I thought I was mad at this fucking retard before, but this shit really takes the cake. I'm coming up on my ten year sobriety date (from alcohol, I still smoke weed occasionally, but I don't like taking more than a puff off a cart. A one gram cart will last me two to three months, and that's if I'm stressed and using it 'heavily', at least by my definition), and putting down the bottle was the hardest thing I've ever done in my life. I was a RAGING alcoholic. I drank every single day, and I'd have to buy a new handle of rotgut vodka every other day. When I say rotgut, you might think McCormicks, Taaka, or Popov. No. My drink of choice was Nikolai vodka. Eight dollars a handle, six if it was on sale. When I finally hit rock bottom, I was lucky enough that my mom took me in and made sure I stayed sober for a few days until I realized what a hell my life had turned into. I went through alcohol withdrawal. The worst night of my life was after I was back at my own place. I'd been sober a few days, and thought the worst of it was over. I woke up at maybe 3 in the morning, dying. Everything hurt, and I was scared. Scared isn't the right word, but I don't know that there actually is a word for it. I was dying, and I knew it. Knew it deeper than I'd ever known anything in my life. And I also knew that there was a way for me to survive. All I needed was some alcohol, and I would be fine. I started panicking even more. It was 3 AM, the liquor store was closed, I was going to die. But then, I though of my salvation. I could walk to the grocery store I lived near, there was no way I could drive in that state, get a bottle of mouthwash, and chug it, and I would live. I started walking towards my door, and I stopped. I realized that if staggering to a grocery store at 3 AM to chug down a bottle of mouthwash was what it took to live, I didn't want to. I laid down on the floor, put my headphones in, and started listening to Megadeth's "Addicted to Chaos" on loop until I passed out, expecting to die. Obviously, I woke up, and realized that it was the monkey on my back chimping out, trying to get booze, but it's a night I'll never forget for as long as I live.
In the decade since then, I've seen a lot of addicts. You start to notice patterns in behavior. I still remember one girl from a group that I went to meetings with for a long time. It wasn't your standard AA group, though it was still an AA group. It was a group that met at something like two AM every day, for night shift workers and others that kept odd hours. Lot of weirdos in it because of that, so while it was still an AA group, it was more of just a social gathering for people with addiction issues who kept those hours to meet up with other people who knew how much it sucked. Very informal. Anyways. This girl had been coming to meetings for a few months, and then she just stopped showing up without saying anything. That's usually a bad sign. She showed up to a week or two later, and told us what had happened. She'd been reading her copy of the big book, and stumbled across some passage. It's been a decade, and I can't be bothered to go looking, but the gist of it was "If you've gotten to this point, and you don't think that you have a problem, try going to a bar and having just one drink.". Now, obviously, that's the sort of passage that you're meant to think about, and realize "Yeah, that probably won't go well", but she tried it, went on a three day bender, and then was too ashamed to come back, or even reply to the people trying to check up on her. Her life had been getting better up until that point, and she burned just about all the bridges she'd repaired in those three days. I still remember everything about that moment, her telling us this, because there was something about her that said that she hadn't learned her lesson. It really showed me exactly what a Dry Drunk was, and just how dangerous that is.
Dry Drunks aren't 'recovered'. They aren't recovering. Dry Drunks are just Drunks that happen to not be drunk at the moment. They will look for any excuse they can to go right back to whatever their substance of choice was. They won't necessarily take the first one that presents itself, but they will be on the lookout for one that sounds good enough. I was a dry drunk for a good long while, and seeing her was one of the things that made me get properly sober. I don't mean working the steps or anything like that, though for some, that works. For me, it was coming to a realization. That my alcoholism wasn't some sort of failure of will, or lack of character, but a chemical reaction. If I put THIS substance into my body, THIS will happen. One of the people that I went to a lot of meetings with used to say something along the lines of "I am powerless over alcohol, but I've got a lot of power over my own arm.", and that's always stuck with me. I can't control myself if I start to drink, but I can make the choice to not drink.
I've seen a lot of Dry Drunks in the last decade, and I can tell you this. Crackets is one of the worst I've ever seen, if not THE worst.
Sorry for the wall of text, but that pissed me the fuck off, and addiction and recovery is something deeply personal to me.
