I drank, often heavily, for about 25 years or so. I had my last drink in 2016.
Officially I have not quit. If I want a drink I'll have one but the idea disgusts me and I found that was the case well before I had my last beverage. So unofficially I'm done with it. I hated what it did to my ability to make intelligent choices. I hated how it affected my judgement and my relationships and health and bank account.
I hated how it clouded my mind to the point that I thought people who I was drinking with were allies or friends and I didn't realize that we were fellow addicts using one another to justify choices that we all knew, individually, were bad for us and those around us.
I really enjoyed some aspects of it. Brewing my own beer, for example, was something I love and I respect the art and science it involves still today.
I was doing temp work in Idaho a few years back and was assigned to a distillery and I found that after a couple of shifts that I just wasn't comfortable working for them. It felt like I was in a meth lab working on making something that exploits human weakness. The distillery kept calling me and trying to hire me permanently. I declined. The people who worked there all seemed pretty nice though, I like that. They were like a family.
Many of the people I know and even some I live with drink. We often have alcohol in the house but I remember that life and I also remember that I can't remember all of it because of blackouts I had. Too often I needed to ask people who were with me what I did. Nothing bad happened but I was very uncomfortable with not having memories of what I was doing when I drank.
Drinking took away the best parts of me from my loved ones during the most important times in our relationships. It messed up my being a father and it harmed every single relationship I ever had. I could not be there for anyone because I was there for the alcohol and though I thought it was there for me, it wasn't. I was a slave who thought that the very thing that was enslaving me was liberating me. It did tremendous damage to my ability to understand myself, those around me and what was actually important. I missed or failed to appreciate a lot of my adult life and am deeply ashamed of that on a personal level.
I started thinking about my drinking and realized I had a choice. I could keep going down the same path and let it continue to corrupt my heart and mind and body until I died or I could stop choosing to drink. I started drinking less to avoid the shakes and then got to the point that I stopped getting them altogether. I haven't bought or had a drink since.
I used to attend meetings and listen, before I quit.
I knew people who went pretty often as well and they would tell themselves and others that to quit drinking everyone needs supernatural help. None of these people I went to meetings with actually stopped drinking. Some of them, now, have already drank themselves to death and are no longer with us. All of them tried to stop and made it for days, or weeks, or months sometimes, before they made the choice to drink again. Often out of this idea that they will be triggered into drinking, that they should expect it to happen and that it was all part of the process of recovery. I have yet to see this approach have good success rate in the people I know, though I understand that for many people this is the only approach they know to try to deal with their addiction. I wish them luck.
As I mentioned above, in my mind I have the option of drinking still, in my head I have not actually quit but I am also well aware that drinking is not something I want to do. I also know that I am the kind of person who rarely stops at one drink. Sure I was able to have a drink or two a day at many points in my life, but most of the time I would get off of work and then drink until I passed out of worse I blacked out. I also partied a lot with other people who drank, often, with no real purpose other than finding a reason to drink.
I've faced other addictions as well. I used meth for awhile. I was addicted at one time to cocaine. I was addicted to opiates as well. During the height of some of that addiction I went to several NA and AA meetings. The message there was the same, that I can't stop unless I have paranormal help. I even believed it to be true at the time but just kept using.
I haven't touched any addictive drugs, other than caffeine, for several years now. I don't miss any of it or the lifestyle, nor the culture that addiction tends to involve.
Looking back on my past doesn't make me miss these drugs or their effects. It deeply saddens me that I gave so much of who and what I was to alcohol and drugs. I lost so much potential and opportunity because of my choices to use and the choices I made when I was using. I am now the sad shadow of the person I could have been.
I think drugs should be legal and that it is immoral to criminalize addiction and drug use. I know that the war on drug addicts, which is what the war on drugs actually is, approach doesn't work and it causes tremendous harm to society, to addicts and to their loved ones. It just makes things worse and escalates the harm exponentially. It is also a way that the justice system makes money by exploiting addiction using fines and through the confiscation of drug money and valuable property. The system promotes drug use with one hand, including with informants who sell drugs with legal immunity, so that a steady supply of addicts can be targeted by the system with the other hand. This approach in not new either, the East India Trading company also sold opium while it profited from criminalizing it and enforcing laws against it. This two faced war on drugs approach we have today is thus not a new problem, it is one that is several hundred years old. Rehab is also a multi-billion dollar industry. Drug use and addiction are exploited for profit by those who claim to oppose it.
I think that sometimes approaches which are known to have very low success rates are used in rehab and people are sent to them by court order because it is known that many of them will return and continue to stay in the system and be a source of income to rehabs and the justice system. I think it is a rigged system concerned with profit... not recovery.
But this is just is my experience, observation and opinion formed from them. I know that there are people for whom such rehab and recovery services have worked for and there are those who clearly benefit from attending them. I am not one of those people and I know that quite well from experience.
Still... I am proud of anyone and everyone who can face their addiction and work towards sobriety and recovery, no matter what approach they take.
But I admit... if you tell me that I cannot quit using without help from a higher power it makes me want to slap you in the face and call you certain names. I haven't had a drink in 7 years. Believing in myself is a huge part of that.
Sorry about how personally offensive this might be to some people. That is not my intention. I wanted to share my experience with addiction and recovery and now I have.
Edited by Nillion (10/25/23 11:45 AM)
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