Not Me or Not Yet?

Life is just one big list of priorities that starts with our highest priority like faith or family and dwindles down through the ranks to things that are decreasingly important to us such as paying bills or washing the car until there is no time or energy left and our lowest priorities, thing like reading junk mail or trimming our ear hair, are all but ignored. At the end of my drinking, alcohol held a very elevated place on my list of priorities second only to my closest family members that depend on me for survival. Everything and everyone else had slowly and over many years relinquished its place on my list of priorities to one of the deepest loves of my life — alcohol.

This is not a fact that I reveal with pride. As I painstakingly extract myself from the powerful pull of alcohol and my brain function gradually returns to normal, it is with great shame that I realize just how important alcohol had become to me. The condition of dependency is very, very slowly progressive. Does anyone in their right mind hope that someday alcohol will become the second most important thing in their life? It is terribly embarrassing to acknowledge this despicable fact. How did this happen? How did I get so twisted? What kind of person lets a poison take hold in that way?

The far more important question is what would have happened had I not stopped? If alcohol had successfully replaced almost all…