I see I've missed all the excitement.
I'm meant to be working (my own fault) but, as Max used to say, I wanna tell you a story.
My dad died when I was 12 and, from then on, the main male role model in my life was my mum's dad. I idolised him.
He died when I was 20. I was in Russia at the time and had to fly home specially. I got drunk in Helsinki airport and fell asleep in the toilet on the plane. I was home for about a week before the funeral and, because of ticket problems, about two weeks after the funeral.
That period is the first time I can remember going out specifically to get drunk. Every night I went to my local, sat on my own, drinking, and walked home at closing time howling at the wind at the unfairness of it all. At the funeral, though normally a beer and wine drinker, I hit the scotch hard and smoked 60 fags (I had smoked my first ever cigarette less than 6 months previously.)
I am sharing this with you all because I know for certain now what I sort of knew even then. Not one of those drinks helped with the pain, and not one of those drinks brought him back. On every walk home, the death of my granddad was no fairer than it had been on the walk to the pub.
At the same time, I effectively rendered myself useless to my mother, who had just lost her own father, less than three years after her mother. Indeed, that spell of drinking really "ramped it up" and, far from being a help to my mother, I probably started then to become an additional worry to her. I gave ruining her life my best shot for the next eight years. At my lowest ebb, my fear was not so much for myself (I kidded myself I was still young and strong, though drink had ensured that, in my mid-20s, I was neither) as for how I was hurting and disappointing my mother and how she would feel to have to bury me and to stay behind more alone than ever. That didn't stop me drinking, and the drinking didn't take away the fear. It was a particularly vicious emotional circle.
So there you go. That's my main experience of the use of alcohol to deal with sadness and lack of control. From that point on, alcohol gave me NOTHING (if it ever had) and tried to take everything.
Hope the rest of you don't have to wait 8 years to get out of that hole (which, one day at a time, is 2922 days, give or take) - and that, if it does, you are as lucky as I was and do not leave a corpse for your loved ones to bury in the process.
We can all do this, one day at a time - I am convinced to my soul that, if I can, you certainly can. What we can't do is play with it. All the time I was not taking my own alcoholism seriously, I did not know that my alcoholism was taking me very seriously indeed.
Chat later, I hope. Tomorrow is a new day.