On April 22, 2014, I woke up with a miserable hangover. I had drunk the day before for at least eighteen hours, and now I was throwing up blood, lying in bed, my body physically wrecked, with a pounding headache. I hated myself.
My wife was at work
My wife was at work. The night before, she'd told me she can't stand to be around me anymore when she drinks, and I told her, that's fine, you can leave. I realize now — wow, if she leaves, I'm totally screwed. My life is going to certainly end at my own hands if she leaves. And who would blame her? I'm a drunk, I'm a bum, I'm hopeless. I've ruined my life.
I know I can't stop. I know I'll promise her to stay sober, I know I'll try, but I've tried to quit so many times. Why bother? I'm hopeless. I have to drink. I didn't even want to drink yesterday, but I had to. I have to drink, and it's hopeless. I'm basically dead at this point. I don't know what to do.
A desperate prayer
So I desperately pray: God, please help me, I'll do anything to stay sober. Because I can see that if I could just stop drinking, there might be some hope for my life. But every time I've tried to quit drinking before, I went back to it. Nothing has worked.
But now there's this thought — well, maybe going to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting will be a part of the anything that I just offered. And now I feel some hope. That doesn't sound so bad.
I went to an AA meeting once in college, and I went home and drank two drinks straight afterwards, just to make sure I wasn't like those old people there, and to make sure I wasn't like those losers there. But now I feel some hope that if I go to Alcoholics Anonymous, I might have a chance to stay sober.
I'm also thinking maybe I should go see a psychologist or a therapist. But honestly, I know I won't tell them about all my self-harm thoughts and attempts, and so there's no point in going to see a therapist or a counselor and lying to them. So I'm going to plan to go to this Alcoholics Anonymous meeting instead.
Planning around my dad's memorial
My dad's memorial is coming up in a few days. Based on my previous behavior, I know that regardless of anything else I do or say, I'll have to get drunk the day after we get back from his memorial — if not the night we get back from driving from Starkville, Mississippi, back to Sarasota, Florida. I'd probably have to get drunk that night, if not absolutely the next day.
So I'm going to plan now. I'm going to go to this Alcoholics Anonymous meeting the day after we get back from my dad's funeral.
For today, I'm going to try and get down some soup now to feel better, and try and just sleep as much as I can, and pull it together so that when my wife gets home from work around 5 p.m., I won't totally still be a wreck. I'm a little afraid of her coming home. But I have a little hope that things might be okay now.
I sure do miss my dad
That was a cool thought about Alcoholics Anonymous. I don't really know where it came from. But I sure do miss my dad. I miss being able to talk to him and ask him for help when I'm getting sober. So I hope this AA meeting will work.
I'm sharing this diary years later because that hungover, hopeless morning turned out to be the beginning of everything. That thought about AA did come from somewhere, and that meeting did work. If you want to see where this road eventually led, I later wrote about long-term emotional sobriety in action years into being sober, and I keep sharing the rest of my life in my Life playlist.