I booked my appointment for detox, followed by the rehab, for tomorrow morning.
I’ve been a hopeless, helpless drunk for the last 5 years (yikes), 5 years down the tank. With a couple of minor exceptions, I’ve been jobless for the last 3. I quit the profession I loved so that I could drink more (it was not a profession where one can have any alcohol in his bloodstream). I got married to the woman I love recently. She and my parents claim I have so much promise that goes wasted on alcohol. I don’t see it that way. I see a deep well of hopelessness. There is a severe stigma for alcoholics that is amplified for alcoholics in my beloved profession. Perhaps it is deserved. The one mistake I’ve made in my attempts to get better was analytic criticism of AA. I’ve always complained about its Christian roots (I’m Jewish) and unscientific cult-like basis, but what better alternative have I done that has actually worked? For the last 5 years, I have been sober for stretches of 7 and 9 months, with odd days in between. I’ve been mostly agnostic my whole life, but my good Christian friend suggests that maybe God will help me through my prolonged crisis. Everyone in my family is either a mathematician or physicist, and I suppose I view the world in a very deterministic, non-spiritual manner - for the feeling of spirituality is merely a particular pattern of neural activity in secondary cortical areas. Maybe I lam wrong to view the world this way, and some sense of spirituality can help. But I cannot get around the many falsehoods spoken in AA, such as “alcohol is an allergy.” No, an allergy is one of the four immune hypersensitivity reactions. Also, I have trouble seeing the relationship between sobriety and God. Lastly, AA has no clinical evidence basis to it. Then again, perhaps I must stop thinking critically and just let go.
In any case, I’m off to my third Rehab this year (I hadn’t tried it before). I hope it sticks this time