Thinking it Through

[bluidkiti]

"Thinking it Through"

A searching, fearless look at our complete drinking record, however, shows that in the last years and months our drinking never created those perfect, magic moments again, no matter how often we tried for them.

Instead, over and over, we wound up drinking more than that, and landed in some kind of trouble as a result. Maybe it was simply inner discontent, a sneaky feeling that we were drinking too much, but sometimes it was marital squabbles, job problems, serious illness or accidents, or legal or financial worries.

Therefore, when the suggestion of "a drink" comes to us, we now try to remember the whole train of consequences of starting with just "a drink." We think the drink all the way through, down to our last miserable drunk and hangover.

A friend who offers us a drink usually means simply that one sociable glass or two. But if we are careful to recall the full suffering of our last drinking episode, we are not deceived by our own long-ago notion of "a drink." The blunt, physiological truth for us, as of today, is that a drink pretty surely means a drunk sooner or later, and that spells trouble.

Drinking for us no longer means music and gay laughter and flirtations. It means sickness and sorrow.

One A.A. member puts it this way: "I know now that stopping in for a drink will never again be-for me-simply killing a few minutes and leaving a buck on the bar. In exchange for that drink, what I would plunk down now is my bank account, my family, our home, our car, my job, my sanity, and probably my life. It's too big a price, too big a risk."
He remembers his last drunk, not his first drink.

---From Living Sober, page 52