Could It Be..........Happiness???!!!!!

I have felt for a while that I should write something here to try to express what I have been experiencing lately to our friends, and to my loves. I have avoided doing that each time I have approached the keyboard fearing that somehow, were I to capture what I am seeing.....so new and so fragile...somehow it might evaporate, and leave me with the emptiness, sadness, anger and shame that was my life for the last 18 months or so. Today I am going to risk it.

First perhaps in the minds of some who have followed our passage, I am today sober for my 429th consecutive day. The wild change is that I assert this fact feeling no deprivation, or anger, or diminution of my quality of life. I feel great...better than I have maybe ever in my adulthood.

The ending of my alcohol rehabilitation aftercare program, and a recent decision by the court to terminate the remainder of my probation have been a great help in my coming to this point. Those two factors have permitted me to freely stop participation in Alcoholics Anonymous. AA and rehab (while it is clear they are huge assets in the lives of many recovering addicts) have kept me focused on what I have come to think of as an alcohol-centric life. Since I was fourteen my life centered around when I was going to get to drink again...when I was going to get to "be happy" again (i. e., buzzed or loaded), and when I was going to be able to forget some terrifically painful experiences in my past. I was not aware I was self-medicating. I thought I was simply celebrating the joy of being alive. I was mistaken. Alcohol is no longer a major theme of my life or even a minor quatrain. It doesn't enter into my life from day to day.

AA and rehab support groups kept me focused on alcohol as a "cunning, baffling, powerful" kryptonite that was always lurking out there to try to ensnare me and ruin my life and even kill me. It caused me to spend several hours a week obsessing on alcohol....albeit alcohol's absence in my life. It made my life "alcohol centric" without drinking, just with the constant reminder of its power over me. I am not sure if I am powerful now with regard to my drinking. I know I have no desire to drink and I feel really healthy. I don't want to spend the hundreds of dollars each month I spent drinking. I don't want to feel as I did then. I don't want to behave as I came to when I drank, particularly since my gastric bypass surgery. I am enjoying life more now than before, and I really just don't often even consider drinking. Writing this paragraph is more than I have thought about alcohol in the weeks since I have no longer attended AA/aftercare.

Too I am freed from the cultish religiosity that is central and, I think, sadly seminal to AA. I could not buy into that at any level. It is sad that an extended grass roots support community which has such potential for good as has AA, sqaunders so much of its potential for good exploiting addicts whose lives are in crisis to achieve a cheap evangelical religious conversion. This is not at all to diminish the lives AA saves, or the gratitude I feel to AA members who did nothing but try to help me in anyway they could, and who have become abiding freinds. AA is about leading a life that is centered on alcohol and, yet, not drinking. I am, at this point, about leading a life in which alcohol is a memory.......perhaps an occasional afterthought. I am certain some may become angry with me for expressing this perspecitve. Imagine that .....me a heretic!

I don't dislike alcohol. I don't judge others who drink. I am not troubled to be around it. If there was ever a man who has no trouble with alcohol, it is I. I have loved the stuff since I was 14 and lived for it and with it until January 18, 2011. I am glad many find joy in it. I no longer do. I have lots of great drinking stories and memories to tell. I also have a few horrific stories related to alcohol as well, especially in my last days of drinking.

I have an absolutely new love relationship with the two most wonderful women. Amazingly they are my teresa and sue. It is as if I have this great new poly relationship with the two women who I would most want to have it with, and with whom I have a wonderful sense of history and a degree of knowledge and awareness that is greater than I have ever had with any other loves..... and, yet, it is new. I am amazed.

I still don't know who I am now. I do know I am glad that I am, which is a huge improvement over much of the last year and a half. I am on a quest to redefine my identity. Much of what defined my sense of self is gone. I am no longer a son except to the memories of still relatively recently dead parents. My filial experience was key to who I was in the past. I am no longer a professional advocate, and agency administrator and political leader of a grass roots advocacy movement on behalf of people with disabilities as I was for 35 years of my life. That passage ended June 2010...and it defined me greatly until then. I am no longer a young man. I seem daily to realize how long ago the key events that influenced my life and character occurred, whether due to a historical report or the death of a celebrity. I am no longer a John Wayne-like self-made, hard drinking, indomitable tough guy. That persona was smashed and is gone. I know now it was a delusion anyway. I no longer am defined by my childhood traumas. My psychotherspist who has unrelentingly and gently nurtured, cajoled, and confronted me has enabled me to get past the huge anger and shame I had regarding the legal aspects of the intervention sue and t made into my out of control life, and the related PTSD, which turned out to be rooted in very real childhood trauma...all of which led to my self-medication. The resulting health is wonderful. My pathology defined me too though, so even that huge improvement is disorienting in terms of my identity

S0 as sue and t and I move forward now, again and anew, we have to feel our way along uncertain who it is I am, and how we are effected by other major simultaneous changes like the death of t's mother, all of us aging, and the passage of life in general

I don't know who I am, but I know I am having renewed excitement once again about adult consensual spanking and D/s. However this new interest in power exchange and sadomasochistic intimacy is characterized by my being much more switchy.....by my wanting experience from both ends of the power/sensual exchange continuum, and in the middle as well.

Things are much better than I imagined they could ever be again. Everything is not easy. We have financial challenges in our new defacto retirement. I am going to undergo a total knee replacement this June, but all in all my life and our lives collectively are better than I could ever imagine they would become with what we have passed through, and I suspect they will continue to improve exponentially if our increasingly aging bodies permit that.

Thank you so much to the dedicated friends who have shared their caring and support with us here whether in kind words or confronting us with realities we needed to face. You have all given us so much.

All the best,

Tom

Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you've imagined.