Linda,
a little red light goes on in my head when someone says
they have two glasses of wine every day, and the first one
is to “relax”. That’s
“drinking for the effect” that alcohol produces. That’s drinking
alcoholically. Two
glasses a day is a lot of alcohol; that’s 14 glasses of
wine per week. It’s
a long, slow, subtle hook.
You’re not “abusing alcohol”, the alcohol is
abusing you.
I
am addressing this letter to you, but I write this to
everyone who has an issue or questions about alcohol.
Just
for an experiment, see if you can go without your daily
wine routine. Skip
it every day for a month, or even a week. See if you can
do it. You
might be surprised to find you can NOT skip it. You may think, “Oh, I can stop
drinking if I want to, I just don’t want to.” If you
don’t miss it, don’t need it, you’re OK. An alcoholic HAS
to drink, he has no choice; he is powerless over
alcohol. An
alcoholic will never drink HALF a glass of wine and then
walk away from it, like a non-alcoholic person can. As far as an
endorsement from your doctor is concerned, there were
cigarette ads about 50 years ago, doctors endorsing
cigarette smoking as being healthy for you.
That’s
no different from a smoker saying, “I can quit smoking any
time I want, but I just don’t want to, I like the taste of
cigarettes.” That’s
addiction.
Two
glasses of wine every day sounds like a “maintenance
alcoholic.” That’s
how much I drank. It
sounds harmless enough, but it’s not. Alcohol destroys
brain cells, and over a period of years the damage is
severe. Here’s
another experiment. Before
you have your first drink, take a piece of paper and
pencil, and write something down, just a sentence or two. Then after
you’ve consumed your first glass of wine, take the same
piece of paper and write the same sentence again. After the 2nd
glass of wine, write the sentence again. See if you
notice a difference in your 3 samples of handwriting. I think you’ll
be surprised. Back
in the days when I used to drink wine, I’d see the
difference in my ability to play the piano after the FIRST
SIP of wine. I’d
immediately change from smooth to sloppy.
Alcoholism
is a disease, just like diabetes. It is an
allergic reaction to alcohol, and a progressive disease,
it gets worse over time.
You can’t try to “cut back” and drink “just a
little”. Once
you start to drink, it destroys inhibition and you can’t
stop. There
is no cure, it doesn’t get better, it doesn’t go away on
its own. It
ultimately ends in death.
Its only cure is total abstinence. Alcohol destroys
lives -- the lives of the alcoholics themselves and all
their family members and those close to them. It destroys
families and homes and strips the alcoholic of everything
he owns, his health, his job, his spouse and children, and
his self-respect. (“His”
is not gender specific here, it could be man or woman.) I speak from
experience; I can never retrieve those years I lost. It’s a dirty
disease, just like Satan – it comes to kill, steal
and destroy.
I
look at alcohol like a cobra in a cage with the door open;
I never turn my back on it.
There is no problem that life can throw at me, that
drinking will not make worse. The next drink
will kill me.
For
anyone who is confused about this, I hope you’ll give this
some serious thought, and Linda I’ll be praying for you.
YSIC,
Diane
G.