Page 219 - The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous

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204 ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS
Headstrong and willful, I rushed from pleasure
to pleasure and found the returns diminishing to the
vanishing point. Hangovers began to assume mon­
strous proportions, and the morning drink became an
urgent necessity. “Blanks” were more frequent, and I
seldom knew how I’d got home. When my friends
suggested that I was drinking too much, they were no
longer my friends. I moved from group to group—
then from place to place—and went on drinking. With
a creeping insidiousness, drink had become more im­
portant than anything else. It no longer gave me
pleasure—it merely dulled the pain—but I had to
have it. I was bitterly unhappy. No doubt I had been
an exile too long—I should go home to America. I did.
And to my surprise, my drinking grew worse.
When I entered a sanitarium for prolonged and
intensive psychiatric treatment, I was convinced that
I was having a serious mental breakdown. I wanted
help, and I tried to cooperate. As the treatment
progressed, I began to get a picture of myself, of the
temperament that had caused me so much trouble.
I had been hypersensitive, shy, idealistic. My inability
to accept the harsh realities of life had resulted in a
disillusioned cynic, clothed in a protective armor
against the world’s misunderstanding. That armor had
turned into prison walls, locking me in loneliness—and
fear. All I had left was an iron determination to live
my own life in spite of the alien world—and here I was,
an inwardly frightened, outwardly defiant woman,
who desperately needed a prop to keep going.
Alcohol was that prop, and I didn’t see how I could
live without it. When my doctor told me I should
never touch a drink again, I couldn’t afford to believe