Ramblings...

So let's be honest before we start lying.

I'm going to preface this post by saying I've been drinking pretty steadily for the last 6 hours. You would think after a day like this, that might be the last thing I'd do, but I couldn't help it. Drinking today is hopefully the beginning of my final days for doing so... It feels like spending time with a great lover towards the end of a long torrid love affair.

Today was rough. Very rough. Yesterday was great and full of love. But today I finally got myself to see a counselor in what was conveyed to me as the first and very basic step of a long process of therapy and AA.

I can't even begin to explain to you all how sad I am that I'm here again.

So I began to sob at my appointment. I found out the counselor who was going to be helping consult me was FREE to me and downstairs and less that 100 steps from where I work. I felt betrayed. I've spent more than a year, completely and openly telling people within my workplace about my alcoholism... these last 3 months spent very vocally asking people to help me find out how to use the resources available to me. There was never any answer. Nothing.

Then one coworker, among the last people I'd expect to help me, Ms. Tonya Love who took notice. Before she dropped me off at BART last weekend she told me by the time I'd come back from SF from my weekend and back to work that she would have all the research done and all I'd need to do was schedule the appointment. When I came into work yesterday and found out that she kept her word, I was very nearly moved to tears. As it turns out, the help that I actively sought was merely downstairs and very easily within reach. She had used her exemplary reputation to get thru the red-tape that had been standing in my way.

Tomorrow, I have to follow-up with my counselor and tell her that I've completed certain steps... an appointment with a psychiatrist and a plan for going to AA either here or in SF. She also gave me a plan. Told me about the paperwork I need to get to get my time off, the disability I might need to go on. She discussed the various types of AA, informed me that she could get me rides to AA if I needed them... and meanwhile she extracted the very basic sweeps of all the things I'd been internalizing over the last 10 years, and told me that more help was on it's way if I'd only promise to let her help me.

Unfortunately, my appointment with this counselor was scheduled during my lunch break. I reported back to work immediately afterwards with a blank expressionless face. My first appointment with therapy since I was 18 had stolen my soul for the afternoon. It was as if I couldn't see. I couldn't see them, those people who I've become close to over the last 2 years. I decided at that moment that I needed to go home.

My walk home was one of the emptiest and loneliest walks of my life. I stopped by a japanese restaurant, got myself something to eat and began to drink beer after beer after beer, by myself, with nothing but me and my IPOD.

We shall see what happens from this step. I hope for the best and fear the worst. We'll see....