First meeting

I had my first meeting with the adviser today, and it went okay. I'm not going to say very much yet since it was literally only an hour ago and I need a lot more time to think about things first. In the space of an hour though we covered quite a bit, much of it a repitition of what was said at the first appointment, but the odd comment here and there gave me food for thought. Most importantly it dispelled the lingering fear I had that it would be totally futile; even on the steps towards the door, I was thinking I surely sit somewhere in that horrible middle bracket of people with problems that are neither too extreme to warrant a bluntly extreme response nor too bland to warrant solution by rote, instead sitting somewhere on a vague middle line of irritating uncertainty for all concerned. However, the effect of the meeting was to remind me that sometimes I take my self-perception too factually and that other people can have useful input now and then.

From what I gathered it will be a fairly informal thing, just an hour or so of talking and trying to understand the causes of my thoughts and behaviour. That was pretty much exactly what I was looking for since for so many years I've hardly ever spoken about any of this and even until very recently I've been keeping things secret because of the damage that being honest does to the rest of your life. Even now, you can tell I still have doubts about whether anyone else can help me - my instinct (as with everything else in life) is that if I need a job doing, I'm best doing it myself, so I have a resistance to asking for help from anyone. I think she understood the benefit of me being able to be free to talk without it coming back to make things worse, though. There'll be analysis of the problems and the patterns and aims for the future; that kind of thing. I didn't have a long time to explain why I was there, so the message I got across was that in the last five years or so, my whole social life has become entwined with drinking and now I feel both trapped and lost whenever I try to cut back or stop - and that's something she understood straight away, so it's a start. From what I briefly mentioned about how hectic my social life is at work and home I think I sounded like an international playboy so the stuff about how I drink to overcome shyness will have to be a surprise for another day.

My one real hope from it all is to know the truth about the way I am. I have my own views about what I do but I don't know other people's and I certainly don't know those of people who work with alcoholics every day; there must be something I can learn from them that'll help me in future.

The German trip went okay, in terms of drinking. I could have done a lot better, I could have done a lot worse. I suppose it depends very much upon what better and worse are, and I think one of the problems here is that my perceptions of that very often collide with other peoples'. I must get far too wrapped up in my self-analysis sometimes to see what my behaviour looks like to other people because I'm sometimes baffled by how I'm told I looked compared to what was going on in my head. That's getting off the subject and into the realms of analysing the sober me, though.

Christmas will be a funny one, I'm sure. I'm not entering into making predictions and binding myself to obligations, because I know for sure that it's in my character to rebel and that includes against myself. It seems better then to just go with the flow and try my best. I'm not going on a few things I normally do, but the lessons of the last few weeks are that even then I can still come close to ruining things, so I'll just have to keep biding my time until the next meeting.

Rock bottom

These confessionals are tricky to know where to begin, so it seems best to just state a few facts and let this flow from there. When I started this a year ago, writing about what was going on at the time proved as cathartic as writing always has done for me. I hope this is still the case as I've contributed very little to the web since then - mostly, I think, because I've been a predominantly happy chappy.

Alas that is the case no more, as a problem has reared its head. (I wouldn't say I'm intensely unhappy either, but then a deep down analysis of the vagaries of my mood isn't what this page is about.) If you've read any of the prior posts on here, you'll know that I've had a problem with drinking for a while now. If you haven't read them, go have a look for an idea of where I was a year ago with it all.

I did a month off drinking and at the time that felt like a success. Unfortunately, since then my drinking has caused problems to me and to others and it finally hit breaking point this weekend just passed. Cue one very drunken argument with her dearest to me, a day spent coming to terms with thoughts of being alone again, a day off work laid motionless thinking about things, and then today.

Today I went to see one of Blackburn's alcohol misuse teams (yep, one of). The first trigger for this, to be honest, was the intense sense of panic I felt at the thought of losing her. My immediate reaction, as always, was to assume blame and think logically what I should do to fix the situation.

A little later, going on in to a long sleepless night characteristic of a body recovering from a binge, I laid thinking about what had gone on, trying to piece things together. It's one of the most difficult parts about drinking too much - sometimes you can't trust your opinion of whether you were in the right or wrong. Over the next few hours I drifted back to events from the past. The same conclusion threw itself up more times than not - I'd caused a problem by being so drunk I didn't have any recollection of being in control of my actions. These times stand out to me because I'm normally quite a peaceful man so they bob up and down in memory like a flashing buoy in the ocean.

I think I've never had to face up to the way I behave because I maintain a large circle of friends and family so any one person's exposure to this kind of mad behaviour is limited. The exception is her, who over more than a year has witnessed a fair few incidents.

The sense of guilt and remorse I've felt since I seemed to see those incidents in a new light for the first time, is difficult to express. I think it explains one of the two motivations I have for taking this so seriously this time, and involving professionals and by extension my GP and people close to me, which is that I need to know fully again what kind of person I am sober. People tell me all the time that I change, and my reaction is always "well yeah, everyone changes after they've drunk" - but like I said before, I can't trust my drunk opinion enough to judge other people's opinion of me. I need to know things against the great leveller of being sober to know how right or wrong I am. I want to know if me drinking too much is the cause of our problems, or if it's something else - that's probably an extension of my desire to fix everything and get a true answer at all costs. My belief at the moment is that the variance in my character and behaviour after a drink probably accounts for two thirds of the problems we have, with the rest being either down to her being in a crap mood or one of those genuine disagreements that crop up from time to time. I can't know or prove this, though, until I remove them from the equation.

The second motive is, well, a kind of grim acceptance that I'm hurting myself. I've been able to ignore certain things for quite a while now, for various reasons, but recently they've all begun to catch up with me. I've developed an excellent talent in keeping the separate parts of my life ticking over just well enough to avoid messing them up, to give me enough time to fit drinking in too. Alas, even after perfecting the art it becomes so intensely wearsome at times that I can't take it any more. I've also developed a strong sense of self-loathing in a way I'd grown very unfamiliar with in recent years. I think I despise weakness in people so much that seeing myself being weak and lieing to myself constantly makes me feel sick about myself.

My intention at the moment is to stop, indefinitely. The guy today said doing that can be dangerous, but I've done it before and indeed it's two days since I've touched anything already. It feels like a bad time of year to do it, but I honestly feel like a long break is the best way for me - and I know I need someone's help to manage it, because intellectually I always reason that I can do it myself, but drinking isn't much of an intellectual opponent and usually beats me down with iron fists after two rounds. I need to know whether this fear I've never lost that I'm boring when I'm sober is true, or if it's just a remnant from how shy I was 10 years ago. I think I've been weak in relying on drink to carry me through social occasions and give me a break from the whirlwind in my head 24/7, so I need to experience life just as I am naturally. My aim with this blog is threefold, really: 1) to stop me keep on lieing to myself, and bring it into the open, 2) as a way for me to keep in touch with the people who I've chosen to share this problem with, and 3) for me to explain and look into a lot of the things I've always wondered contribute to a problem like this.

In a funny way, for a split second today while I was sat answering questions about whether I was planning to self-harm and whether I'd ever used a weapon, I thought that all of this at least gives me something constructive to think and write about, and it might even make a good dissertation topic. We'll see what comes out over the next few months.

Tomorrow: where I think all this began.