I sit opposite my dining companion, me with my glass of water, she with her single glass of wine. I enjoy the company, I enjoy the meal, I enjoy my water; however, the whole time – sometimes more strongly, sometimes less, but always – there is this thought in the back of my mind.
Why on earth would you do that? Why on earth would anyone drink one glass of wine? Why would you not by now be on to the second glass, the third, the fourth; why would you not already be ordering the second bottle, and indeed contemplating the whiskeys to follow?
This is a consistent thing whenever I am in the company of a “healthy drinker”, one who is happy to have “just the one”. It is one of the big things that reminds me why I do not drink alcohol, why I am today six years sober. It indicates very clearly that deep inside the dark, bottomless thirst for oblivion still remains in me.
I am less inclined these days to throw the term “recovering alcoholic” around, although that is indeed one of the things I am. My path is the path of trying to see who I am from moment to moment, of trying to emerge from the grooves – of behaviour, of thought – into which I constantly fall. So self definitions seem slightly at odds with the project.
Of course, as someone still grubbing in the lowest muds of the path, this business of escaping the bonds of patterning is more an intention than a reality. For now, it helps occasionally – particularly on each January 28 that I am blessed to mark as another year of sobriety – to remember where I have come from. To remind myself that I am a recovering alcoholic, grateful to be sober, one moment at a time.
Bardo Burner 