I'd rather go through life sober C, than go through life drunk, trying to prove I'm not."
"I'd rather go through life sober believing I'm an alcoholic, than go through life drunk, trying to prove I'm not."
I love it when newcomers share at meetings that they don't think they are alcoholics. Sure they like to party, they admit, and perhaps they had a DUI or two, or lost a job or made a bad scene, but they can control their drinking when they have to. Eventually someone points out that people who don't have a drinking problem are rarely at meetings trying to defend or explain their drinking!
For a long time I also resisted the idea that I might be an alcoholic. The longer I stayed sober and learned about the disease, and the more I compared my behavior with the alcoholics around me, the more I had to admit that I probably was one, too. Rather than be a sentence, though, this turned out to be the key that set me free.
Today, I've stopped debating whether I'm an alcoholic or not, and I choose to live a sober life. It's kind of like that saying about whether to believe in God or not: "I'd rather live my life believing that there is a God and find out in the end there isn't, than live my life believing there isn't a God and end up finding out there is."
In the end, it's about living a good life, and that's what sobriety allows me to do.
