When I Discovered I Wasn't Alone

My sobriety date is October 30, 2011. I picked up my second white chip that day and I am so grateful that I have not had to pick up a third...yet.

I'm not sure that there is anyone who, in the beginning, wholeheartedly wanted to attend a 12-Step program. I didn't. I knew that I should go and that I needed to go, but I didn't want to have to go. Walking through those doors and taking a seat meant total and absolute defeat. It signified an immeasurable weakness that I feared would define me like a hideous mask that I would not be able to remove- everyone would see it; everyone would know.

I also knew that I was an alcoholic. I knew that I had a problem. A problem I could not figure out how to fix or solve on my own. I wanted so badly to fix it: to control my drinking, to get a handle on it, to prove that I wasn't an alcoholic, and that I could drink normally like all the other 'normal' people. I was a survivor, why couldn't I beat this thing? I thought that I had overcome so much trauma and adversity in my life and this one thing kept getting the better of me- I could not control it. In fact, the more I tried to control my drinking the more I drank.

It was a devastating blow to my ego, to the resilient and invincible person I tried to convince myself and everyone else that I was, to have to ask for help. And it wasn't that I was just asking for help, but begging for it. I was so desperate that I was begging for help from a roomful of strangers. I thought I had reached the definitive depiction of shame and humiliation. It was unnerving; it made physically ill to have to sit there and admit, out loud, to myself and these other people that I was an alcoholic and I couldn't solve my drinking problem.

Life Expanded

Expansion. What a great word. Expansion. Expanding. Expanded. Expand. It is one of the many words that describes my life right now.

Merriam-Webster defines expand as
1) to open up: unfold
2) to increase the extent, number, volume, or scope of: enlarge

It is humbling to be able to look back at my life when I was drinking and compare it to how my life is now. I can hold them up side by side like charts or a split screen and clearly see the glaring differences. I look back and I see just how limited my life had become. My world had become so very small and my existence, now seems, practically irrelevant. As my alcoholism progressed the smaller my world became until I finally found myself strangled by its grip and gasping for breath.

Being sober is giving me the opportunity to experience how it feels to expand; to experience the state of expansion. I can feel it rising from within my existence and overflowing into my outer life expanding my world. The progression of my sobriety is happening much faster than the progression of my disease. The distance between then and now seems light years away and yet I know it is important to keep what my life was like then very close. As my life expands, I must remember what it felt like when I couldn't breathe. I must remember that picking up will only serve to put me right back where I don't want to be; one drink will take me right back to that small world where I cannot breathe and it feels way to good to be able to breathe.

I am thankful to be where I am right now and grateful to know that I don't ever have to feel that way again.