I was definitely a Monday morning quarterback when he came to my drinking. In my reality, I always went for two after a touchdown, and quite often punted on second down.
Mondays would be spent admonishing my behavior, hating myself, and working out better strategies to curtail my actions in the future. Not that my weekends were blow-outs: Friday night and mid-morning Wednesday were remarkably similar. However, I did spend a fair amount of my time concentrating on how I could better control my out-of-control.
A successful alcoholic was an unknown alcoholic. Failure only occurred when someone noticed. If I could effectively liquefy my thoughts and get away with it for the day, well, I guess that was a win. As long as the outside world didn’t hear my King Baby crying, there would be no need to check the diaper.
Before the twelve steps and the program, every day was spent coming up with new play calls and schemes to hide the glaring holes in my defense. Problem number one: I never had enough men on the field. I couldn’t possibly cover everything and everyone. Hence the constant throwing of challenge flags: nothing was ever fair.
How did I learn to get out of this tragic circle of clipboard throwing? By coming to the understanding that there isn’t a giant scoreboard that everyone’s looking at when I’m on the field. For this alcoholic, it truly cannot be about winning and losing. It has to be all about how I play the game.
12 the hard way 