“The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the Broken places.”

-Earnest Heminway

After I wrote the post about Moderation Management, which I actually wrote last weekend, I decided, despite my clear opinions about it, to try it for myself on Monday night.  To say it went disastrously is an understatement akin to saying that it’s warm in the Sahara.

In my defense, if there is any defense to be made, questions lingered in my mind about whether moderation was possible for me.  Given that my relationship to Alcohol was so inexorably tied to my bipolar disorder, or rather to the lack of diagnosis and proper treatment, I wondered if, with that pesky bipolar thang  under control, I might be able to drink like a sane, reasonable person.  I wound up with my answer, and my head in a bucket.  For hours.

The next day, lying in the hospital with an IV pumping fluids, Gravol, and Toradol for my headache into my arm, I had lots of time to think.  I thought about addiction, and how no one ever wants to end up battling it, but so many of us do anyway.  I thought about how lucky I was to have recognized the toxicity of my relationship with alcohol and to have sought help, freely and on my own terms, without my ass being nailed to the wall by legal troubles or scary ultimatums in my personal life, like ‘get treatment or sign these divorce papers’.  I thought about the unequivocal closure I had gotten to the one question I would always have been asking, the nagging wondering I would always do about whether this time, even with all that had been said and done, things with alcohol and me might be different.

Somehow, I started to feel blessed.  And the blessings just kept coming.

I woke up the next morning more motivated to work on recovery than I have ever been, newly dedicated to Sobriety and convinced of its necessity for me and my life.   I reached out to counselors at my former treatment centre, and had a long talk with one of them, who said amongst other things that lapses happen, that they contain many lessons if we are willing and humble enough to learn them, and that I am very much still moving forward in my recovery.  A friend referred me to a fabulous website, http://www.hipsobriety.com, that takes the whole idea of ‘alcoholism’ and turns it on its head, and not only that makes sobriety seem fun and cool and kind of badass.  I dig badass.

Somewhere on Hip Sobriety is the fabulous statement that sobriety isn’t a sad consequence, but rather a proud choice.  This should be a rallying cry for those of us in recovery, and it will become a personal motto for me.  We are not defeated by a chronic disease and destined for a life of illness, but rather have made the decision, for ourselves and by ourselves, to kick alcohol to the curb because it adds nothing and takes away too much.  We are claiming our right to the gifts of sobriety, not sentenced to it.

This brief lapse brought all this into my life.  My sobriety cracked open, and all that awesomeness rushed in.  So here I am, sober again, grateful, and stronger at my broken place.  One day, I know, with enough work and enough faith, it won’t be a broken place any more.