You’ve been drinking for awhile now and have lost so much in the process. You’ve lost enough and you don’t want to let alcohol take everything you have left. Maybe it’s time to start some real damage control.
Alcohol can start taking your friends from you pretty early on with enough embarrassing incidents. Chances are you will be lucky and able to hold on to one or two of your truest friends, but they may keep their distance until they feel you have things under control.
How soon alcohol takes your job is debatable. Many alcoholics say the job is the last thing to go, but if you are drinking in excess and start calling in for hangovers, or are not up to par as far as your job performance goes, the job can go fairly early in the process too, depending on how much time you are spending drinking and how much volume you are taking in.
When you lose your job as a result of your drinking, the obvious outcome is immediate and sometimes in the form of very serious financial problems. You have your house/apartment and car payments, and a multitude of other bills to pay. And even if you are looking for another job, you probably aren’t as on top of your game as you think you are, in other words, you may not appear to be as together as you think you are to others, because alcohol has a tendancy to make things look better to us when we are drinking heavily than they actually are.
Finally, if you have a significant other, this is a high stakes game. Most will likely stay with you longer than you would have thought, but it is inevitable that even the most devoted mate can decide that he or she just can’t take it anymore and may opt for a more normal existence.
So if you are standing at the edge of the cliff looking down, ask yourself, are you really willing to let alcohol take one more important piece of your life away from you?
