Experiencing sadness without alcohol makes me stronger – 03/11/2024 – Life of an Alcoholic

Sadness is an important feeling to face. It is through him that I can see myself better and understand my impulses and my attempts to escape. “Study your pain so it doesn’t become a symptom,” I learned in the recovery program.

While drunk, any threat of bad weather I would run to the glass and suffocate my feelings. Numbing myself was the best and quickest way to face life’s most diverse challenges.

Experiencing frustration has always been extremely difficult for me and it still is, because only now, without drinking, can I experience this feeling. They say that a drunk has the mentality of a child. And it’s true! If I started using alcohol to anesthetize myself at 13, when I stopped drinking I simply went back to that mental age.

You know that child whose parents do everything they can to prevent him from suffering? Ideally, we don’t want someone we love to suffer, we want to spare them. But the reality is that everything we go through makes us grow and mature. Often, it is not enough for a child to hear “Stay away from the fire because it burns”, they themselves have to feel their hand burning to understand that this is not good.

I receive many messages from desperate relatives of alcoholics. They don’t know what to do when they see someone they love destroying themselves with alcohol. The truth is that no one knows what to do with drunk people and most of the time there isn’t much of a way out. The feeling is similar to trying to help a baby stop crying. Why is he snorting like that? Could it be colic, hunger, cold, any specific pain? You can’t know until you meet a pediatrician, who, through experience and clinical analysis, can identify what is going on. Drunkards and children cannot communicate properly.

I was a persistent drunk. I had to burn myself a lot to see myself as an alcoholic. It wasn’t enough that I was hospitalized once, nor that I almost died in a car accident, much less that I lost friends, work and relationships. My rock bottom was soooo deep. And no one could bear this impotence of being by my side just watching the house fall.

It is indeed a mess, the alcoholic patient is making himself and everyone around him sick. Tired. A year before I was able to enter recovery, I adopted my dog. And he was the only one who kept me company at all times during this terrible last year of damage. The animal helps a lot.

I tried to remember the lyrics of the songs that refer to drinking to overcome some pain. It is common practice and even advice to take one to pass. In other words, it is common to use the drink as an anesthetic. My issue is that I never took one. As the brilliant Ruy Castro said in his text about Sócrates here in Folha de S.Paulo, “I’m not against drinking, I’m against me drinking.”

The other day I received a message from my friend and reader Pedro, saying: Alice, is everything ok? I feel from the tone of your texts that you haven’t been very cool lately. Wow, I was impressed. I really am a little sad, but there is no better medicine than realizing that today I can communicate even in the most subtle way about how I feel.

I don’t go to the glass, I don’t go to the bar, I don’t crush my feelings in some kind of blender. Greatness is in accepting the situation, the sadness, and knowing what to do with it because I know what’s hurting, I know why I’m feeling this way, I remember exactly what happened in the last few months to make me this way.

Just yesterday I ate a tub of dulce de leche ice cream with chocolate at night because I couldn’t sleep. Sometimes I resort to sweets/ice cream to help calm me down. I keep listening to the song “Samba dabenção”. It’s better to be happy than to be sad, but facing obstacles sober makes me grow. It is very difficult to often accept situations that I cannot change, but then I go to prayer and ask for serenity. Because I know that I was often the protagonist of this part of the song: “Like these people who go around playing with life. Be careful, mate. Life is for real. And don’t be fooled, there’s only one”.

It’s okay, Pedro. I’m just facing my life without alcohol and that often hurts, but it passes. And when I go through dark times, I can help myself and come out better. People who have seen this progress throughout my recovery look at me and applaud with tears in their eyes. I always need a lot of courage and awareness.

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