Hello. No worries, I don't think his drinking is my fault whatsoever.
So. The night after his last bad episode, we were watching TV together and talking, and we saw some LiveStrong commercials, about different athletes that have survived cancer, and were talking about hope, blah blah.
And he says he wishes he had been a better man about handling his own situation. That he handled it with drinking, and he proceeded to talk about all of that in a mature sincere manner that I found surprising. He told me he thinks he was addicted to his painkillers at the end of the year (which I also thought), and then started drinking a lot of hard liquor to compensate for going off the drugs. And he knows it was too much and it did affect the family, and he was sorry for that. He says he's quit drinking liquor (still drinks beer, but the fallout is much less horrible when he drinks beer...he mostly just vegges out and goes to sleep), that he's quit drinking in the car. That drinking in the car all the time was ridiculous behavior and he had no excuse for it.
So I didn't say much, as that is quite a minefield, I just nodded sympathetically from time to time.
He said he's feeling a lot better since he laid off all the vodka. Ya think?
So that was all positive, and from what I can see it seems to be true. But I am not all excited or anything. 24 hours before this conversation he was totally irrational and mean. 24 hours from now he could be again. Like when he read that Stosny book and he seemed to really get it, and it was such a "breakthrough" and then he went back to the same hostility and blamed it on me.
But I will take it as some progress. I got a new job recently that is really satisfying, though it doesn't pay much. But I feel like I have control of my own environment there, and a lot of autonomy and appreciation, and it makes it easier to tolerate his stifling control of what we eat and when and all that crap. I just think, yeah, great, whatever.
I'm also around a lot of young people and creative people and it's very inspiring. I can't believe how much I've lost all my confidence over the last 10 years. It makes me feel sad...but I feel like I can begin to turn it around. Once upon a time I was a person who felt like I could do anything if I set my mind to it.
