I Quit Drinking 13 Years Ago - Something Nobody Warned Me About!

So the first one is honesty.

i am not a dishonest person as as a rule right you know that's the problem i think it's one of the biggest problems with this you know a lot of my values or three of my biggest values are to try and be as honest as i can especially with myself to be sincere to have that sincerity and to live with a good heart right to try to be the golden rule doing to others as you would have them doing to you right um so I can only say that I behaved dishonestly when I was drinking.

And because you are trying to...

It's not only about what you're drinking, it's how you're drinking, it's who you're drinking with, it's the amount of time that I spent in the pub and just different things that I would say and do that were dishonest.

And not in a conventional way that you're deliberately telling lies, but you're just covering up things.

You're not... telling the truth and especially to yourself, right? And I think it comes down to a lot of this is down to self-preservation.

You know, we don't want people to think badly of us.

We don't want to think badly of ourselves.

We don't want to look in the mirror and go, you know, you're an awful fucking asshole.

Do you know what I mean? And a lot of the time that is you're preserving yourself and you're preserving your own dignity and your own kind of your self-esteem to a certain degree, even when all of those things are falling away and you know it, right? But you still will lie to yourself because you don't want to crack the mirror in front of you.

The more you drink, the more that you drink.

The longer you drink, the more that you can tolerate.

So the more that you drink.

And the more that you drink, the more that you do other stuff as well that is just not part of the person.

You become a drinker in all senses of that word.

There isn't a straight line between the person who starts out drinking and the person who ends up in the doorway sleeping in the street because he's been drinking.

It's a very crooked line.

It goes all over the place and there's a lot of different signposts on the way pointing to that person, pointing to that direction where you're going to go and there's a lot of opportunities to change.

But as you're going down, behaviours change, habits change, you take on more habits, you lose other behaviours, your values, your beliefs change.

And I think...

One of the things about this that you really understand earlier on in this journey is once you start to get honesty about yourself, not with other people, right? I'm not talking about other people.

I'm talking about you looking at yourself in the mirror and you saying the things that you're saying to yourself, the beliefs that you have about yourself, the values that the beliefs that you have about your own values, the values that you have that you really act out on every day, not the ones that you say you have and the airy-fairy ones that we all have, and I'm not saying I have all those things as well.

Being honest, that's the biggest antidote to any fear that you can have about this journey.

I think a lot of the reason why we're fearful is because we have to start facing those things within ourselves facing the emotions that we've been hiding away from, facing ourselves and trying to be happy without the thing that we've accustomed ourselves to being happy about or being happy with.

So you get rid of the gap between who you are and who you pretend to be.