The following
is an excerpt from Sarah Hepola’s gut-wrenching account of the challenges she
coped with while trying to kick her alcohol addiction:
I have been thinking about that closet
recently. Friends talk to me about changes they are trying to make, and how
they are slipping, and I watch them lash themselves for it. They say things
like: I’m never going to change.
What I wish I had known when I was
drinking in that ridiculous closet is that change requires failure. It requires
screw-ups and a mouthful of grass and shins covered in bruises and I’m sorry,
but I don’t know any other way around that. It also requires time and patience,
two things I don’t particularly like, because I was raised in the school
of epiphany and instant gratification,
which is why I loved alcohol, because it was fast, immediate, pummeling.
But change is not a bolt of lightning
that arrives with a zap. It is a bridge built brick by brick, every day, with
sweat and humility and slips. It is hard work, and slow work, but it can be
thrilling to watch it take shape. I believed I could not quit drinking, that
people would not like me sober, that life would be drained of its color — but
every ounce of that was untrue. Which made me wonder what else I believed that
was untrue. What other impossible feats were within my grasp.
Read her complete Salon article here.
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is one alcohol when he or she drinks once in a while? or twice a week? the answer is no but definitely, it could be a start of an addiction.
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