Those who are not alcoholics often have a hard time understanding how the mind of an alcoholic works. It seems perfectly obvious to them that alcohol is a problem for the problem drinker and they just cannot get why the alcoholic can't see it. It's easy to understand this disconnect. Trying to explain alcoholism to a non-alcoholic is like trying to explain full-spectrum color sight to the color-blind.
My husband is color blind. He tells me that the grass we both see looks orange to him. How can it look orange? It's green. They are two completely different colors to my eyes. Living in a primarily orange world seems like science fiction to me. To him, it's all he's ever known. While he theoretically understands that I see something else, he's never seen the color green, so he can't even imagine what I see. I, on the other hand, have seen orange, so I can at least try to visualize it.
Similarly, I try to explain what alcohol does to me to someone without alcoholism, but they have to take my word for what I tell them. They've never felt it for themselves. I can picture life without this problem because I didn't always drink. It seems foreign to me now, because my disease is progressive and I can't go back to what I was before. It can only get worse.
Before I joined AA, there was a hole in my psyche. I tried to fill it with alcohol. I poured as much alcohol into it as my physical body could stand, but the hole was never filled. A normal person might have given up and tried something else. But my disease just tells me that I must not have drunk enough. I wanted to drink it all, every last drop of alcohol that ever was. There were times, when I was very drunk, that I would realize that there would always be more alcohol than I could ever consume, and I'd say that I had to quit. But the next day would come and there would be more alcohol, and well, I'm just not a quitter, you know?
When I first quit, I wasn't quitting for good. I didn't want to quit. But I did want to try to quit, and give it an honest try. I was willing. Something was wrong with me, and I wanted to know what it was so that I could fix it and go back to drinking, only like other people did. I could not wrap my mind around a future without alcohol in it.
For me, because I was trying hard to learn what AA was teaching me, and I was trying hard to be honest with myself for the first time in my life, it wasn't long before the sad fact that I was powerless over alcohol dawned on me. It was the lowest point in my life. There was something I could not do that most other people could. And I had to surrender to that idea, or die in denial.
The good news is that, once I really did face up to my alcoholism, life got better. For me, it got better very fast. What a relief to know that it was beyond my control. There was truly nothing I could do about it. At all. If I was going to live, I was going to have to stop trying to quit and let someone/something else do it for me.
At the time, I didn't realize how brave it was of me to literally put my fate in the hands of something I didn't understand and didn't even know if it existed. But I was scared and I did it anyway, so it was a brave act. I did know that other people had done it, people just like me, so I knew it worked, somehow, and it might work for me, too. I took my mustard seed of faith and rode it for all it was worth.
Today, I have a better understanding of the ego, and in particular, the alcoholic ego that is always with me but is not "me". I am not my disease anymore than I am my finger. It is part of the makeup of my psyche and my physiology, and if the real me, the sober me, does not pay attention and let this thing that works work, I can be lost again, very quickly.
So, I have to stay in the now. I can look at the past for instruction, and I can look to the future as a rough guide, but I have to live my life in this very moment. It's all I have, and it's a tremendous gift to be able to do this. If I don't, I will die. But as long as I do, I'm living a life that is greater than I ever could have imagined. I live in a world where enough is enough, no matter what it is, because I know for a certainty that I'm exactly where I'm supposed to be.
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