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Alcohol
tom walsh
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Having grown up in an environment in which alcohol was a huge
influence (due to an alcoholic parent), I've seen first-hand the
truly devastating effects that alcoholism can have on us, even if
we aren't the people drinking it to excess. Alcohol is a
completely legal drug that changes our ways of thinking and
acting, and for many people it becomes a drug of choice that they
use whenever they feel a need to make themselves "feel
better" or to "escape" from reality for a short
while.
What they don't count on, though, are the insidious effects of
alcohol, the ways that it can take a person over and cause them to
do and say things that they would never say otherwise.
Millions of people all over the world are made miserable by
alcohol and its effects, many of them helpless children who have
absolutely no way at all to escape the abuse that they face due to
the effects of alcohol. Children lose parents to the effects
of the substance--that drunk person in the chair isn't my father
at all--and tend to start blaming themselves for something that's
completely out of their control.
Personally, I've been very fortunate to have avoided the hell of
an addiction to alcohol. I reached adulthood not drinking at
all due to my father's actions, but after living a few years in
Europe, I found that I truly enjoyed a nice glass of wine before a
meal, especially with a couple of crackers or cheese.
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But I
never go beyond that, and there is no hard liquor in our
house--there's simply no use or need for it. And I really do
feel fortunate, for picking up such an addiction can be very easy if
life has become difficult or if we're facing challenges that we
feel we can't cope with.
It's almost
kind of sad that when we search for quotes about
alcohol online, we tend to find words that make
light of the topic, jokes about how important beer
is in our lives or how stupid it is to go through an
entire day without getting drunk or how drunkenness
is such a desirable state to be in. The truth
is, though, that alcohol is one of the most common
and most predominant obstacles to living our lives
fully and happily.
We don't have to be alcoholics for alcohol to affect
our lives strongly. We don't even have to
drink a single drop for our lives to be ripped apart
by the misuse of the liquid. All it takes is
for one person in our lives to start drinking too
much for our own realities to be shaken dramatically
or even shattered beyond repair. It's
especially bad when it's a person we have to live
with in the same home, but it can be just as painful
to watch someone else fall into a downward spiral of
substance abuse and harming their loved ones as they
do so.
And the emotional and physical damage is only part
of the story--the fact is that alcohol is quite
expensive, and an alcoholic can do horrible damage
to his or her families just by the constant spending
that they have to do in order to sustain their
drinking habit. And things get worse in bars,
as each drink further lessens one's ability to make
rational decisions--in one family that I knew while
growing up, the father (who was in the military)
would often go out drinking as soon as he got his
once-a-month paycheck, and by the time he got home
sometime the next day, his entire month's pay was
gone. Try feeding a family of five on no
income for a month.
The human
being's desire to be in an altered state brought on
by intoxicants is truly a perplexing desire.
Nothing is gained by it. People use it as a
supposed escape, but we really do escape nothing
when we intoxicate ourselves--we just change our
ability to think a slight bit, and we allow
ourselves to be angry about our debt or about
someone else dumping us or about another person's
actions. We're spending a significant amount
of money just to try to avoid thinking calmly and
clearly for a while, but once the intoxicant wears
off, there we are with our problems once more, and
they're often compounded by problems that we created
ourselves while intoxicated. I don't know if
my dad drank to try to avoid problems, but he
created plenty more of them by crashing a couple of
cars and breaking his glasses several times and
causing huge amounts of stress in the family--among
many, many other problems.
Almost worst of all, when we do start using alcohol
excessively, we very often start lying to the people
whom we love, causing huge trust issues in our
relationships. We lie to ourselves most of
all, though, giving ourselves more justification for
doing what we're doing by telling ourselves that
it's okay, that we're not hurting anyone, or that
it's none of anyone else's business. But when
we start affecting other people's lives, of course
it's their business.
One of the most painful films that I've watched in a
while was Flight, with Denzel Washington,
which provides a brutally honest portrayal of a man
who allows alcohol and drugs to take over who he
is. It's not a film that I would watch again,
but it is extremely effective in showing just how
people lie to themselves and to others to cover up
their unwillingness to deal with their drinking
problems.
We have to be
very careful when we let things like alcohol into
our lives. While they seem to be quite
innocuous most of the time, they can cause us to
complicate our lives very quickly, almost without
warning at times. They can cause us to change
our behaviors, and they cause us to sabotage our
relationships and jobs. A major problem with
dealing with it, though, is that alcohol use is so
widely accepted, even to excess--it's something that
other people joke about and expect their friends to
do. There are hundreds of songs and movies
that glorify drinking and even glorify the stupid
things that people do while drunk, thus adding to
our societal perception that this is something
"normal."
But when a substance can make us behave in ways in
which we normally wouldn't behave, that can hardly
be called "normal." It's very
important that we recognize that even though
alcohol is legal and generally accepted in our
society, we need to deal with it on our own terms,
honestly and clearly, and not on anyone else's
terms. After all, we're living our lives, and
what we make of them is definitely up to us, not to
anyone else.
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The
first thing in the human personality that dissolves in alcohol is
dignity.
unattributed |
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tm |
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All contents © Living Life
Fully, all rights reserved. |
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Alcohol
ruined me financially and morally, broke my heart and the
hearts of
too many others. Even though it did this to me and it almost
killed
me and I haven't touched a drop of it in seventeen years,
sometimes
I wonder if I could get away with drinking some now. I
totally
subscribe to the notion that alcoholism is a mental illness
because
thinking like that is clearly insane.
Craig Ferguson |
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