One cool thing about stopping drinking alcohol after your body has become so used to it over time, is you experience a kind of euphoria. At least I do, and I’ve read this is a common experience. It is because the alcohol has been more or less permanently suppressing your nervous system for months, years, and you adapted to living in that somewhat depressed-suppressed state. Alcohol is a downer drug, although it also has a somewhat opposite effect in the short-term. Gets you excited and energized for an hour or two, but if you keep going or wait for that to wear off them you just get tired, pass out, lazy, or whatever.
Over years your entire neurology becomes energetically suppressed, although you might not realize it because you just seem normal more or less. It seems normal to you anyway. But quit drinking and by the third day you might feel this large surge of happiness and energy as your brain and nerves kick up into higher gear, finally free of the suppressing effects of the alcohol.
Apparently this can be dangerous, the energetic release can be too much and cause physiological problems and even psychological problems. Best to wean off the drinking if you are worried about that. In extreme cases hardcore alcoholics can die if they suddenly stop drinking, which is crazy. But assuming you’re somewhere between raging decades-long alcoholic and casual day drinker, quitting cold turkey can feel really good.
I am nowhere near that extreme, apparently it’s possible to drink 1/2 to 1 liter of whiskey a day for years and still be nowhere near it. Amazing really.
The “secret” (I hate using that phrase, ever since that book came out) but really in this case it is sort of a best kept secret, which maybe the better AA leaders and sponsors know about, is in order to make a change like this stick (such as quitting a powerful “addiction” (another word I find useless, or worse than useless)) you must integrate the new you into your existing personality. There must be a bridge wide enough to connect the two in your soul, in the most essential parts of your self.
Find a way to visualize yourself the way you want to be, but you also need more than just powerful images and strong willpower. Environmental influences help keep this on track because they come with counter-incentives to the incentives you are trying to resist. That also helps. But as the saying goes, “once an addict always an addict” this is true only for those who merely struggle to resist, not for those who actually change and become new again.
How can you change who you are like that? It’s not that difficult, but it helps to know what you are doing. Be conscious and intentional about exactly the process. Otherwise it is accidental and ex post facto stumbling here and there, learning through pain as it were. Pain is far from the best teacher, but for those without conscious awareness and clear intention over their actions I suppose pain might be the quickest way out of their personal hells. Nature does seem to have a way of punishing “low consciousness”, although understanding the nature of intelligence sheds quite a bit of light onto this.
Humanize, I really go for that, except I have been told I am a chip off the old Germanic block that I mix with the self degrading Jew of my saintly mom, who was an angel in disguise and I mentioned that in the short decade or so I have had residency there.
Been drinking since 1944 when my dad, who was in an SS situation, bless his soul an admitted neophyte, if that is a word even relevant to what’s at hand and been drinking since.
Cause: there was beer but no water in those harrowing years to keep one alive, so I guess I WAS a happy baby.
Later when having inkling of what a hippy baby can consists of, I mentioned to Larenghetti of some muse(ich) that having with booze and he says join my poetry workshop.
Then on top of that, I was reminded by ‘Howl’s author that if you need to drink , don’t do it in public , but do it in private for the sake of said music. Now that Ginsburg saying that as well his lover whose name , but just remembered as : Peter Orlovsky, was of Russian Jewish ancestry, and he says “I could not have driven a bus in the city of angels for bear 30 years as you have done.
Others say you are not original , as if intimating I tried to fireshadiw some on the road type experience.