Processing Life ’Before’ And ’After’ Alcohol

The buzzing as the fly desperately tries to escape the maze of my mother-in-law’s house sounds like a man leaning on a jackhammer in downtown LA. Of course, I’ve heard the sound thousands of times, only today, as someone that doesn’t drink alcohol, I listen to it, I find empathy with it, and I pose the question, “ Why does it make me want to stand in the middle of a busy Fairway?” In ‘Nature’, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s first treatise, he says: “Good thoughts are no better than good dreams unless they are executed!” But the thought does come first, and when I was drinking, my thoughts did need executing, but not in the form of affirmative action, but at the end of a rope. “Thoughts! You are to be hanged until you are dead, dead, dead!” Today, I am switched on. I am like a locomotive, when before I was a man eaten alive by irrational motive. I am a set of Bose cans screwed into a Bang & Olufsen sound system, when before I was those foam things plugged into a Sony Walkman, spouting nonsense that belonged in a toilet cistern. Back then it was about me. Today, it’s about you. And you. You. You. And You. Back to my old buddy Ralph, and he was on to something. Thoughts turn into feelings that turn into actions - and for that sequence to knit together like DNA you need awarenesses of self and the surrounding world, acceptance of your ailments, and the bravery and courage to commit to change. And you get that by making a choice. One choice. To stop drinking alcohol. Look, man, I know that it feels strange; that you think all of your friends will think you’re deranged, and you are the white outline hanging at the end of the shooting range. But it's time you changed. What changes when you become someone that doesn’t drink alcohol? Everything. Everything man. Striver Glynis asks, “I read somewhere that a good question to ask yourself is: “what does my life look like before alcohol, and what does my life look like after alcohol?” I can’t get my head around the question… What do you make of it? Is it simply an answer like “Before I have my first drink I am feeling ‘xyz’… and after I drink a bottle of wine I say hurtful things, and my head hurts,” or do you think it goes deeper? The whole picture of life with or without alcohol? I really like the question and am pondering over the answer in relation to my ‘whole life’ before and after… And that’s what we talk about in today’s podcast. The Truth About Alcohol We Are Not Alcoholics, And we Refuse to be Anonymous Join Us & Our Community TTAA Taster: http://www.thetruthaboutalcohol.co.uk/p/TTAA%20Taster TTAA Intensive: https://www.thetruthaboutalcohol.co.uk/p/TTAAIntensive Strive Community: https://strive.thetruthaboutalcohol.co.uk/