Living Sober. Anonymous

beer and wine could get us drunk, too—we just had to drink more of them to get the same effects we got on distilled spirits. We wound up as drunk on beer or wine as we had been before on the hard stuff.

      Yes, others of us did give up alcohol completely and did keep our pledges exactly as promised, until the time was up.... Then we ended the drought by drinking again, and were soon right back in trouble, with an additional load of new guilt and remorse.

      With such struggles behind us now, in A.A. we try to avoid the expressions “on the wagon” and “taking the pledge.” They remind us of our failures.

      Although we realize that alcoholism is a permanent, irreversible condition, our experience has taught us to make no long-term promises about staying sober. We have found it more realistic—and more successful—to say, “I am not taking a drink just for today.”

      Even if we drank yesterday, we can plan not to drink today. We may drink tomorrow—who knows whether we’ll even be alive then?—but for this 24 hours, we decide not to drink. No matter what the temptation or provocation, we determine to go to any extremes necessary to avoid a drink today.

      Our friends and families are understandably weary of hearing us vow, “This time I really mean it,” only to see us lurch home loaded. So we do not promise them, or even each other, not to drink. Each of us promises only herself or himself. It is, after all, our own health and life at stake. We, not our family or friends, have to take the necessary steps to stay well.

      If the desire to drink is really strong, many of us chop the 24 hours down into smaller parts. We decide not to drink for, say, at least one hour. We can endure the temporary discomfort of not drinking for just one more hour; then one more, and so on. Many of us began our recovery in just this way. In fact, every recovery from alcoholism began with one sober hour.

      One version of this is simply postponing the (next) drink.

      (How about it? Still sipping soda? Have you really postponed that drink we mentioned back in Chapter 1? If so, this can be the beginning of your recovery.)

      The next drink will be available later, but right now, we postpone taking it at least for the present day, or moment. (Say, for the rest of this page?)

      The 24-hour plan is very flexible. We can start it afresh at any time, wherever we are. At home, at work, in a bar or in a hospital room, at 4:00 p.m. or at 3:00 a.m., we can decide right then not to take a drink during the forthcoming 24 hours, or five minutes.

      Continually renewed, this plan avoids the weakness of such methods as going on the wagon or taking a pledge. A period on the wagon and a pledge both eventually came, as planned, to an end—so we felt free to drink again. But today is always here. Life is daily; today is all we have; and anybody can go one day without drinking.

      First, we try living in the now just in order to stay sober—and it works. Once the idea has become a part of our thinking, we find that living life in 24-hour segments is an effective and satisfying way to handle many other matters as well.

      4 Remembering that alcoholism is an incurable,

       progressive, fatal disease

      Many people in the world know they cannot eat certain foods—oysters or strawberries or eggs or cucumbers or sugar or something else—without getting very uncomfortable and maybe even quite sick.

      A person with a food allergy of this kind can go around feeling a lot of self-pity, complaining to everyone that he or she is unfairly deprived, and constantly whining about not being able, or allowed, to eat something delicious.

      Obviously, even though we may feel cheated, it isn’t wise to ignore our own physiological makeup. If our limitations are ignored, severe discomfort or illness may result. To stay healthy and reasonably happy, we must learn to live with the bodies we have.

      One of the new thinking habits a recovering alcoholic can develop is a calm view of himself or herself as someone who needs to avoid chemicals (alcohol and other drugs that are substitutes for it) if he or she wants to maintain good health.

      We have as evidence our own drinking days, a total of hundreds of thousands of man- or woman-years of a whale of a lot of drinking. We know that, as the drinking years went by, our problems related to drinking continually worsened. Alcoholism is progressive.

      Oh, of course, many of us had periods when, for some months or even years, we sometimes thought the drinking had sort of straightened itself out. We seemed able to maintain a pretty heavy alcohol intake fairly safely. Or we would stay sober except for occasional drunk nights, and the drinking was not getting noticeably worse, as far as we could see. Nothing horrible or dramatic happened.

      However, we can now see that, in the long or short haul, our drinking problem inevitably got more serious.

      Some physicians expert on alcoholism tell us there is no doubt that alcoholism steadily grows worse as one grows older. (Know anyone who isn’t growing older?)

      We are also convinced, after the countless attempts we made to prove otherwise, that alcoholism is incurable—just like some other illnesses. It cannot be “cured” in this sense: We cannot change our body chemistry and go back to being the normal, moderate social drinkers lots of us seemed to be in our youth.

      As some of us put it, we can no more make that change than a pickle can change itself back into a cucumber. No medication or psychological treatment any of us ever had “cured” our alcoholism.

      Further, having seen thousands and thousands of alcoholics who did not stop drinking, we are strongly persuaded that alcoholism is a fatal disease. Not only have we seen many alcoholics drink themselves to death—dying during the “withdrawal” symptoms of delirium tremens (D.T.’s) or convulsions, or dying of cirrhosis of the liver directly related to drinking—we also know that many deaths not officially attributed to alcoholism are in reality caused by it. Often, when an automobile accident, drowning, suicide, homicide, heart attack, fire, pneumonia, or stroke is listed as the immediate cause of death, it was heavy alcoholic drinking that led to the fatal condition or event.

      Certainly, most of us in A.A. felt safely far away from such a fate when we were drinking. And probably the majority of us never came near the horrible last stages of chronic alcoholism.

      But we saw that we could, if we just kept on drinking. If you get on a bus bound for a town a thousand miles away, that’s where you’ll wind up, unless you get off and move in another direction.

      Okay. What do you do if you learn that you have an incurable, ­progressive, fatal disease—whether it’s alcoholism or some other, such as a heart condition or cancer?

      Many people just deny it is true, ignore the condition, accept no treatment for it, suffer, and die.

      But there is another way.

      You can accept the “diagnosis”—persuaded by your doctor, your friends, or yourself. Then you can find out what can be done, if anything, to keep the condition “under control,” so you can still live many happy, productive, healthy years as long as you take proper care of yourself. You recognize fully the seriousness of your condition, and you do the sensible things necessary to carry on a healthy life.

      This, it turns out, is surprisingly easy in regard to alcoholism, if you really want to stay well. And since we A.A.’s have learned to enjoy life so much, we really want to stay well.

      We try never to lose sight of the unchangeable fact of our alcoholism, but we learn not to brood or feel sorry for ourselves or talk about it all the time. We accept it as a characteristic of our body—like our height or our need for glasses, or like any allergies we may have.

      Then we can figure out how to live comfortably—not bitterly—with that knowledge as long as we start out by simply avoiding that first drink (remember?) just for today.

      A blind member of A.A. said his alcoholism was quite similar to his blindness. “Once I accepted the loss of my sight,” he explained, “and took the rehabilitation training available to me, I discovered I really can, with the aid of my cane or