What if you had a long-time friend that you trusted and relied on for many years. Suddenly you realize that this friend has betrayed you, abused your trust, cheated you and those you care about out of the good life you deserve. What an awful feeling! You've let yourself be duped, played for a fool! In the face of all the evidence, you want with all your heart to believe that your friend could not possibly betray you that way. You just can't accept it.
For me, alcohol is like that trusted but abusive friend—the Bernie Madoff of beverages. This blog is called "Our Unfaithful Friend" because, just like the investors whose life savings disappeared in Madoff's Ponzi scheme, I still find it hard to accept that something I trusted so much could be so treacherous.
How could I have been so stupid, especially since I thought I was so smart? Well, of course, alcohol use makes you less smart than you are, all the while making you think you're more smart than you are.
What a prescription for disaster! A cocktail of impaired ability to choose wisely, shaken or stirred with a jigger of reckless confidence.
It's terribly difficult to admit to yourself that you've been wrong about something and accept the loss you've suffered from it. But you have to make that break so you can go on.
You need to mourn the death of that dream world. I still yearn for it sometimes, but it's dead to me. In a world painted in pink champagne, everything is pretty but nothing is beautiful—craving without love, being without living, indulgence without happiness.
Yesterday was my 65th birthday spent happily with my lovely wife on a short, alcohol-free fugue to Montauk on Long Island. I look at the photos we took and I see no trace of the chronic sadness you would find in photos of me when I was drinking.
My whole life could have been like that if I'd never used alcohol, but at least I'm free of it now. Better late than never.
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