“Some drinkers have excuses with which they are satisfied part of the time. But in their hearts they really do not know why they do it.” (Chapter 2, Big Book)
I thought I was having the first drink because I was depressed.
But when I wasn’t depressed I had the first drink anyway.
I thought I was having the first drink because my circumstances were unfavourable.
But when they were favourable I had the first drink anyway.
I thought I was having the first drink because I liked it.
But when I didn’t like it I had the first drink anyway.
The same goes for any past experience, present circumstance, or emotion.
What terrified me was the realisation that I was not drinking, as an agent, as someone who decided to drink then drinks, as one might decide to board a train to Harrogate and board the train. I wasn’t drinking. I was being drunk through by something else. I was the instrument of my alcoholism. My alcoholism was drinking. I was the bucket into which the drink was being poured. That was a frightening realisation.
This is so frightening that I started to understand my credulity towards the specious arguments, the rationalisations, the plain nonsense that my mind would offer us as justifications for obeying the imperious impulse to drink.
What was even more frightening was the realisation, years into being in AA, that, even sober years in AA, I was talking about my past, my childhood, my upbringing, my conditioning, the values I was inculcated with, my circumstances long past, recent past, and present, and my emotions as having some sort of causal relationship with either the first drink or subsequent drinks.
Sober in AA, I was employing the same rationalisation mechanism deployed by my active alcoholism to justify drinking in advance to explain drinking in retrospect. Under the guise of ‘sharing’, of ‘carrying the message’, I was actually still propagating alcoholism in myself and amongst my fellows, an unwitting fifth column within AA.
The simple, boring truth is that the desire to drink arises because I am an alcoholic, and without a defence I will fulfil the desire.