You’ve probably heard the saying, “if you think you have a problem, you probably do”, and as I get older, I am definitely starting to buy into the fact that it just might be true, but we’ll get more into that later.

Have you ever been out somewhere in public and you see someone and you’re like “fuck, that could be me in X amount of years”? No? Well it’s god damn terrifying and I don’t recommend it. If you have, then you’ll probably be able to relate to what I am about to blabber on about.

From time to time I’ll be out somewhere and see someone that by first glance appears to have lived a hard life (one much harder than my own at least). It’s usually some middle aged man coming out of the corner store with his arms full of tallboys at 9 am, but in this particular case, it was an older gentleman at the grocery store later in the evening on a Tuesday. This man appeared aged, weathered and worn out, but still somewhat put together despite this and when I looked down, his small shopping cart was full of bottles of wine. I am talking like 10 to 15 bottles of wine, not organized in a case or anything, kind of just scattered about in the cart.

My first thought wasn’t “damn that’s a lot of wine”, it was “damn, that could be me one day”, the exact same thought I’ve had seeing some middle aged man coming out of the corner store with his arms full of tallboys at 9 am. The irony of seeing this man with all of the wine was that I was at that same grocery store scurrying around trying to find some sale beer from the booze section that I tried the day before, liked, but had since run out of because I lack the ability to moderate myself.

See the thing about me is for the most part, I am an all or nothing kind of guy, for better, and mostly for worse. For instance, if I am trying to get in shape, I’ll try to just start running for miles haphazardly without gradually increasing the amount of stress I am putting on my very, very out of shape body. Last time, this resulted in a stress fracture in both of my legs in nearly the exact same spot. When being treated by doctors, they looked at me like I was a fucking idiot, because well when it comes to this type of shit, I am.

Let’s just say that if there is a bag of chips around that I have taken a liking to, I am eating them, probably all of them, in probably one or two sittings. Espresso? Four shots with whole milk over ice. I’ve been known to do upwards of three of those in a day. I tend to be the same way with alcohol. I don’t drink all of the time, I don’t have to drink, and I don’t feel particularly bad when I decide not to drink. However, when I do drink, it’s typically in binge fashion, and typically beer. One is never enough, and two is too much because it turns into eight. I might drink every day for a week, and then not at all for a month.

Let’s just say moderation isn’t my forte.

This becomes particularly problematic as alcoholism also runs very deeply into both sides of my family, and has wreaked immense havoc creating generational trauma that will probably truthfully never get sorted out. My brother and I are left trying to wade through the chaos that was the childhood of our parents, trying desperately to circumvent all of this having a negative affect on our own children.

The thing is, there has been no rock bottom, just the inability to moderate. I’m not on my third DUI, have never lost a job, friend, or relationship due to alcohol, don’t get into fights at bars, never been in a domestic altercation because of alcohol, been mean to the kids because of alcohol, etc. In fact, I don’t think my kids have ever even seen me drunk, or even moderately intoxicated. I’ve read that this isn’t all that uncommon, and that you can absolutely not hit “rock bottom” per say, and still have an overall negative relationship with alcohol (or other things) as a whole.

I, for the most part, am very self ware of what’s going on, and how it can and likely will cause issues if left untethered, and I think that is probably part of the reason why it’s so easy to see myself in these individuals. It’s maybe my brains way of kindly saying “see, if you continue to fuck around, you’ll eventually find out”.

So to the guy with a cart full of wine at the grocery store, I hope I was wrong about you, and that you’ve never had to find your rock bottom and that you were just buying all of that wine for an upcoming event or party you are planning to have, and it was just my brain trying yet again to rein in my inability to live in moderation.

Only time will tell I guess.