Rock Bottom

Sometimes when we love, we love with everything we have; the person we place our trust in is the centre of our existence. That person becomes the reason for everything. You work, because you want to give them the absolute best you can.

You arrange your life for their convenience, you do things to try and win their love, their approval. I know this sounds unhealthy, and thinking that will not be wrong. It is. However when you are living it, it feels right.

The day I met my wife, she became my reason to live. I know now that in my alcoholic mind I did everything I could to win her approval. However we alcoholics do not do things like other “normal” people when we drink. In my case this meant that I tried to do everything I could in support. I made sure there were cooked meals for her. I made sure the house cleaning did not have to be done by her. I made sure washing was taken care of.

But what I failed to realize was that as long as I was drinking, it did not matter how much of myself I gave to her in other ways, because I was not truly giving all of myself it everything else could and would never be enough. I was not giving myself, not in the true sense of the word. Instead I gave her heartache and sorrow of a kind that would make her see the person that she fell in love with become a degenerate. And then the inevitable happened. She pushed me away. And in that I experienced rejection. Rejection that was evident in the way she talked to me and the way she made love.

Unfortunately I was not the one she was making love with. She had found another man that could give her what she truly needed. A man that could offer her a strong shoulder.

A man that could listen. A man that could give her advice. A man that would not necessarily always give her advice but also sometimes just listen. Where she could get rid of emotional baggage, where she found safety and understanding. Where she found sobriety in another human being away from the crazy world that I had led her into.

She had an affair, an affair of the worst kind. An affair where she found love.

No amount of love that I could offer in that time could have ever compared to the love that she must still have had for me, I was a weak and egocentric alcoholic. Yet she stayed. In some way I should be thankful that she found someone else to give her sober orgasms. Because that quite possibly saved my live.

When I found out about her affair. I had reached a rock bottom where my life did not just smash to pieces in seconds. I had reached a rock bottom where the one person that I had placed on a pedestal and whom in my eyes was above all suspicion in the world. In a few long soul wrecking days she became a slut to me, became human. This opened my eyes to see her human needs. This woke me out of a drunken stupor for long enough to realize that I needed help to end the insanity and self centered egotistical life I had been leading. I was confronted not only with her humanity and flaws, but also with her need for a sober man. A man that could be a man and not a bag of wind.

Thus when I sobered up I went to a place where I could find crazy people like me. People who would understand the emotional sewerage that my life had become. People who would see themselves in me.

That day my life began. That day I realized how much I did love my wife. That day that I thought everything I knew was gone.

I only now realize that I stood at the first day of the rest of my life then. The things that came after this has been utterly amazing and thrilling and life changing.

That is where my rock bottom was, where I began to become human again. The day she found honesty, was the day I found the small road to sobriety. And what a road its been.