After going to that AA meeting on the 23rd of September, I decided that I needed to commit myself to sobriety.   I knew that this meant getting past my angst with the first step.

We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.

See, I truly didn’t believe that I was powerless over alcohol.  And I was positive that my life was not unmanageable. As I mentioned in my last post, I had not lost anything.  I wasn’t “at the bottom.” I still had my wife, my house, my car, my job, my son.  I had everything.

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I haven’t written about this yet for a couple of reasons.  First, I wanted to make sure that I didn’t put any artificial time limits on myself — I didn’t want to declare that I was taking a 30/60/90 day break from booze.  Secondly, I wanted to see how this worked out.  Finally, I felt an overwhelming sense of guilt and shame.  I’ve learned that I don’t have to be ashamed because I’m taking positive action to make my life better.

I’d been suffering for a long, long time and I secretly knew it was time for a change, but I couldn’t bring myself to make the change.  On September 21 of this year, I woke up full of regret.  The night before, I’d had several glasses of bourbon, several beers and half a bottle of wine.  I didn’t count my drinks anymore, but I knew it was a lot.  The recycling told the story.  I was fuzzy on the details of the night before, but I knew we’d had some family over for dinner that I’d cooked and I was reasonably sure that we’d had a good time, that I hadn’t been an overt ass or hurt anyone, and I didn’t burn dinner.  I may have served steak that was so rare it was blue in the middle though.

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