You Can Stop Drinking Now

When you first start drinking you are just like everyone else.  You’re smart and you have a lot to offer.  You are looking forward to a good career, finding your significant other, getting your own house, driving the nice car.

Then, as the social drinking continues, alcohol suddenly becomes more important.  You are drinking after work, on the weekends, and after enough time, every chance you get.

With enough drinking your family and friends may start to protest.  You are drinking way too much.  Your significant other may leave you and your friends stop returning your calls as your behavior under the influence becomes more unacceptable.  

So there you are.  You, the one who had so much potential.  You have your priorities and because you have developed an alcohol addiction, alcohol has reached the top of the list.

Many times the people in your life will completely ban your drinking in their presence, so you now have to either drink alone or find people to spend time with who have a high tolerance for the volume and frequency of your drinking. And these new friends are not going to be of the same caliber as your old friends, because they have the same priority – alcohol. 

Since these are advanced alcoholics, they will probably have more time to drink on their hands, most being unencumbered by employment or other standard responsibilities.  Now you have friends you can drink with, pretty much around the clock.  Every drunk’s dream.  Whittling the days, weeks and months away drinking.  No ambition, no accomplishments, no contribution, no life.  Sometimes it’s all you can do to get up in the morning.  You don’t keep up your appearance like you used to.  For that matter, you don’t keep up anything the way you did before.  But that’s o.k., because your new friends don’t mind that is, if they even noticed.

This is why it can be lonely after you stop drinking.  After some time sober has passed and you have regained some of your mental capacity, you don’t want to spend any more time with these people – the people who because of their addiction helped you to keep your own addiction to alcohol alive.  You are newly sober and have begun, once again, to start moving up in the world and making a new, better life for yourself.  You are going to have to leave the low life and your companions on the fast track to nowhere, behind.

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