Beyond Alcohol, Toward Clarity: An Offer of Thanks

I want to thank you for helping send me on a path to finally eliminate my problems with drinking and my relationship with alcohol. It’s been almost 7 months and alcohol stays in the fridge when people leave things behind. I still sit in bars a lot but I happily drink non-alcoholic beers. I still drive to Toronto a couple times a week but I’m no longer irritated by it and I haven’t seen “Irritable Owen” in a long time (lingering effects of alcohol definitely made me irritable and anxious at times, especially driving and in the morning).

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I want to give this 6 month AA celebration chip to you. Six months isn’t a special milestone. I just knew that if I got around that point, my relationship with alcohol would likely be over. Now that I understand that my brain functions differently, making me vulnerable to excessive drinking, I can confidently say this change is permanent for the rest of my life. I’ve gone through the depressive/self-medicating cycles enough to understand I can control my drinking when things are good….until I’m not well mentally. Then alcohol controls me.

I want you to have this chip as a symbol of my apology and attempt to correct wrongs. I’m sorry for not being honest with you (or anyone in my life) for how often I was drinking from August 2024 until January 26th, 2025. It was virtually every day and any time I was alone. I know it affected you and our relationship even though it wasn’t obvious every day. I’m sorry for not being honest about how I was handling my inner pain.

I want you to know that even though I failed at helping you understand my mental health issues, I have grown to be thankful that happened. Through out my adult life, any of the previous dozen or so times I paused drinking, I began drinking again thinking I have things “under control”. I may never have ended up on a path to diagnosis and understanding how being neurodivergent has affected so many facets of my life and history – most importantly, how much more likely I am to abuse alcohol to self medicate.

The truth is that the decision to drink was often made for me subconsciously and not by me. Calling me a narcissist and hanging on to that narrative forced me to look at myself differently and where some of my issues come from.
 Multiple therapists have told me it was wrong and hurtful to make those accusations and withhold an apology when I asked, but those accusations helped me end up in a place where I am diagnosed. Now I can try to approach life with strategies that will work for me instead of forcing myself in to frameworks, that ultimately cause me feelings of guilt and shame from failing other peoples models or trying to do what other people tell me will work.

At the same time, I need to be honest that your responses to my drinking problem and mental health issues often hurt me too. Almost every time I tried to open up about my mental health struggles, I was dismissed, downplayed or simply ignored – even called a narcissist looking for sympathy and wanting to be the victim.

One small example is any time you sat in my car, I’d hear you complain about how dirty it is. But when I told you that I was by myself breaking down and uncontrollably crying in the same car, I heard nothing. The superficial mess in my car, a byproduct of trying to be productive in life, was more important to you than my internal mess that prevented me from properly living life with you.

It’s not your fault for me drinking alcohol but these things that seem small had a big impact on me. It became easier to self-medicate alone than to try work through and address my internal issues with you.

I now understand that my drinking and my own emotional chaos contributed in some way to the walls you built . Dismissing my emotions as “complaints” was very painful and still is. But I’ve learned that the way I was asking for help and the way I was asking for temporary change to our/your/my life was difficult to understand. Your own wounds and issues often perceived me as being mean and controlling (you called me a dictatorship once when you were angry!). That doesn’t excuse my bad behaviour, but my internal chaos is large part of why I would do things like being awake beside you all night worrying about “us”. My internal chaos eventually reached a breaking point.

I’ve learned how neurodivergence influenced my choices, and how much I was using alcohol to self-medicate. That insight has made quitting liberating rather than a struggle. I don’t think I would have learned this through couples therapy, meditation and cognitive behaviour therapy (all things I wanted to do with you once I got through feelings of extreme overwhelm and what I now understand to be multiple periods of ADHD burnout with some panic attacks sprinkled in there).

Quitting has been liberating except at the AA meetings I have attended. They’re the only place and time that I actually have an urge to drink alcohol, so I only go to collect these milestone chips…and I continue to address my problems in ways that work for me. I told you before that AA will not work for me and I know enough about it from my Dad’s 35 year history being alcohol-free.

This letter is not asking forgiveness and not trying to rebuild our past (none of my letters have been). I just want to express gratitude to someone that used to be the centre of my universe. There were many days alone, I felt like I was living in a black hole that I couldn’t escape. My thoughts and emotions are no longer dulled and numbed by alcohol. I now soak in my emotions, even though they can be incredibly intense.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from my broken relationship with my father, it’s that all human connection is worth trying to repair, even when someone has done as much damage as he did. Understanding each other and ourselves better is the catalyst for change. Understanding creates permanence.

Understanding WHY I eventually lose control of my drinking has changed my life forever. So, thank you. And my future life partner will eventually thank you too.

TL/DR version:
Thank you for the things you said and did. They set me on a path to being diagnosed. This was the key to understanding why I continually go through a depressive/self-medicating cycle where alcohol consumption is extreme. This new understanding has broken me free from that cycle for the rest of my life. I finally beat my demons with alcohol.