… young they are — to think of getting old and dying as something that happens way off in the future. Instead, I prefer Seneca’s observation, the one about how death isn’t this thing that happens once but as something that is happening right now. We are dying everyday, he said, and each second that passes is lost to death. If we can think that…
…where you can call yourself an alcoholic. To me, it wasn’t something I was particularly ashamed of. I just saw a lot of people in my life who had been brought to the brink by the bottle (sadly one or two beyond the brink) and when I compared my situation to them, I felt like calling myself an alcoholic would diminish the gravity of what they endured. The shades of grey are the most dangerous — where you can convince yourself that it’s just “enjoying a drink”; that because you can still turn up to work the next day and function that it isn’t an addiction. Alcoholism is, as should be obvious, a spectrum. I’m certain that, had I kept going as I was, I would have drank myself into an early grave.