Why It’s Okay to Be Cynical About Sobriety
I wasn’t always optimistic about overcoming my alcoholism.
These days, I have an optimistic outlook on life, but that certainly hasn’t always been the case. Until about four years ago, I was a daily, heavy drinker with a decidedly cynical and pessimistic worldview.
My cynicism was perhaps most apparent when I started trying to get sober. I remember scoffing at most of the sobriety advice that I heard.
Some of the advice came across as woefully out of touch. For example, many recovering addicts praised the role that exercise had played in their recovery. When I read about how daily runs had replaced someone’s desire for alcohol, I felt disgusted.
How could exercise possibly have any meaningful impact on addiction? It just didn’t seem possible to me. In fact, it came across as laughably impossible.
I assumed that the people writing stories like this had never actually experienced real alcoholism. I wrote them off as pretenders who could never understand what I was going through.
Other advice I ignored because I thought it was too dogmatic. I’d tell myself that these people weren’t following the science — they were just in a cult. I didn’t want to sacrifice my rationality for sobriety.
