehow, my daily life has become more serene than I ever thought possible. Not every day is sunshine, but the morning after is never the abysmal waking up in the middle of a hurricane feeling it once comprised so unpredictably...then the hated mad dash for work whilst trying to find my bearings, the constant head above water feeling.....the impending doom of the eventual calamity and the end, begging for the release of the end but fearing it all the same.

 

Gone are the cheap thrills and pointless forays into the dark night, and having traversed the rabbit hole as deep and dark as I cared to, it holds not the promise it once did.

I feel a calm and an acceptance I once thought not possible.

It's as simple as trying to do the next right thing. Then the next. Then the next.

---

 

I was afraid of getting help. I was afraid it would mean becoming a different person.

I was right.

I have to be a different person to live sober and stay sober. My impulsiveness must be arrested and contained lest I feed the obsessive part of my psyche.

 

The reality is, and what I must always bear in mind, that my obsessive/addict/alcoholic persona will have me locked up and/or dead if I let it run riot. There will be no freedom, no choices, no decisions, no nothing whatsoever if he takes the wheel.

So, inside the box he goes and must stay.

Jekyll and Hyde was the perfect analogy to reference before I went away. I know what the serum/formula does and I know what it brings about.

A beast, savage and feral, a monster that hates what I love most and wants to take everything I cherish away only after watching as it makes me ravage it.

It's been a wild road and I'm honestly glad that the rollercoaster has ended and I managed to get off.
   - Yrs. in Christ