Extract from article in NY Times d.5th Jan 2009:
http://proof.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/05/the-give-and-the-take/#more-39
All of this gave booze the aura of a magic potion to me. It wasn't just that I happened to like how it made me feel — most anyone who has a drink will attest to that. I believed that a certain modicum of it was needed — like food, water or oxygen — for me to lead a happy and successful life. In retrospect, I knew that I was over-drinking by the time I was 30. But I figured that I was a "high performance" alcoholic — an interesting oxymoron, if there ever was one — and honestly couldn't imagine life without the stuff.
As time went on, this became more or less literally true. I can remember a day when a bartender who'd served me unknown thousands of gallons of booze over the years observed that, "You know, when you walk in, it's like you're a zombie until about the third drink. Then, all of sudden, your eyes clear up and you come to life. Amazing!"
The sad thing is, I knew exactly what he meant.
In time, my relationships with loved ones, especially my wife, my career, my health — all began to spiral down in a death dive. Even though I knew booze was the culprit, I just ordered another because that's what I did when I had a problem: I drank. At the root of this twisted thinking was the absurd belief that I'd just lost my touch when it came to the bottle, misplaced my ability to find that "sweet spot" of inebriation where there's a perfect balance between disinhibition and control, euphoria and calm. I just needed to get my swing back.
As with a marriage gone sour, I didn't want to admit that my relationship with booze was suddenly doing me more harm than good. And like a battered spouse, I didn't know whom else to be with.
If I'd been clear-headed enough to take stock, I could have seen what was going on very clearly: Feeling "normal" was requiring progressively larger amounts of the stuff. And while it had become a kind of lifeblood to me, in the real world, alcohol was still basically just a poison (it's what we put on a wound to kill invading bacteria, one of the most effective destroyers of human tissue known to biochemistry). The body and mind and spirit could handle a bit of it, even on a regular basis. But I was literally and figuratively drowning myself in it. While once it had given me things that nothing else could, now it was taking away the two things everyone needs to lead a life that even has a chance of being complete: my dignity and my good health.
In retrospect, like many drunks, I had reached a stage with alcohol where I was paralyzed, frozen in time, stuck in a tiny crevasse between what had been my best friend and what had become my worst enemy. I needed to find a true bottom before I could begin to regain control of my life.
It finally came one night in February, 1993, when I found myself in a drunk tank at the county jail with a bunch of guys you really wouldn't want to meet, wondering how I'd wound up there.
I entered treatment a week after I hit bottom, on February 11, 1993. Alcohol had finally crowded me into a corner from which there were only two escapes — sobriety or death — but I didn't really realize how literally true that was until my third day of treatment, when I noticed that a particular fellow patient was missing. When I inquired about the patient, who was an alcoholic and a heroin addict, I was told the patient had been taken to the hospital with a severe infection related to the drug and had subsequently died. "This business about this killing you is not just a slogan," a therapist observed dryly.
At that moment, I finally grasped what the stakes were — what they'd always been. And while, at the time, I still wasn't sure what all this sobriety business would entail, where it would lead me — whether, indeed, I could do it — I did know that I didn't want to die. That turned out to be enough of an epiphany, I guess, because I haven't had a drink since.
