Happy Birthday, Happy Halloween--my 12th year sober.

 

I don't usually mention this but 12 seems sort of special. 12 years ago today I was "celebrating" Halloween at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles. I had checked myself in when it became apparent that I could NOT have another drink after 5 previous years of sobriety. Halloween night 2000 was my final evening in the Hospital (talk about weird!) and tomorrow marks my 12th year "on the wagon." It is the single most important thing I ever did in my life. Happy Halloween to you, happy birthday to me!

The paragraph above is a post today, Halloween, 2012, from my Facebook page. It suddenly struck me as significant enough to post here on a public forum for anyone who might appreciate it but even more so for anyone struggling with alcoholism. It's nothing more than an announcement. It's not a solution but hopefully someone finds in it some inspiration. The solution is inside you. What I discovered, with all the support that is around and support is a good thing, the answer finally comes from the individual, not from a higher power and not from the person sitting next to you at a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous but from inside you. Internally my creative spirit and drive were the things I harmed the most most by drinking and as it turned out they were the things I put in the place of my alcoholism, they are my never ending cure. May you find yours if you are in this dilemma.