According to Beeminder, today marks 1000 days since I decided to go sober. I don’t know if it is 1000 days since my last drink, exactly, but it’s certainly possible.
I feel accomplished. Indeed, the only thing I regret about reaching 1000 days now is that I ever started at all. What few promises civilizational culture likes to toss around about alcohol being a “social lubricant” don’t apply if you’re drinking bottom shelf vodka alone in the basement, like I was.
And yet… I suspect I was the kind of alcoholic who gave alcohol a bad name. I could have done so much more with the ~decade I half wasted drinking myself into unconsciousness. Instead of accept the mantle thrust upon me and do the basic, routine things I knew would reliably get me closer to my goals, I decided to reach for oblivion at the low price of $20 per week.
I have a theory, based on many years of research and practice with Anki, that true healing from any kind of psychic illness only starts to set in place when you start to genuinely forget what it was ever like to be ill at all. When the actions of past-you stop making sense to current-you from a personal standpoint. You can look back on the stupid shit you did at 20 and say e.g. “Yeah I was so BPD then”, diagnostic papers in hand, but that’s a different kind of thing to being able to reconstruct the logic that led you to take those actions. You have forgotten how to factor that equation. There is something so similar to looking at death when you notice it happening.
Alcoholic me did not deserve to ‘die’ in this sense. No one does. Regardless, he got outboxed by sober me in a fair match. He will not be getting up any time soon. It is the way of all woken things to kill our pasts so that our futures may be quilted.