Hello, I'm Mike and I'm an Alcoholic.

Hello, I'm Mike and I'm an Alcoholic.

I don't know how many times I've said that line. I'm an alcoholic and the number one thing that keeps me sober is to never forget that. There was a time that a drink meant everything to me. It was my best friend and half my reason for being. I can remember times when I thought, "When my ship comes in I'll quit". I think that ship got lost at sea a long time ago and, very thankfully, I gave up looking for it.

Just a little history on my relationship with the bottle.

There really was no origination to my learning to drink, you could say I came by it naturally. When I was still in my formative years, my parents always had their three or four beers every evening to sit back and relax with. It was their reward for completing another day. Thus, I learned the first excuse for the drink, it was an award for the spirit.

The U.S. Army gave me my next lesson in drinking. I have to admit it didn't come easy. I was in with some guys that had perfected the art of getting drunk and still find their way back to the baracks. My mistake was trying to keep up with them, bottle for bottle. I didn't do so good but I did learn that when I drank, I was much more into the party scene and it made everything a lot more fun. It took me 24 years to learn it was all false. A fake reality.

The next step in my downward spiral with the bottle was when I got home from the military. I never took to the drug scene much and I'm very thankful I didn't. I tryed it here and there but never saw that much in it. The bottle was my drug of choice and it was legal. Once, I was stopped for going through a stop sign and the cop let me go because I was drunk. (My, my, how things have changed.) Still, I went through two wives because of my drinking. It was never my fault that they couldn't take my drinking. Didn't everybody drink a little. Hell, why couldn't they understand that. I used to put my son to bed at night and run the three blocks to the liquor store for a twelve pack and run all the way home. By morning, that twelve was gone. The empties lined up on the kitchen counter.

Well, I guess that gives you an understanding of how my thinking was going back then. It wasn't my fault that I drank. Look at the world I had to put up with. I was dealt a bad hand and I had all the reason in the world for my drunk. Believe it or not, that's exactly what I thought. The bottle became my best and only friend and don't anybody dare to take him away from me. The bottle became my reason for living and my Novocaine for facing the life.

Then I met a girl that meant everything to me. After the way I treated her she had every reason to tell me to take my bottle and go to hell. I guess she saw something in me that the bottle wouldn't. She demanded that if I wanted anything with her I had to start AA. "What, are you crazy? I'm no alcy. I just like to drink a little." When in reality, I liked to drink a lot. Well, she insisted and made threats to leave if I didn't. My thinking was that I would try a meeting and then come back and say, "You're wrong. Everybody there said I was alright and didn't have a problem." It didn't work out the way I thought it would.

Once I got to that first meeting and heard the stories of other drunks, I knew I was in the right place. No, I was not happy about this. It meant that I had to face myself and I didn't like myself. I had to admit all the things that me, myself and I did to make me the @!$%# that I was. I had to learn to take responsibility for my actions and the way I treated others. It took me one month of AA and Al-anon for every year I spent as a drunk to say I was sober and happy. Was it hard? Oh, hell yes it was hard. I cried more in those two years than I cried in my whole life. But, with each and every tear, I came closer to feeling good about myself and life around me.

Now, I've learned to live life without the bottle and the hate and self loathing. I still have to remember that I'm a drunk and just one drink away from another drunk. I also have to admit that as I write this the keys are a little blurry from the tears in the corner of my eyes. It doesn't matter though as I'm letting go of some more of the old me. I also still attend a meeting every now and then to put a little maintenance on the old sobriety and I always walk out with a renewed feeling of life.

I know this might be a little too personel for some but I wonder if anybody else sees them self in my drunk story?