Hey, Wait! I Thought I Was Fixed!

I re-read that last post from two years ago. I remember thinking, "Yes! I finally did it!" I thought I had arrived at that utopian place that a lot of people talk about. That place where one has a drink, savors it, then stops. I think I just got my hopes up. Even when I was writing that post, I was nervous in the sense that I was just brushing off this whole dependency thing. Because that's what we want to hear. That we aren't dependent. We aren't like those people. We don't have a problem. I'm pretty sure every highly functioning alcoholic has, at one time or another, taken comfort in the fact that there are people who wake up, pop open a beer and continue their day in a drunken haze. Glad I'm not that person, we think. Drinking a little wine at night is a far cry from that. Never mind that its an entire bottle. Every night. For as long as you can fucking remember.

So, as you can imagine, and as I'm sure anyone could predict, I was not able to just have one drink. Sure, you can do it once - and then you think you're cured! But how about this scenario? A friend invites you to dinner. This is a friend who doesn't have an alcohol dependency, but can have a couple of drinks and a good time. You like this friend a lot. You have a lot of warm, fuzzy (booze) associations with this person. But you're cured now, right? You can just have one, remember? So you go to dinner and each of you orders a glass of wine. It arrives. A nice, big one (I love when the restaurant doesn't skimp on size. It's not really a love so much as a sense of relief, that maybe I won't plow through the beverage as quickly and be forced to shamefully ask for another before dinner arrives). And you guys continue to have a grand old time. Your meal arrives, and when you are about to take that last bite, you notice that your wine is running very low. The waiter comes by and asks you if you'd like another. Your friend's glass is just as low and she quickly nods. What do you do? She has no idea you've made this promise to yourself. That someone gave you the keys to the secret world of "I Can Just Have One." Of course, you fucking cave and have another glass. Because you figure, okay, this is an exception, not an ordinary thing. But that's all Booze Brain needs to hear, because Booze Brain will remember this tomorrow at 5PM. "You had two yesterday and nothing bad happened." And so it goes. Your friend will be at her yoga class when you are trying to negotiate with Booze Brain and she won't thinking about alcohol again for a while.

I've since learned that Booze Brain is real. Seriously. My brain is just wired differently. It doesn't mean I'm a bad person or anything, it just means I have a different system up there. Even though I've never tried any hard core drugs, that doesn't mean I'm not already a cocaine addict and a heroin addict and a crack head. I'm a drug addict waiting to happen. It's the way I was made and it isn't my fault.

So, last night I decided to quit. Actually, it was yesterday morning. The previous night, I had a bit of an argument with my husband. He doesn't drink, by the way, and never has. No desire, bless his heart. It was a dumb argument that I started and he said something like, "You always say these weird things when you're drunk!" This doesn't seem too bad, but it was kind of the straw that broke the camel's back. I also had been having a lot of black outs recently (not major ones, just forgetting that something was said here or there) and he recently made mention of how, even after I had brushed my teeth and went to bed, my breath was super boozy. This image of me breathing like some kind of a  wine dragon, filling the room with fiery puffs of grossness, is not very attractive. Unless you are in a co-dependent relationship with another alcoholic. Then it becomes some weird wine dragon breathing contest. Ew.

Wish me luck. Now I'm on Day 2. Again.