I Don't Want to Be an Alcoholic

A few days after writing "I am an alcoholic" to my wife, I started objecting to the word.

That might look like denial from the outside.

Maybe somebody else would hear it that way.

But it doesn't feel like denial.

I'm not saying the problem is smaller.

I'm saying I don't want the problem to become my identity.

Nobody says heroinholic.

Nobody says cocaineholic.

If somebody becomes addicted to another substance, we can say exactly that.

They became addicted to it.

So why should alcohol get to turn itself into a noun for the entire person?

I became addicted to alcohol.

That sentence makes more sense to me.

The funny thing is that I still wouldn't go back and change the message I sent my wife.

"I am an alcoholic" was what I needed that night.

It was brutal.

It was difficult to wriggle out of.

It cut through something.

Now, days later, I'm already pulling the language apart and asking questions.

That's probably very me.

I analyse everything.

I'm interested in why we use certain words, what they make us believe, what happens in the brain, why one person can stop drinking because they simply don't like what alcohol does to them while another person can know perfectly well what it's doing and still have an internal salesman working overtime.

I'm reading about it.

I've gone through alcohol books and started another.

I'm reading This Naked Mind and finding the different way it looks at beliefs around alcohol genuinely interesting.

I'm looking at AA even though I've never naturally thought of myself as an AA person.

My sister has told me to get my arse into a room with actual people who understand this, regardless of whether every part of AA fits me.

I'm looking properly at Moving On too.

I'd been treating it almost as the building where I see my recovery worker once a week, when there are groups and other support around me that I've never really used.

SMART interests me.

So does the psychology.

So does art therapy.

So does the question of why talking about all this suddenly feels so good.

I don't need to decide today what label I wear for the rest of my life.

I know the important part.

Alcohol got its claws into me.

And I don't want it there anymore.