But, How Do you Know It's Different This Time?

I don't.

But what is different about this time is that I'm not afraid of admitting that I am an alcoholic. I have a very long road ahead of me. I'm not kidding myself here. I'm only on Day 11. Unlike my last attempt (which was to moderate after 30 days of abstinence), I don't have that carrot dangling in front of my face, that promise of a reward. Well, I am hoping for rewards, but not the drinking kind. The kind that come with self reflection and hard work. The reward of a better, richer, fuller life without booze.

The biggest revelation that has come to me so far, apart from the fact that I have realized I can call myself an alcoholic without fear, is thinking deeply about my father and his relationship to alcohol. It never occurred to me that he might have had an inner struggle. He was human, after all. Maybe he did have moments where he thought, "I have to do something about this." As I have stated, confronting alcoholism for him would have been so incredibly hard because it was one of the binding ingredients in his friendships. I'm not just talking about a few drinking buddies. I am talking about men he knew his entire life, people who knew him better than anyone else. People who stood by him during good and bad times. The wall between him and sobriety was much higher, much heavier, much thicker than mine was. And this made me very, very, very sad for him. I just never thought of it like that and it hit me like a ton of bricks. The powerlessness he must have felt and how he probably felt very alone in those feelings. I wish I could go back in time to tell him it was alright. That love takes care of everything. But I can't and that makes me really sad, too.

When I went through my divorce, I really steeped myself in it. I went to a therapist regularly, I kept a journal and I did an entire series of paintings about it. Henry Rollins says, "Touch your fear. Kiss your fear on the mouth." That is powerful and for me, it's the only way. I wanted to understand - fully - what my responsibility was in the unraveling of my marriage. I wanted to know how it got to that point and I wanted to be aware of those parts of myself that enabled it to happen so that I could recognize that moving ahead. I didn't want to drag any of that shit into my future relationships. I worked really fucking hard and I felt like a new person at the end of it.

While my mother was battling cancer, I did the same thing. I dealt with it, head on. As her disease progressed, I slowly started to mourn her death. Not knowingly, but it was a way of coping, a way of gradually letting go. I didn't run away from her diagnosis. At first, I was angry with God for doing this to her, to me, to her new husband. How could you, I thought, not ten years from the sudden death of my father. How dare you? But I slowly came to accept that she wasn't going to get better and I had to find a way of dealing with it. That's a whole other thing unto itself, but I guess my bigger point is that I didn't have a choice in the matter. I had to say goodbye to this woman who meant the whole world to me.

I don't see protecting my sobriety any differently. I am using the Henry Rollins method, because for me, it works. When I narrow my focus on something, watch the fuck out.

So to you, Booze Brain, I say, in the immortal words of Alice Cooper: No more Mr. Nice Guy.