I’m asked every now and then about when I finally reached out help. I can tell you that plenty of people tried to tell me to at least slow down before I ever came close to asking for help. I use to get so mad when ever anybody would say that I should take it easy or that they thought I was drinking too much. In my mind it was none of their business (and I didn’t have a problem anyways).
Looking back I now see how out of control my drinking was and how it was hurting me and those closest to me. My poor family went through hell with my drinking for years. Yeah we use to get together like any other family and have cook outs that included a lot of drinking but I was always the only one that took it too far. I have never asked them if they ever thought about doing an intervention on me. I also think that because drinking has always been such a big part of our family and my culture, being Hispanic, that I don’t know if they even knew what an intervention was all about.
I do know that eventually my family slowly pulled back from me because every time I came to their home I would just sit there and drink. I don’t want to go into details but there were a couple on incidents that I still regret to this day. The one thing that never changed was their love for me. As much as I hurt them, they never stopped loving or caring about me. They were and are still a big part of why I am still sober today. I do live each day for me and I stay sober for me, but knowing how happy they are now that I’m sober is huge.
I can only speak from my own experience so when people ask me if I might have gotten help sooner if my family and friends had done an intervention on me I can only say, I don’t know. I don’t know how I would have reacted to an intervention back then. I was so full of anger toward me and the world. I was full of hate at my father and at the person I had turned out to be. I do know that when I finally asked for help, I was ready to live. At that point there was only two ways to go for me, I could get sober and live or I could just drink myself to death.
Look, we have so many choices in life. Most of the time the choices we make are insignificant but there are a few that will change our lives dramatically. For those of us that are or have gone through addiction that choice is huge. If we decide to live, we are not only saving ourselves but we are also saving our family and friends from tremendous pain. We may not see the desperation in the eyes of our loved ones when we are trying to destroy ourselves, but we will see the joy in their eyes when we chose to live.
Don’t forget, you’re not alone!
Bio
Oscar is a thirty something recovering alcoholic. He’s been sober since 2005. You can follow his sobriety journal at Life Without Beer Goggles. Oscar also stays in touch with his readers on his Facebook page and Twitter.