Quick update for all my friends here.

Went to a wedding this weekend with some old drinking buddies. The wine wasn't great... Now, the old me could have drank prison wine made in a toilet by fermenting ketchup. Not now. I Thought about getting some whiskey, which always tastes good, but just didn't feel like it. At one point I had a cup of coffee because that's what I legitimately wanted. On a Saturday night. At 10:30pm. At a wedding with an open bar.

There's a line in the movie Rounders: "If you can't spot the mark at the table, well, you ARE the mark." I never used to be able to tell who was drunk at a party and who was sober. Wanna guess why????

I had so much fun at this wedding. Had a little alcohol to loosen up... But no real buzz. Ate, danced, talked, took photos, and looked like a well put together handsome motherf*cker! Okay, okay, egomania kicking in.

I feel like I have turned a corner. I have stopped drinking during the week. I used to be able to sometimes white-knuckle my way through the weekdays, but the weekend would be like letting go of a bowstring. I am actually starting to enjoy being sober during the week.

How sad. I have been to so many great parties that would have actually been fun if I was conscious. Turns out my friends and family are cool people to hang out with.

Just read your last couple of posts and I think it's really important and useful for newbies, as well as those struggling to see results to read. Just shows how much difference Nal and TSM can make. Like you I noticed an immediate difference, and those dangerous times just stopped even though I did have a few heavy spikes occasionally. Just that little change can make it all worth it.

Love hearing this .

Hi friends, just checking in here with more of the same.

AF last Sun through Thu, then drank some (with nal as ALWAYS) on Friday. Probably 1 bottle of wine + 1-2 beers. Little too drunk but no big deal. I didn't want to stop until the point when I did, which I guess kinda bugs me a little. Like, I probably still would have a hard time having just one glass of wine. Anyway, no drama, no sneaking booze, no blackout, no grey-out, no hangover.

Saturday night is date night and I have probably the same amount of alcohol as Friday though spread over a longer period. No hangover on Sunday, no craving, no liver pain, none of the old sure signs of a serious problem that I used to either ignore, or ironically, drink to ignore. Wife and I went to a bar that is known for having hundreds of scotches(her idea). I had one. She encouraged me to have another but I didn't feel like it. Plus, at >$15 a pour for the rarer stuff, I didn't want to spend the money.... Wow. My first year of graduate school I racked up around $6k in credit card debt, thanks almost entirely to one particular bar on Mass Ave in Cambridge. Now, 15 bucks is too high to consider, even though I can fully afford it at this point.

AF Sunday felt really nice, as will AF today and every day until Friday. For those who are ready, I encourage you to attempt to lengthen your AF stretches. I know you can't force it, that's not how this whole thing works, but think of it like reeling in a fish. You gotta keep a little tension on the line, but not so much that it snaps. AF weekdays rule. In the last couple of months, on THREE separate occasions, my wife has drank a glass of wine while I abstained. This had happened exactly zero times in the previous ten years.

So here we are. I am not cured, and I don't care. I drink at a level that i'm pretty darned comfortable with and unless health issues arise, I imagine I'd be comfortable if I plateau'd here forever.

On another note, we just got our plane tickets and hotel room for New Year's eve in Las Vegas. My wife's idea. The only other time I was allowed to go to Vegas I had to promise to stay away from the hard stuff, which I did. I survived for 96 hours on almost nothing but miller lite and red bull. It was a hazy, bizarre, at sometimes terrifying event where I caught my first glimpse of what my life could turn in to without positive change. I got drunk on the plane ride there and stayed drunk the entire time. That didn't stop me from experiencing significant withdrawal symptoms at times, because I wasn't drunk enough. On the plane ride home I saw that the stewardess wasn't opening the beers she was selling... The auditory hallucinations made me think it was probably a good idea to buy 2 extras for my morning layover. Drank them to ward off the serious shakes at 5am in Newark. Made it home and twitched in and out of sleep for about 24 hours. I guess the sad thing looking back is that there is a lot of stuff to see and do in Vegas, and I could have had a similar experience to the one I had by locking myself in my apartment with a couple handles of whiskey, some stripper DVDs, and online gambling. Would have saved me some cash. Anyway, I digress. I am eager to experience Las Vegas as the man I am now. One who likes going out, likes a drink, likes to eat, likes a show, and goes to bed by choice in the place he intended to.

So I think I passed a big test this weekend. Not with an A+, but with a C. Satisfactory.

Old drinking buddies from grad school staying with me. I drank heavily, and feel a little under the weather on this fine Monday morning.. BUT!!!

No blackouts
No loss of control
No white-knuckling at any point
No hard alcohol

There was a lot of drinking going on the entire time, but things are so different for me now. We went to a baseball game Saturday, which I was able to pay attention to for ALL 9 INNINGS! Gasp. Back in the day, I'd go to Fenway park with 400ml of whiskey stashed in my pocket then I'd make sure to finish that before the 7th so that I could get some beers in me. This is all of course, after a couple of pre-game beers. Saturday, there were 0 pre game beers and no sneaking in whiskey. I bought my two beers in the first inning, finishing them both by the 6th inning. Got one more and the wife says "only one more?" Without clandestine hard stuff, I would normally be back and forth for more and more. I didn't want two more, and that's the whole thing these days. One of the mantras that I heard in AA when the idea of a medicinal cure was brought up went:

"I wish they would invent a cure for alcoholism, then I could drink as much as I want!" Then everyone has a good chuckle at how silly the idea sounds and how we are all hopeless drunks.

Well, I can drink as much as I want. I just don't want to drink as much as I can.

After she remarked on my solitary beer, I asked my wife if she thought I was cured. She hesitated, then said yes.

My wife is a professional scientist, and therefore educationally trained as a skeptic. My wife hated my drinking in the past and was one of the main reasons to start this process. In my past attempts to control my drinking, she could always tell when I was white knuckling, and now she says that something is fundamentally different. My wife has no reason to potentially encourage me to go wild with the drinking by telling me that I don't really have to watch myself anymore. All that said, my wife thinks I am cured.

I am exquisitely hesitant to make this claim myself. My long history with booze has included so many embarrassments and failures that the last thing I want to do is claim to be cured, then to go on a bender and revert to the old me. But it's hard to deny when I look back at this weekend and see that I was surrounded by the people who tempt me the most in this world, and in the midst of that I kept my sh*t together and it wasn't even hard. I enjoyed how a little relaxation from the booze augmented the fun I was having with my friends, rather than being the only focus.

I didn't even begin writing this post expecting to say this, but I'm calling it. As of the moment my wife said so on Saturday, my life has taken an undeniable turn for the better. I am sure I will drink too much at some point in the future, but I have changed. It's different. I trust myself with alcohol. My skeptic wife trusts me with alcohol. We bought two cases of wine in January and we still have wine left! There is no more internal struggle with that demon whiskey. I'm on to bigger and better life problems to solve. A mortgage? Children? The cure for cancer?

Bring. It. On.

14 months ago, you wrote...

I bought a six-pack because I hoped that would be a good amount to last me through it. Sure enough, I finished the sixer in just over an hour so felt the need to chase it with an entire bottle of tequila. Needless to say I have felt better than I do today. I threw up and then kept drinking, which is a new low for me. My hands are shaking and my ears are ringing. I’ve given up hope of being productive at work today, but if I go home sick I’ll definitely drink, so for now I just hope my co-workers can’t tell. My plan is to dry out until it gets here. Le sigh. This life sucks sometimes.

You're post today was a beautiful thing. Beautiful that you could be saved from the path you were on. Beautiful that your marriage is so much better. Beautiful that there's one less victim of alcohol in the world. I especially enjoyed the part about the AA quote, and how it seemed so absurd at the time! But it's true, we can drink what we want, but our wants have been set free or have disappeared altogether. That's true freedom. Congratulations to you.

P.S. Perhaps you should put together a lengthier summary of your cure in the cured section.

Thanks for your incredibly kind words Barry. I remember that day quite vividly. The shakiness, the self-loathing... All these symptoms of addiction that I used to ignore are behind me now. I was hitting the bottle so hard for so long that I had quite literally forgotten what it feels like to feel good while sober.

I will definitely put together a lengthy "cured" post soon. I have had some serious bumps along the road, and it has been winding, but hopefully I can help people to cross the finish line without making all of my mistakes.

For the people that it works for, AA might still the best method out there. Complete abstinence is probably pretty nice. For the huge number of people that just find more shame and failure in AA and people who are "not ready" for AA because they haven't hit absolute rock bottom and killed someone on the highway, I hope desperately that our medical system will open it's eyes. Maybe with universal health care, prevention will get more air time and the FDA will rethink naltrexone. I am certain that if there were real life equivalents of these boards, where people could meet face to face and discuss what has been working and what hasn't, then nal's already life-changing effects would be potentiated.

Way to go Generic!!

what an inspring post!! Its been good reading through your progress and I'm delighted for you and your wife with your success this weekend. I particularly like the part where you say you can still enjoy those few drinks .. but its not the main focus. I can see that for me alcohol had started to dominate everything .. and it was scary admitting that (I probably haven't ... except for on here) ... To read your words about enjoying the weekend and how it wasn't even that difficult .. is really encouraging for the rest of us a bit earlier on the road.

I'm following your advice about lengthening the AF stretches .. it was time for me to put in a bit more effort .. but enjoying the fact that now .. an AF evening actually isn't so much effort ... wey hey!!

Lorraine

Congrats, Generic.

I hope to be where you are in a year. Our stories have some similarities and I'm feeling really good (about a month in) about the change in me.

Thanks Lorraine and Bill!

It's been a long haul, and I am sure that I will still learn things about how to deal with my relationship with alcohol in the future. This journey isn't over, it's just reached a point where I can no longer deny that things have fundamentally changed.

Well, this weekend things seem to improve a bit more, despite starting off bad. I made the mistake of not waiting the full hour when surprised by an open bottle of wine in my face Thursday. I won't make that mistake again. While I didn't go wild, the residual adrenaline rush had me sipping too frequently, and the bottle got so big it filled up the room. I was back - momentarily to being the guy who tracked exactly how much was left in the bottle while it was being passed around... so that I could get what I needed out of it before others selfishly tried to get their first glass. I need to remember that it's better to take a step back, decide if I am really going to have some drinks, maybe drink a soda in the meantime, and wait my hour. It's not a hard rule to follow, and shame on me for f***ing it up. Compliance has been one of my strong suits in this journey.

Anyway, Friday was fine. Had some beers and some wine. Probably the equivalent of a pitcher of beer and a bottle of wine. Unsafe levels for every day, to be sure, and not my ideal Friday, but I did spread it out and I didn't do anything stupid or silly.

Saturday I had one glass of wine. Now that's rare.

Sunday I hit the racetrack. The ponies were always fun in my heavy boozing days. Gambling, cheap sh1tty food, and pint after pint of the champagne of beers. I had 3 beers over 4 hours, went home, still under my 8 hour umbrella... Now I have noticed that nearer the end of those 8 hours, I can start to get a little wild again... I pondered another pill so that a few glasses of wine would help me sleep. Didn't feel like it enough to take another nal, so I drank some iced tea and watched television instead.

So there we have it. Another weekend in the life of a guy who might go a tiny bit too far one night, but doesn't turn that into a 4 day bender. Instead he barely drinks at all the next couple days, then goes back to his usual routine of AF living. I still can't believe that's me.