THE EVE OF DESTRUCTION

THE EVE OF DESTRUCTION

'You're only as sick as your secrets.' We hear that practically every day in the rooms.

What secret was J... harboring when, despite all the warnings of his friends that he only treat his cough with over-the-counter medications, he deliberately went to a doctor and got narcotic medication? And then on top of that decided to have plenty of vodka to wash that down! We have within us either the seeds of our own salvation or destruction. Deep down we always know what we are doing even while we act out in despair and desperation, often in the hope that someone or some agency will, in that overwhelming feeling of desperation, pluck us out of our misery and place us in some more tenable nirvana.

This magical thinking that got us to where we are in the first place drives us to desperate solutions in the second place which is, not infrequently, the ultimate place. It is this thinking that gives us delusions of hope as hope’s solution. It drives us to attempt doleful solutions, solutions which inevitably become the problems instead of solutions for living. And then instead of learning to live in the solution we start to die in the problem.

Muddied, globular thinking, dripping into viscous puddles of confusions, running off in molasses rivulets.

The problem both J... and we all face is the duel dilemma of living with our problems and just living per se. Life asks so much of us and in our special case we cannot drink because of that, because to do so will not permit us cogent thought. And cogent thought brings on the realization that if we are to live, we must first do without; do without comfortable lodging perhaps, without some luxuries, and live with maybe some unsavory characters, but characters who have a better flavor than others and who do not hold us emotionally hostage to any personal past.

So if we find ourselves having to live with another alcoholic who is active, we know that is anathema. We cannot and will not remain sober in such a situation. And to pretend that this is by any stretch of the imagination reasonable is folly to the nth degree. We cannot say that we have no alternative, that we are at the mercy of someone for our room and board, and that is why we must stay with that person.

What point is there in subjecting ourselves to that kind of daily assault if the inevitable end will be that we wind up where we started in the first place; drunk and in the deepest despair? Each time we return from going out, our recovery finds us a bit weaker than the last time and each time we having fewer resources to return to with an ever narrowing circle of supports and friends. And who of them will then be willing to place their own sobriety on the guillotine of risk for us?

Sometimes, most times, we think we are just talking, arguing with ourselves. It's like that Alka Seltza commercial in which the man is arguing with his stomach about all the wrongs his stomach has committed against him as if he weren't the problem in the first instance. We don't want to face ourselves in the mirror and have a real discussion with ourselves; instead we choose constructs, stand-ins to talk with, virtual stomachs as it were.

We blame our woes on the symptom pain not on the source of that pain, which in the case of alcoholics is ourselves. We continually miss our Pogo moment. And unless we find it we will be searching all over the battle field for the enemy until the war is lost for good.

© res 2/7/11