A Sobering Thought.

I sincerely hope that you are settling in nicely to the year that is Two Thousand and Eighteen.  It has taken me eleven days to actually concentrate enough to do a posting.

This year is a milestone for me.  Or, if you speak in metric, a kilometrestone for me, I suppose.  For, as of June eighteen, it will be exactly twenty years since I last consumed alcohol.  Twenty years since I got stretchered out of my home and rushed to hospital.  But hey, who's keeping track.

On the actual date of my twentieth anniversary, I shall put up a harrowing yet uplifting post to mark an occasion that I hope may well give hope to those who think it's hopeless to even attempt to combat addiction and the underlying causes.

Even now, after all these years, I'm still raw with the pain I caused to others and to myself.  To this very day, I'm an extreme combination of fragility and resilient strength.  I've spent nearly twenty years trying to compensate, to prove to those that I love, to myself, that I could seek out and find the good man that had been hidden away during those frightening days of alcohol abuse. 

If somebody had told me, as I lay in a hospital bed, on the verge of death, that twenty years later I'd be writing about how I defeated alcohol, I'd of never believed them.

When I left hospital, I had two choices.  I could of chosen to continue drinking and die a painful, agonising death or choose the exhilarating freedom of being sober.  I chose freedom.