I drank.

There are Two truths to be shared.  One:  I wanted to get vulnerable up on my soapbox and put this out there before word got out and you heard it from some another source.   Two:  I had been looking for an excuse to do it, or someone to enable it.   For the past two months, I had been surrounding myself with people, places and context that would facilitate and encourage me to. 

I drank last Sunday.  Two beers.  If you ask me what motivated me to do so, I would say that I don’t know, that it was entirely a conscious decision to drink and that it was uneventful and totally under “control”.  But in reality, all of the activity and turn of the clockworks and the grinds took place behind the scene, in a dark little place where the evil resides and orchestrates its wrong doings – deep, deep in the brain and the heart, or somewhere in between.   (However, I do know that the emotional stir began when my boss got unexpectedly terminated back in February; this event became the event that would snowball into a giant unmanageable emotional avalanche.)

Sunday, April  17th, was both a good and a bad day.  Good because the weather was gorgeous and I was in the company of good people.  Bad day because I opened up a tinny tinny door that leads to a “slippery slope”.  My first response was “eh”, you know.  It was nothing.  But I felt it; I felt the all-too-familiar evil stir from its slumber.  However little the alcohol may have been, it fueled it – it gave it the power it needed to begin to rise.  I heard it ask me for more.  I felt it stretching its stiff body.  I heard its bones pop as he began to move.  The only two things that kept from engaging it were my ego and the other alcoholic next to me who I watched transform right before my very eyes as he swallowed drink after drink – our conversation went from a “Hello” to hearing him describe the addiction-damaged relationship he upholds with his wife, which was literally a regurgitation of my very own story with my ex. 

So, now the challenge for me is to not only start from scratch with the calendar count of my days sober, but to take my sobriety journey to a deeper level.  It’s one thing to quit drinking and remain abstinent to it, and it’s another thing to dig deeper into understanding why you drank the way you did, and why you did the things you did and why you got the way you did when you got drunk.   And so, the next stage is for me to grab a better understanding of that underlying layer of the other me.

 So, here I am.  Day two of my new sobriety.  Do I get a chip?