Unmanageable

Step 1 - We admitted that we were powerless over Alcohol, and that our lives had become unmanageable.

Unmanageable.  Unable to Manage.  We could not manage our lives. 

I've never had trouble with the first part of Step 1.  I am powerless over Alcohol.  If I'm drinking, Alcohol is controlling me.  The only power I have over Alcohol is managing to get the glass to my mouth and pouring it in.  So that's the easy half of the step.

Admitting that my life had become unmanageable was harder.  I always compared my life to others, so if I had a good paying job, a car, a home, food on the table and clothes on my back, my life was good.  So what if my relationships with friends and family suffered?  So what that my spiritual life was almost non-existent and that I had no real relationship with a higher power?  So what if my physical condition was not the best?  Who cares that I was physically and emotionally exhausted?  I was working, I had a place to sleep and food to eat, and I had all my basic human needs met.  I could function day to day at work with no problems.

You see, I didn't see how my deep unhappiness was a sign that my life was unmanageable.  I didn't understand that the more I took on to fill the time and emptiness, the more overwhelmed I was feeling, the more I was making my life unmanageable.  The more I tried to help others and neglected helping myself, the less I was able to manage my own damn life.  And that's where the slide into drinking started for me this time.  I was so busy doing the things I thought I should, doing what everyone else wanted me to do or needed me to do, giving of my energy over and over without stopping to pause or even thinking of the fact that I needed to pause.  I was allowing people and things to suck the life out of me, and then I started to try to fill that hole up with junk food and alcohol.

I'm certain there is someone out there who's reading this and saying to themselves, "what a damn whiner!"  Yes, I know I am an extremely fortunate drunk.  I am grateful every day for the good things I have in my life, and I write it out every day that I'm grateful for what I have, and for what hasn't happened to me.  I'm grateful for the alcoholics who went low bottom before me, who got there, who reached out to other alcoholics and helped them before they got to quite that low, and those folks who went and helped people before THEY got as low, and so on and so forth until someone reached out to me before I ever really got into too much trouble, before I got a DUI or lost a job, before I ever got arrested for acts I did while drunk...someone who recognized that it wouldn't take much more before I was heading on the slide to the bottom and cared enough to point out how my life was unmanageable.

I joke that I can only be organized in one aspect of my life at a time, and right now that aspect is my work life.   It's not true, though.  I'm a damn brilliant person.  If I spent the energy I could really organize most of my home, my work life and my social life and have a lot more harmony in my life.  It's just that right now, my life is unmanageable.  But it won't always be that way.