Throwing In The Towel

I mark my sobriety every year by the age of my youngest daughter, I am one of the lucky ones – she is now seventeen.
It strikes me that the conflict analogy most often used with regard to recovery from alcoholism the ‘battle’ with the bottle, the ‘fight’ against drink is an unhelpful one. This is a battle that cannot be won and therefore a fight best not entered into. I say this from painful experience because I climbed into the ring in this contest many many times and suffered some fearful batterings in a mismatch that would only ever have one outcome. The truth is that it is only when one refuses to compete and throws in the towel that recovery can truly begin.
When I stopped drinking I truly believed that I was entering what could be described as a ‘greyscale’ world, a world where everything would be boring, dull and uninteresting but things were so bad I was willing to live with that. Examining that kind of thinking from where I am now only serves to confirm what many people forget, that as well as being a physical illness alcoholism is most certainly a mental illness, how else can you account for such a warped worldview.
To those of you struggling out there I can only tell you that if you throw in the towel and are willing to truly and deeply change your mind, by which I mean change your way of thinking about alcohol and your relationship to it, there is a wonderful, bright, technicolour world out here
full of possibilities that you never thought existed.
One other thing, I don’t worry who knows I am an alcoholic, it is a part of me. I now look on my years of active alcoholism as a crucible through which my present character has been refined.
One tip though, don’t wait too long - some die in the fire.

Charlie Orr (51), former Detective Lothian and Borders Police

First Published in The Scotsman 2004