I've been an alcoholic ever since I had my first drink. I have never known temperance - no point in drinking for me unless getting drunk was the aim. Lost count of the weird places I've woken up in or the strange drunken adventures I've had. I guess I started the abuse 30 years ago and never really grew out of it.
Why? It made me feel normal and happy. The OCD vanished and I could interact with people better, even be charming and felt like a better person. That is addictive.
I stopped around 15 years ago due to liver damage. It took 3 years to diagnose cuz the shite doctors kept telling me it was all in my mind (take some anti-depressant's, you'll be fine), I persisted, finally got a good doc and a scan showed the damage. I spent 3 years on the wagon with chronic pain, but eventually recovered.
And then I started drinking again. Yes, I know, I'm an idiot.
I drank a lot less and thought I could get away with it. I kinda expected my liver to give me another warning if it got too much. What I didn't realise is the extent to which the liver works in concert with the rest of your metabolism. The damage may have repaired, but the imbalance caused originally, plus the continued low level drinking, utterly screwed up my body and five years ago various systems started to go wrong.
Time for some unpleasant chronic illness.
That's when everything collapsed. Job gone, family forced me out of my home, stopped eating, hospital, stopped sleeping (almost completely), developed horrific anxiety and depression, spent all day doing web searches to feed my suicidal ideation. I was under a psych because no one knew what else to do and all he did was offer me medications that didn't work and made things worse. Their solution was stronger medications and an attempt to get me to go into hospital.
I did end up in hospital, but because I hadn't had a bowel movement for almost a month.
They kicked me out and told me it was all in my head.
That's when I came back to this website and decided I had no other choice. If the emergency department won't treat you in an emergency, what else do you do?
Improvise, I guess.
I called an out of hours GP. He was shit. I asked him if this would kill me. He nodded and turned away.
That made me angry and I decided I'd push him. I told him what to prescribe me and in what dose. After taking the medication I had some much needed relief. It's taken over a year to regain some functionality, though I also suffer from other, more inconvenient issues.
What kept me alive was two things:
1) Someone on here who gave me back my sense of pride
2) Carefully cultivated anger at trusting the people who I turned to for help who then comprehensively let me down.
As things got a little better in the spring, guess what? I started drinking again. What a fecking idiot.
A glass of wine turned into a bottle a week, then moved on to gin and a few weeks ago spent the next day vomming like a teenager on cider.
I still drink. I have a bottle of wine once a week and it barely touches the sides. But it helps me turn off the OCD etc for just one evening, and that is BLISS. I will suffer the physical consequences, I have no doubt, but then that's also almost certainly a horse that has bolted.
What I really want is many pints of good beer and to prop the bar up and chat up the barmaid! That's never going to happen though:/
Sorry, I got a bit carried away there. But maybe you can see the same sort of thing? Always coming back to it and fucking it up, yeah that's what I've always done. Still do.