The drinking again accelerated.  What had once been a few to relax a couple times a week became an every night event.  The frequency was greater and so was the amount consumed at each sitting.  Being numb and suffering was better then fully awake and suffering.  My old cure had found a new purpose, anestitizing a downward slide. 

 

Six months later my health could no longer support the drinking.  I had hit bottom.  Being sober was intolerable and so was being drunk.  I had an understanding of the expression 'Between a rock and a hard place' I had never before imagined. 

 

I knew to drink meant a very dark and possibly short future and to not drink felt like a fate worse then any other.  Somewhere in the darkness I remembered a seemingly long gone hope to be better.  Perhaps not drinking was the answer to again feeling alive. 

 

Somewhere during the night of January 31st that year I took my last drink*.  I realized that to drink ultimately left me with no hope, being sober left me with the possibility of hope.  I slept for a week.  I expected things to get better, they didn't.  Things got worse at first then much worse in a short period of time.  My body and my spirit had no idea how to live this way.  That first year without alcohol was the worst of my life. 

 

That year I dove into gaining a spiritual relationship with a higher power.  I discovered that the main block I had with the idea of God was every one else's ideas about God.  I let all my preconceived notions behind and read every book on the subject I could get my hands on. 

 

This year I also set forth on cleaning up my past.  I knew that, like a shopkeeper with a stock room full of un-sellable items, it was necessary to get rid of what was not working and make way for what would. 

 

Somewhere around one year sober I started to feel better.  Don't get me wrong, I still felt bad, but for the fist time in a very long while things were headed in the right direction. For the next several months I noticed improvement, the strategy I was using was working.  I dove into the three-pronged plan with gusto.  I stopped putting things in my body that did not belong there.  I started getting rid of the things in my psyche that were not working.  All the while searching for a spiritual connectedness.  Perhaps I had finally found the path back clarity. The rode to recovery had finally begun.

 

 

*I had up until this point also been smoking a pack a day for the previous ten years.  One month after I quit drinking I also quit smoking.  The cessation of putting this toxicity into my body was a vital step in my recovery from Multiple Chemical Sensitivity.