Alcoholism, taming the beast.

As the old year has passed I have to ask myself what I have accomplished. Although it’s easy to say that I have done so much with beginning to raise a set of twins, that doesn’t feel like an accomplishment so much as an inevitability. What is keeping me up tonight is the question — Have I really beaten alcoholism?

I’ve been a regular drinker for many years, and I began to recognize it as a problem around 2008. It was really that year when I realized the number of days I hadn’t had a drink numbered in the single digits, and those days were hard. I knew I never wanted to quit forever, but I just wanted to stop drinking regularly. I wanted to get up knowing that I might have a drink, but it would be no big deal if I did not. Since that time, I’ve gone through painful stretches of attempting to not drink for days at a time.

A few months ago, about a month before I left Maui, I somehow just stopped drinking. I had set an alcohol budget of $170 per month, and I was about to go over. I bought a bottle of inexpensive rum to get me through the last week, and somehow, I just never opened it. I went a week before having a few glasses of wine, and then that’s how it has been since. I have gone a month straight without alcohol. I have also drank for a few days in a row. I have really stopped counting.

That’s the most interesting thing to me. Somehow, within a few months time I have come to this point where normal social drinkers lie. I’ll drink on occasion when there is an occasion. I don’t have the people around me to encourage regular drinking, and that helps tremendously. I have children, and that helps too.

I’ve been told that what I desire, being a casual drinker, is much more difficult to attain that abstinence. Can a once chronic smoker become a casual smoker? Sure, but it’s rare. Can I be that once chronic drinker come social drinker? I don’t see why not. However, the truth of the matter is much bleaker.

It’s much more likely that this is just a low point after having hit a high point over the past 5 years. It’s likely that I’ll become a habitual drinker again, only to have this battle again, and hopefully, come out on top before something gets the best of me. It’s very likely that if I were put into social situations that encouraged drinking, that I would have a drink, or two. What will become of me if those social situations were an everyday thing?

All I can say is this … Knowing that this is a slippery slope, that the other side is looming, that if I lack discipline, then I will be on that road again, that knowledge will help me. That possibility is very real, and I am playing with fire. By being a social drinker, I am tempting a beast.

Do I have it beat? For now … for these few months, and hopefully for years to come.