"A Daily Reprieve"

    Diminishing returns. When drinking started in my late teens and early twenties, the positives outweighed the negatives, and by a long shot. If I weren't an alcoholic, when the scales tipped in the other direction, I would have been pro-active in cutting down or stopping drinking altogether. But that's not how addiction works. Drug abuse (alcohol is a drug) continues despite and sometimes because of negative consequences. The poison is the potion.

 

   But there's something pervasive about diminishing returns in recovery, also. When I first got sober, the positive changes were stark, bold and immediate. Then, as time went by in early recovery, the changes became less visible and more subtle.

 

   It was at this point that my gratitude for sobriety seemed to lessen. It would be at this point in my recovery where I would find myself singing, "If that's all there is, my friend, then let's keep..." drinking.

 

(Vatchi): Yes, Sotto, yours is an honest affirmation. Jim's recovery has an ebb and a flow, degrees of being unsure, degrees of gratitude and impermanence, degrees of insanity.

 

   Sotto, you too, are given a daily reprieve, if not from alcoholism, then from any one of many things. Death. If only a daily reprieve from death. Accept it graciously, Sotto. Jim is but an example. You are but an example, Sotto.

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Day 79)