Starting Point

Alcohol destroys everything. It doesn't just destroy the life of the alcoholic -- but the lives of all around. The more you drink, the more people and things you destroy.

From my personal experience:

You don't want to hurt anyone you love, and you don't want to lose anything important to you. But you don't know how to get through the day without drinking. The very idea is similar to getting through the day without breathing. You can't just "not breathe". You can't just "not drink" either.

So you drink. That hurts people you love -- you end up saying or doing stupid things that hurt their feelings. You feel awful about that. You hate your behavior, and you feel like a monster.

You try to stop drinking to prevent further devastation. You know it's bad for you and bad for those around you. But you still don't know how to get through the day without drinking. You may be successful for a while, but you're obsessed with drinking. Thousands of thoughts whirl around in your head but the only stable thought is for another drink. The entire world is a blur and doesn't matter anymore -- the bottle is the one and only thing in focus.

At your wit's end, you reason, "Okay, I'll just have one drink. I won't get drunk this time." In no time after taking the first drink, you have finished twenty drinks and are staggering drunk and saying stupid things that hurt people again. You know you've failed again, and you know that you've become a worse monster than you were before. You are out of control.

The cycle repeats endlessly and gets progressively worse. This is how you change emotionally:

You become consumed with self hatred, cynicism, depression, passive-aggression, anxiety, and rage. You are a monster. Whatever friends you haven't scared off yet perceive you as a volatile emotional leach and burden. You know that you are a complete loser and a freak. Every time something goes wrong, it's proof that you're a blundering idiot. You are convinced that you're a terrible, horrible, worthless, stupid, miserable failure of a human being who should have never been born. In your mind, that is who you ARE -- it is the identity you have created for yourself through your alcoholism.

It makes no sense! But this is my personal starting point. It's not the "prettiest" nor "ugliest" of other people's stories I've heard. But it's my own -- everyone's story is different. Everyone has different issues. My issues often pale in comparison to everyone else's.

Some people lose their entire families, all their friends, their homes, their jobs -- everything -- and end up destitute. I was fortunate just to lose two people: a lying boyfriend who cheated (probably with a different random chick each day of the week), and a mutual friend who tried to be friends with us both. It was probably beneficial to everyone for those relationships to end, but I wish they didn't end as the result of an abusive drunken rage.

But in all "stories", it becomes obvious that simply stopping drinking won't fix everything. As destructive as it was, drinking was really only a symptom of other underlying issues. Continuing to drink prevents all hope for ever healing. But at least getting sober gives us a chance -- regardless of our starting point.