Happy Anniversary

Today’s writing prompt: What was the hardest personal goal you’ve set for yourself?

This is timely. Today is the 24th anniversary of my sobriety. Back in the last century, I made a commitment several weeks before the turn of the century. I was going to take my last drink before the clock struck midnight on December 31st, 1999.

So I did it. In retrospect, it feels easier to have quit booze than it likely was. In the culture I came from, drinking was social currency. “Have a beer!” “Join us for cocktails after work.” “Pick up a 2-4 and we’ll go camping for the weekend.”

That booze masks pain is a given. But there was something more to it and the culture in which it thrived. A mark of adulthood? A sense of belonging? An adult-like behavior denied to us when we were 18 years and 364 days old. But the next day!! Wow. Hoist a glass. Join the fellas. Be a man!

Of course, this mysterious crossover to “adulthood” age barrier is quite state or province or country specific. Also gender specific. Women are not granted the same sense of admission when they take their first drink – another peculiar sex based inequality in our culture.

When I was a teenager, I was a passenger in a car that slid off the road and flipped over. We all walked away. When the tremulous driver shakily meets up with his father (the cars’ owner), his father offers him a “real” alcoholic drink (instead say, of a glass of milk or a soda).

It would appear an element of the rite of passage into the drinking culture also has to do with not killing a carful of your peers. Chin, chin!

Some famous incidents stand out in my drinking career. I was 20 and had just travelled nonstop overnight by train from Munich, Germany to Barcelona, Spain. I was exhausted. But not too exhausted to go wide eyed when I learned styrofoam coffee cups full of Grand Marnier cost 20 cents each.

I think I downed a dollar’s worth. Not to good effect. I fell asleep on my side under the hot Spanish sun. I awoke several hours later with a deep, painful sunburn on the right side of my leg. It took many more cumulative years of similarly stupid acts before it finally dawned on me that I had a problem.

One thing about alcoholism is that it can take time to develop and for the problem to become obvious. When you are young – as with most everything else – your capacity for recovery is more resilient. Long term alcohol consumption seems to break down cellular resistance to its more deleterious effects.

It did with me. I can’t say precisely when I realized “I had a problem.” I can’t say precisely when “I knew” I had to quit booze for my own sake and the sake of my children. Booze took nearly everything from me until it finally exited my life. Booze did not go quietly into “that good night.”

But went from life booze finally did. October 11, 1999. There is much to say about what the intervening years without booze taught me and put me through. How I learned to manage pain and tragedy and disappointment without it. I’m not 100% sure how I adapted and survived life without it. I just know I did.

Am I stronger? Probably. Healthier? Absolutely.

Sometimes I get my jollies sniffing the bouquet of a dinner companion’s delicious liqueur. If there is one thing I miss about booze, it was the sensual delight. The exquisite tastes. The heady bouquets. The complexity of the flavors.

Then my mind casts itself back to waking up deep fried in the Spanish sunshine after my Grand Marnier binge all those years ago. And all of the temptation and inherent pleasures that imbibing even a sip of the liqueur in front of me dissipate.

I get myself a soft drink and more and more frequently, a glass of ice water. With lemon. Liquid nirvana.

Considerably less flavorful but infinitely more satisfying. It’s a more than acceptable tradeoff. It still is today, 24 years after taking the pledge.