101 Things That I Am Grateful For…Or…Things That I Won’t have To Do Or Think About Doing Or Having Anymore
Mutterings And Murmurs . Social Studies
These things are in no particular order. I started a written list in a diary of sorts as these things occurred to me while I was finding my way out of the hell of an addiction. I found this list while sorting through old documents, certificates and papers as part of a paper purge. I was trying to lighten the load of documented history before I either peacefully drift off this mortal coil or am abruptly, censored, impoverished, shut down or removed and erased by the authorities.
One of the tenets of ‘The Promises’ from ‘The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous’ states that “We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it”, the point being that acknowledging our experiences and making a fearless moral inventory of ourselves and admitting the exact nature of our failings or wrongs could lead us to make amends, in thoughts and deed, to all those that we had harmed.
“The hardest part of getting clean is coming clean” – Howard
Ready?
Here we go.
1. Drink or think too much about drinking
2. Lie about drinking or having quit drinking
3. Drive, walk, stagger or bicycle to a liquor store
4. Need to enter a bar or liquor store
5. Buy alcohol
6. Spend money I could have spent better elsewhere
7. Drive drunk and endanger my life or the lives of others
8. Litter the environment with my empties
9. Be arrested on a DUI charge
10. Hide my drinking
11. Hide my bottles full or empty
12. Worry about where I left my empties
13. Buy gum or Visine to try and hide my drinking
14. Avoid people or places to avoid discovery
15. Lie about having a cold or eye infection to cover my morning voice or bloodshot eyes
16. Drink beer to cover the vodka on my breath
17. Worry about my breath
18. Worry about whether others noticed that I had been drinking
19. Buy a fancy hip flask
20. Buy a travelling wet bar
21. Build a wet bar in my basement
22. Get the sweaty shakes
23. Experience withdrawal symptoms
24. Get the dry heaves in the morning
25. Be afraid to confront the pain and truth of my past
26. Experience rare hangovers
27. Drink to ease hangovers
28. Patronize many different liquor stores so the staff would not think I had a problem
29. Be afraid to admit that I had a problem with alcohol
30. Know that I had a problem with alcohol and be afraid to get help
31. Pretend that I enjoy fine wines or scotch
32. Be hopeless, afraid and lonely
33. Throw up alcohol only
34. Want to kill myself
35. Try to kill myself
36. Spend time in a psychiatric ward
37. Stop or stay stopped drinking unsuccessfully
38. Be afraid to be honest
39. Be afraid to get help when I need it
40. Ruin my health from drinking
41. Drink mouthwash to satisfy cravings for alcohol
42. Be addicted to alcohol
43. Trade addictions
44. Be resentful of other people’s perceived success in having quit
45. Criticize myself constructively or not
46. Be caught in a lie
47. Be afraid of the truth about my condition
48. Pretend that I deserved the soothing and sedating effects of alcohol
49. Reward myself with alcohol
50. Drink heavily at an all-inclusive resort because that’s what you do
51. Escape reality by drinking alcohol
52. Steal time from my children to indulge in my addiction
53. Make decisions under the influence of alcohol
54. Work under the influence of alcohol
55. Have morning sickness or dry heaves
56. Try to find a reason to think that drinking is okay
57. Find fault in other people’s behavior as it relates to drinking
58. Lose control of mind and body
59. Think that I am cured
60. Think that I am somehow better than others
61. Lose the capacity to be humble
62. Lose the capacity to be grateful
63. Be afraid to reach out to others
64. Be afraid to grow as a person
65- Be afraid to love
66. Drink myself to sleep
67. Take a ‘Planning Ahead’ course
68. Be required to participate in the ‘Interlock Program’
69. Have a criminal record
70. Have to appear in court on a D.U.I. charge
71. Be represented by a shady lawyer
72. Liquor up to go to a concert
72. Liquor up to go to a party
73. Go to an AA meeting under the influence
74. Keep vodka in a briefcase or suitcase
75. Get pulled over by the police and get away with only a speeding ticket
76. Have a fender bender and only be charged with following too close
77. Agonize over finding new hiding places for my bottles
78. Keep a bottle or two, full or empty, under my car seat, or in the trunk of my car
79. Bark my shins
80. Go to church after a few eye-openers
81. Have a few shots before a surgery
82. Hold onto some but not all resentments
83. Throw away deposit items to hide the evidence
84. Carry a mickey of vodka in my pants
85. Check myself into detox twice
87. Check myself into rehab
88. See a purple guy die in detox
89. Go to too many funerals for people that couldn’t stay stopped
90. Go to 7 AA meetings in 7 days for months
91. Sincerely ask an RCMP officer to shoot me after I was apprehended for drunk driving
92. Go to a public event and drink a soda or water, pretending it’s a drink drink
93. Take depressants or anti-depressants to deal with my depression and anxiety
94- Be a mostly highly functional alcoholic
95- Shake and shiver in my father’s basement, telling him I have the flu
96- Worry about the weirdness of never having blacked out from drinking too much
97- Have a beer to cover the vodka on my breath
98- Start taking SSRIs to deal with depression and anxiety knowing my problem is most likely alcohol
99- Lie to a doctor and psychologist about my drinking
100- Trust a lawyer to represent me in court
101- Go through the ‘process’ of being arrested, jailed, and locked up without my belt or shoelaces, because of item 91, thinking that this is the end, that there was no living after this.
101+- To be determined
While I do not think on these thoughts daily and I have moved on from the obsession, dread, regret and fear of them, I must admit that they are part of a troubled history. I cannot close the door on them or lock them in a box to be buried at a crossroads somewhere. No matter what will come, my best path forward is to live my amends with humility and be open to sharing them with others – to show up and to own my life and history – no matter what comes next.
Cheers!
I want to comment but find I have no words.