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 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.


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 drinking, I can confidently say this change is permanent.

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 September 2024 until January 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, like you suggested, that ultimately cause me feelings of guilt and shame from failing other peoples models.

At the same time, I need to be honest that your responses often hurt me too. Almost every time I tried to open up about my mental health struggles, I was dismissed, downplayed or simply ignored. It hurt the most when you would shut me out and stonewall me, exactly like you did on January 25th before my meltdown started.

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, from trying to be productive in life, was more important to you than my internal mess that prevented me from properly living life with you.

I now understand that my drinking and my own emotional chaos contributed to those walls in some way, but my emotions being dismissed as “complaints”, was very painful when I was desperate to be understood. That doesn’t excuse my bad behaviour, but it is large part of why I would do things like being awake beside you all night worrying about “us” and 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 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. I just want to express gratitude to someone that used to mean a lot to me. 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.