It has been almost one year since I stopped drinking.

February 6 will be the one year anniversary of the last day I drank.

When I drank, I was a suicidal knock-out drinker. I would drink at least 12-20 24's (24-40 beers) just on days (or half days) of stabilizing, then I would pass out, wake up and pop some librium or tranxenes. I would then try to wait at least 12 hours, but usually would start drinking 5-6 hours later as the benzo wore off. I did this for about 7-8 years, since before I was even 21. At times I couldn't even drink beer and had to switch to hard liquor. Toward the end I was drinking 150% alcohol everclear, to about the equivalent of 40-60 beers in a 5-6 hour binge. I remember going to a rehab center (big mistake, disease model and 12 step bullshit) where I blew a .24 when I arrived. I wasn't even halfway into my drinking and was still walking and talking perfectly fine.

The primary reason that I quit drinking was that I could not take the suffering caused by it. Between drinking episodes, usually beginning only a few hours after my last drink, I would feel terribly ill, torturously anxious and stressed out, physically destroyed and psychologically desperate - feelings of doom, dread and panic would engulf me. I had actually began experiencing this in the first few years of my drinking and decided I would quit back when I was about 23 years old. The frequent failings almost led me to suicide many of times. I still don't know why I'm still there.

The way I was successfully allowed to finally quit was because I had grown so sick that I just could not drink. I seriously couldn't. I couldn't eat, either. I could hardly move or breathe. This got me past the delirium tremens. When I finally came out of that, I was so fried that maybe a month went by on it's own before I realized that I hadn't been drinking. The first few months were really easy because of this reason, and whatever machine-like thing in my brain that kept running to drive me to alcohol had just stopped. I keep it stopped by just not drinking. My addiction went from being physical, to psychological. Now, there is nothing forcing me to drink. I always know that I am one decision away from going through that all over again and probably dying from it (I really don't care, I just said that to be dramatic.)

In this time I have been sober now I have gone absolutely nowhere in life. I've just taken the SSI $ that I had blown on alcohol and just blew it on weights and training equipment, and a guitar and computer. I'm still desperately lonely, still afraid to try to go out in the world, still rotting in my parents attic with a life worse than death.

And, to top it off, any day now someone from the state will come and turn me into a cash cow and I will be forced to take the same tortuous neuroleptics that fucked me up as a child and led to all of this. ... The world I live in.