I started my journey some fifty-something years ago, the only surviving son of my parents, who were modest people. My father was a mechanic; my mother began to work after I started school. I never wanted for clothing, food, or shelter, but the things I needed most seldom came.
It was a turbulent childhood; my father, although a good man most of the time, drank. Hard. He was unpredictable and mean when he was drunk. My mother spent most of her time covering up for him, then making sure he was eternally punished for the error of his ways.
I grew up without direction or foundation. My parents tried to guide me the best they could, but their resources were limited. You can’t draw water from a dry well. They were so involved with each other’s faults that they had little left over to pass along to me.
By the time I was an adult, my view of life was jaded and self centered. I was at best, a hollow individual, without goals, and bent on serving my own twisted idea of what I thought life owed me for the “suffering” of my youth. Drifting through life like a rudderless ship in a hurricane, I became the very thing that I loathed, imposing my will on everyone that I interacted with, having very little concern for their wants or needs. When these people withdrew out of self-defense, I wondered what happened, taking their withdrawal as sign of weakness. If only they all would listen to me, they would understand that my way was the right way. When people didn’t buy into my little world, like a child, I became angry. I threw tantrums. After many years of this type of thinking and behavior, I was losing touch with reality. I suppressed my feelings. The insanity came out when I least expected. Emotions exploded. The very people I wanted to bond with were driven away by the angry and bitter person I had become. Nothing was ever my fault; I blamed everyone else for my misfortunes. I had crawled into a bottle staying there while losing friends, jobs, and everything that I held dear in my life.
Early on, while I was still in my young teens, I drank to be one of the guys. We snuck beer, liquor, and wine from our parent’s houses and got polluted at the house of one of my buddy’s. We thought that we were cool, hip and really slipping one by our folks.
Alcohol did everything for me that life couldn’t. When I drank, I became everything that I wanted to be. Gradually, I crossed the line. Alcohol stopped working for me. I can’t tell you the exact time, because it was so subtle. I had to drink more and more to get the same result.
People began to drop hints that I might be drinking a little too much and I should “taper off”.
In my mind I didn’t have a problem because I had a pre-conceived notion of what an alcoholic was. I had seen the bums downtown with their two bit bottles of rot gut. And, I had had the benefit of watching my father after he drank. I knew that if I didn’t act like my old man and looked or acted like the souses on skid row, I didn’t have a problem.
I can’t tell you when the booze stopped working for me either. But where I used to be satisfied with a little buzz, I now had to get thoroughly blitzed. I found that once I stared drinking, I couldn’t stop until I was wasted.
Then the drink overcame me.
To Conclusion |
