The UNQUENCHABLE THIRST That Only #RECOVERY Can Fill

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Letting go of alcohol in my early recovery felt truly impossible. I thought we were inseparable, no other life even remotely possible. Early on, my relentless, unquenchable thirst for alcohol remained as the last remnants of alcohol drained from my body. My habitual, unforgiving chase after alcohol left me feeling unworthy and incapable of ever finding recovery from it. Tight-fisted, I clutched this new-found life with a ferocity which only made it seem more unachievable. 

After all, drinking was all I had known... for decades.

Early Recovery was a tightrope. Feeling unsafe, if I looked down, surely I would fall. 

But Recovery is not a tightrope... It's a bridge, a wide bridge, which leads to many paths and a new life for those who finally find and walk it. 

To chase after sobriety felt too close to the chase for the next drink for me. Doing push-ups for the next drink. A drunk without the drink, an unquenchable thirst which seemed only another endless drink could fill. I was used to that chase, but Recovery is not a chase at all. I would need different muscles somehow. Recovery felt like it should become an embodiment, not something to possess, like a cheap half-gallon of vodka. I would somehow enfold it as it enfolded me. Gently. Sobriety, "a loose-fitting garment." 

I would have to move away from the idea that sobriety was some form of punishment. Slow down. So close to death, then suddenly sober. How awkwardly I chased the desire to live without alcohol. Alcohol had been ruthlessly, mercilessly killing me. And now this, Sobriety. I didn't know what it was. Recovery was beyond my 30 years of experience drinking daily, another world in which, surely, I would never fit.

Each sober breath became a new experience, different, so different from the numbness each drink presented me. Learning to breathe became a way of letting go, completely, of my last drink, of every drink. The bridge is wide, the path, an expansive highway. Still lost, it was not so much that I found recovery as that recovery found me.

The realization that I was truly sober, truly living in recovery took around five years. That's the unvarnished truth. My teeth were no longer clenching. Nor my fists. A subtle shift, loosening, unloosening. Recovery found me.

Letting go, that hackneyed "Go with the flow," finally meant something. My brain changed with time in thousands of different and subtle ways and the broken pieces became whole, a container which could hold me, complete, no glass in hand.

The edges of a rainbow dissipate into thin air. In that space I found recovery and myself, a letting go that was becoming whole.

No drink ever took me into that thin, full air. Never.

I did not drink today.

This is a very, very, very good day. 

Letting go to receive this gift. 

Sober. Living in Recovery. 

Life... so much more than another drink could ever fill.

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"Nothing matters more than that we remain sober because when we remain sober everything matters more." 
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#Alcoholism #Addiction #Recovery
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You might also enjoy ALL DRINKING ASIDE: The Destruction, Deconstruction & Reconstruction of an Alcoholic Animal  http://amzn.to/1bX6Jy
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