“Freedom is not achieved by satisfying desire, but by eliminating it.” --Seneca

Before I had reached drinking age, drinking represented a certain freedom to me.  Turning 21 and being able to buy my own booze and belly up to a bar represented the ultimate coming of age.  It seemed to signify the point in my life where I would require no one’s permission to do as I pleased.  Total license to behave as I pleased.  It seemed to be the last rite of passage where everything that was legal for anyone else would be legal for me.  Full adulthood.  Autonomy.

I looked forward to it as any other birthday that carried certain rights and privileges.  I got my learner’s permit at 14, as soon as I could.  I got my driver’s license on my 16th birthday, wasting not a moment.  On my 18th birthday, I bought cigarettes, chew, and a lottery ticket, mostly because I could.  And when I turned 21, I got excessively drunk.  I stayed pretty much excessively drunk for the next fifteen years.

As my drinking progressed, it felt a lot less like freedom than it did a prison of my own construction.  Gone was any semblance of meaningful choice, replaced by habitual return to drink.  My drinking caused me to push away from activities and people who were not compatible with excessive drunkenness.  I lost friendships.  Relationships withered away.  I became entirely less three-dimensional as a person.  I stopped reading.  I stopped exercising.  The more I gravitated to alcohol, the less I participated in the full measure of activities available to me.  I didn’t spend much time outdoors anymore.  I didn’t really want to do anything where alcohol wasn’t involved.  Eventually, I found that even places that had drinking weren’t really able to accommodate the drinking I wanted to do.

Alcoholic drinking at a bar can be a real pain in the ass.  What do I have to do to get this guy to come over here and bring me another drink?  I’ll wave my money in the air.  I’ll shout for him.  When he comes over, I’ll order two drinks instead of one.  I must have looked like a huge asshole.  I was sure acting like one.  You know what, screw bars.  I’m tired of the mark-up.  I’m tired of the tipping.  I’m tired of the wait.  I’m tired of trying to behave myself from getting myself kicked out.  I’m tired of the looks.  I’m tired of the judgment.  All of those thoughts conspired to drive my drinking very much underground.  I developed a strong preference for drinking in isolation.  This caused me to lie to protect that preference.  Everything became deception.  My co-workers knew I drank a lot.  My friends knew I drank a lot.  My wife knew I drank a lot.  None of them knew about the drinking the other group knew about.  None of them knew about the drinking I did alone.  I kept the bars and liquor stores on a rotation so I didn’t go to the same ones on consecutive days.  Which one did I go to yesterday?  Screw it, that guy probably isn’t working today anyway.  Whatever.

As my alcoholism progressed, I was living a life of constant anxiety.  I feared coming home to an intervention.  I expected it.  I rehearsed what I would say if my family and friends begged me to stop.  Would I run out, last out, or give in?  I’ll never know.  It didn’t happen.  It didn’t happen, in part, because no one knew how bad it had gotten.  No one knew how alcohol-obsessed I was.  No one knew how afraid I was that the life I had left wasn’t worth trying to save.

My alcoholism walled me in.  I didn’t enjoy anything anymore.  Even the drinking wasn’t fun.  It wasn’t liberating.  It wasn’t exciting.  I did it to suppress the fear I’d developed about the problems I’d ignored, the relationships I’d ruined, the shame I had swallowed.  Lonely, afraid, angry, anxious…I was far from the free person I thought alcohol would make me.  I was imprisoned.  What’s worse is that I’d done it to myself.  I built these walls.  I installed these bars.  I locked these locks.  I was my own jailer.  I’d pronounced my own sentence.  

What I now realize is that the process of imprisoning myself was entirely reversible.  Yes, I’d locked myself in, but I also held the literal keys to my salvation.  I only had to decide to turn them.  With every rejection of alcoholism, I emancipated myself from the bondage I’d so willingly walked into.  Rather than allow myself to be incarcerated in my prison of deception, I liberated myself with honesty and with action.  I achieved a meaningful freedom in my life by not allowing myself to be tethered to the bottle.  Now, I can truly go anywhere.  Now, I can truly live my life with the agency and confidence to do it without compulsion to drink, to lie, to steal.  Dear Reader, Sobriety is the freedom from the bondage of addiction.  Free yourself.