Eston Bills kindness and friendship amazed me.This was a time of uncertainty and was my first tentative steps without alcohol. This was a strange different world that I didn’t fit into. My whole life had been constructed around alcohol every minute of every day a constant obsession. The description of myself would always have drink associated to it.My business was alcohol consumption in all its varied forms. I nearly said friends but all my associates were drinking partners. Long heavy drinking sessions were my norm, or had been wasted lunchtimes. I longed for the old conviviality of the public house and the lounge bar whose smoky,beery atmosphere conjured up feelings of social acceptance, shared secrets and understanding winks. The alternative was meetings and drunkalogs. An acceptance that somehow I had crossed some invisible line. Social invitations started to reappear to drink inducing wine tastings. New launches of exotic and not so exotic wines,spirits and beers.
The restoration of health the intermittent bleeding had stopped and yet the dry heaves returned at the slightest amount of stress. I buried myself into the meetings frightened and puzzled by the new reality of my situation. I had taken on the disease concept of Alcholics Anonymous and made my first attempts at the steps. My sponsor had had little experience but freely shared what he had. I understood very little my head was foggy and my reasoning suspect. I reacted with an alcoholic mind to fears, projections of impending doom and the slow realisation of the damage done and inflicted on others. I failed to acknowledge the profound changes that were taking place by stopping all alcohol and in consequence worked in a misplaced way to formulate the worst possible outcomes.
The meetings were sparsely attended many people relapsed and the resulting deaths,incarcerations proved the adage that alcoholism was progressive and fatal. I kept attending meetings and slowly started to understand this new world, as my business life imploded, in my drunkenness I had confided in the wrong people. Thieves had seen the opportunity of a boss who was seldom sober and irresponsable.The results of long liquid lunches had taken there toll. The unmanageability of a drunken life had spilled into a business life with catastrophic results. Explanations of my behaviour were asked for and then demanded.The blackouts I had so earnestly sort now became liabilities. People recounted outrageos episodes with someone I could not recollect. These new revelations cause me to become frightened and confused not understanding that try as I might I had little to no memory of events, the people or the circumstances.They induced a doubt as to my sanity and to further compound this unwanted effect.
The meetings were sparsely attended many people relapsed and the resulting deaths,incarcerations proved the adage that alcoholism was progressive and fatal. I kept attending meetings and slowly started to understand this new world, as my business life imploded, in my drunkenness I had confided in the wrong people. Thieves had seen the opportunity of a boss who was seldom sober and irresponsable.The results of long liquid lunches had taken there toll. The unmanageability of a drunken life had spilled into a business life with catastrophic results. Explanations of my behaviour were asked for and then demanded.The blackouts I had so earnestly sort now became liabilities. People recounted outrageos episodes with someone I could not recollect. These new revelations cause me to become frightened and confused not understanding that try as I might I had little to no memory of events, the people or the circumstances.They induced a doubt as to my sanity and to further compound this unwanted effect.
Yet this was sometimes the clarity of a forgotten moment.A brief techicolour flash of that moment would reassert itself into my consciousness when I had come out of a blackout then returned.Flashing headlights angry shouts and then nothing. Flickering firelight in an derelict house. A pool table in an underground cavern with dripping walls, my hands round another persons throat. I shuddered at these brief insights into a sots life, the terrifying spectre of my past. Much of this I kept to myself as I tossed in sleepless nights. Tortured by fear and anxiety what would happen to me. What had I become.Who was I.
The big book of alcoholics anonymous was my constant companion somewhere buried in its pages was an answer but where and how did it apply to me. It told me about the problem , but I was blind to the solution. Yet it gave me some consolation telling me threw its stories that I was not alone. I started to develop a belief in the book. All I could see around me was devastation. Each day brought with a new round of problems which I was ill equipped to deal with. Honesty was starting to glimmer into my life, but the reality of honesty frightened me. Bill had told me to find God. How and where do you find God?
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