The Motivating Factor

What finally gave me the clarity that drinking should never be in my future again?  Last weekend I was in a city where a friend lived for a weekend class.  I asked the friend to meet me for dinner and drinks and told her that she could just stay at my hotel so she wouldn't have to drive home.  I honestly couldn't wait to catch up with her.  My focus was purely on spending time with an old friend.  I had no intention of  "partying it up." I went to dinner and had a few drinks.  I have been gluten free for a while and the menu wasn't exactly gluten friendly.  My first mistake was that I only ate a small salad.  I felt the drinks hitting me hard.  After dinner we transitioned to a cozy pub for a drink.  

Here is where the "universe could unfold" in one of two ways.  I could simply stop drinking after the first drink at the pub knowing I was already drunk from the dinner drinks, go back to my hotel and go to bed.  My friend would have been completely fine with that.  The other scenario is not so simple and it is definitely not pretty.  As the drinks began to hit me hard, I drank faster and began to monopolize the conversation.  My personality became pushy and domineering as it always does when this happens.  Two guys came over and bought us shots.  I drank the shots.  In my "having a normal drinking night" times, I always refuse shots as I know I am already at risk to overdo it simply because I am drinking at all.  But this time the offer for shots came too late.  My switch had already flipped. I became sloppy to the point of falling down a couple of times in the bar.  The bartender called a cab for us and we made it back to the hotel where I proceeded to fall into the hotel furniture before making it to bed.

It seems pretty clear that if this is a typical scenario, a person like me would have stopped drinking a long time ago.  Unfortunately and I suppose fortunately, that was not always my typical scenario.  For me drinking was always unpredictable.  I could go out and have a couple glasses of wine and stop.  I could go for days, sometimes weeks without even thinking about alcohol.  However, sometimes when I would drink, a flip would switch and I would just end up drinking to the point of complete sloppiness.  I didn't have the pass out button.  That would have been better.  My body would just stay awake and conscious but I would stumble and slur.  If I had more than 3 drinks, there was a 50/50 chance as to whether I would have a normal night or I was getting onto a nonstop flight with only one destination... absolute sloppy drunk. 

I have plenty of time to blog and get into the history of things but my point here is that I have done a lot of work on myself so that I make choices that reflect self love and self respect but there was still a severe danger lurking.  Recently, I was rarely going out anymore and rarely even drinking.  My life was filling up with hiking, travel and adventure.  That is because that is the life I truly wanted and was transitioning into anyway.  I tired of the bar scene long ago.  However, if a couple of times a year I am going to get falling down drunk unexpectedly,  things have to change.  I could keep trying to ensure that I ate a big meal, stayed hydrated, and made sure I wasn't drinking to blow off steam.  I could have examined every other risk factor for ending up overdoing it and minimized it.  The truth is that no one is perfect 100 percent of the time and there will be a time where I didn't eat enough, was drinking after a stressful week or whatever it is.  When that time comes I will get falling down drunk.  The only way I can ensure that this never happens again is to never drink again.  I will say it again, what a relief!  So, did the universe unfold as it should have?  I say yes because I was operating under a false sense of confidence and the universe gave me a big reality check.  Because I was not drinking often, because I would just drive to meet friends for dinner so therefore would either not drink at all or only have one drink, because I was with friends on vacation who liked adventure over drinking, because I have been on a health kick... because because because... these bad times weren't happening.  But guess what, they still COULD happen all along.  And it did happen... again.  Though the days of waking up mortified or even worse, injured, have been few and far between in the past couple of years, I couldn't take even one more time feeling like that.  It puts me into a severe depression that basically erases any positive mental or spiritual work I have done on myself for a good while.  So I am done.  I am grateful for last weekend.  It finally gave me the courage to put the alcohol down and take my first step toward the threshold of being whole.