Sleeping with a sober Cannibal...
"Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunk Christian."
Herman Melville, Moby Dick.
I'm an alcoholic, and I've been sober for exactly 18 years. That is 6, 570 days of sobriety.
I've never been in an AA meeting, I have never had any treatment for my addictions, and in the 8th, 9th, and 10th years of sobriety I worked as a barman in Munich, Germany. I wasn't the only Drunk working in that bar, but I was the only sober Drunk in that bar.
Everyone who has escaped the curse of alcoholism has a story, a place or person they point to and say this was who or what got me through the first dark days, weeks, months and years of sobriety. For me that place/person is also my Deity. My God.
God told me I could be sober, in fact He insisted I should be sober. So I began being sober, and then I kept being sober by counting the number of days I had remained sober, then when that number grew too cumbersome I changed to counting the weeks, then the months, and now I've reached the point where it is the passage of years that I count. In two more years I may turn to counting the passage of decades and round down.
As a Wordsmith it offends me to merely explain the journey into sobriety as an indescribable hell. So let me attempt a description....
The first days were consumed by a raging need for alcohol. I felt as if I was being eaten alive from the inside out. Then my body began to experience my own personal purgatory of Detox. Cold sweats, sleepless nights, random voices in my head, weird bouts of illness, and back to more sweat drenched nights of insomnia with only the voices to break the monotony. Occasionally there was this fist-like lump that would try to climb up out of my throat in a vain attempt to reach for an imaginary glass of whiskey.
Getting sober is like choosing to fall asleep beside a sober Cannibal. You are pretty sure they are fully rehabilitated and have truly fore-sworn the eating of their bedfellows, but there was always this little twinge of uncertainty.
It was two years before that uncertainty stopped nibbling at the edge of my consciousness and receded into a happy acceptance that my sober cannibalistic bedfellow had indeed become a vegetarian. The raging need for alcohol decreased over time, the sweats and insomnia were replaced by a healthier slumber, the fist opened up and finally stopped trying to grasp that imaginary tumbler of whiskey, and the chemically induced voices have faded into mere memory.
I love my Sobriety and never miss those dark days of drunkenness. But I still have no idea why anyone would want to have only one drink. You people are just plain Weird!
I've been sober for 18 years..... Each night I fall comfortably asleep with the knowledge that within reach is a sober cannibal that would gladly consume me if it ever chose to revert to an earlier state of being.
what was eating you 18 year ago?
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