Contemplating Sober

[dancelot]

Contemplating Sober

eight days a week;802298 wrote: I was what I'd call a 'problem drinker' for many years (14+). Last year I became a full-blown alcoholic. I think that one will inevitably eventually lead to the other unless you deal with it, the only question is how long it takes.

Others may not make that distinction between the two, and I completely respect that That's just the way I perceive things myself, through my experiences.

This sounds like me - At some point , I can't pinpoint it exactly, I became physically addicted - the way I'm defining that is, in previous times going AF, I didn't go through withdrawals. I realize now, that worse than normal feeling I woke up with every day in recent times was physical craving. That was scary.

[pointed head]

Contemplating Sober

Browsing, found this:

It's more important what you DO about the problem than what you choose to call it.

It's a noble ideal...but what if "what you choose to call it" is part of the problem? Or, rather, it _is_ reality? Words are important. You (dg) offered a joke ("I don't have a problem drinking, I have a problem stopping") which was amusing, but it was a purely verbal, intelligent proposition. And now you want to whip the legs out from under that amusement by proposing that reality is constructed above verbalization.

I disagree. We're sentient and self-aware, and to afford that amazing gift we've traded a lot of intuition for symbology, syntax, and semantics -- and we can't help it. We _tell_ ourselves who we are, and what we do, and what we think. And the words we use are nearly the entirety of our reality.

So, yes, labels are important. Not as imposed by the outside, "drunk", "sot", "loser", but from the inside "I _deserve_ this one last night to drink", "I'm not an _alcoholic_, I just _like_ [pleasant word] to drink.", "I hate myself [no you don't, no one does, but it's very easy to push the word], so it's ok [pleasant, again] if I drink."

Word are huge. They are what separate us from the people who live in Nebraska.