My drink of choice was hard liquor.
Before admitting that I was an alcoholic, I could never pinpoint the reasons that led me to drink so excessively. In my early stages of drinking, I just knew that I liked the way alcohol made me feel. It made me feel like I had a "S" on my chest. Anything I was nervous or uncomfortable about doing, I could do after having a little alcohol in me. Alcohol took away my rationale. For example, I was never much of a dancer, but after a few shots of Hennessy, I became Dance Fever. If I was nervous about approaching a woman, after a couple shots of Grey Goose, I became Goldie from the movie The Mack. Years later, when I told my alcohol sponsor that alcohol gave me courage, he responded by telling me it was fake courage, and he was absolutely right. I was no Dance Fever and I was no Goldie. I was Vernon A., a young man struggling with acceptance and finding his way in the world.
A counselor and an alcoholic patient.
I began to find more detailed answers to the reasons why I drank after part of a court sentence required me to attend 8 months of alcohol counseling. My counselor asked me about the things that "triggered" me to drink. Prior to the counseling, I had no idea what a trigger was. My counselor told me that a trigger is anything that urges one to desire, crave and eventually partake in alcohol or drugs. Slowly I began to realize that "life in general" was my trigger. I simply could not face certain things in life, usually things that I could not change. I got to thinking about how I drank when people did me wrong; when friends and family used me, stole from me and said things to me that made me feel like I was less than human. I thought about how I drank about all of the racism and discrimination that I faced growing up, as well as throughout my adulthood. I thought about all of the scallywag women that I had wasted my time with. I thought about how I never had a good relationship with my birth father and how he treated me like crap my whole life. I thought about the people that claimed to love me but became jealous of me when I began to do well in life. I then realized that all of these things contributed as triggers to my alcoholism.In a nutshell, alcohol gave me a break from the real world. When the real world didn't conform to the way I wanted to see it, I would drink until I didn't see it that way anymore. The bad thing about that was, I was forced to face reality again when the alcohol wore off; so I would simply make sure that it didn't wear off. I would just continue to drink, sometimes days at a time. The alcohol put me in a fantasy world which many times gave me the illusion that it was better than living in reality.
