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MY RECOVERY CONTINUED....
......The first time I ever got really drunk, at 14 years old, I naively believed dixie cups to be the equivalent of shot glasses. In a fit of baseless boastfulness, I described my great ability to toss back shots without so much as a grimace, my "tolerance". My best friend Andres, another 14-year-old genius, lined up four dixie cups in front of me, filled them with a horrid concoction of the most potent bottles in his father's liquor cabinet. Without  food, without chaser, without any remote grasp of what I was doing, I knocked them down in swift succession. That's the pure alcohol volume equivalent to a full bottle of soda, in less than a minute. I was 14; I weighed just over 100 pounds. My “tolerance” left me to this day with no recollection of that night. The only reason I did not die was because my friend didn't follow my lead, and because, somehow, I managed to survive what must have been acute alcohol poisoning. The next day he told me he had to roll me over frequently throughout the night; I was passed out on my back: unconscious, vomiting repeatedly, and choking. Anyone in his right mind might very well swear off drinking forever after such an event, but not me. Despite that experience, I dabbled in binge drinking throughout high school whenever I had an infrequent chance of not getting caught by my strict authoritarian parents. During college and into my adult life, I continued to drink excessively, often in binges, but interspersed with short periods of relative moderation.
......When I was 28, after some particularly unsettling alcohol-related mishaps, I even "took 6 months off" just to prove that I was not an addict: to prove that I could willfully stop whenever I chose. On the night I decided to get off the wagon, I wound up in jail for a couple days. The crime was not serious, and the charges were dismissed, but yet again I overlooked any lesson to be learned. Alcohol continued to play a leading role in most of the troublingly tumultuous events in my life. Yet, all along, I managed to rein it in just sufficiently enough to cling to my “career” as an Internet lackey and writer, as well as some measure of habitable life.
.....On occasion throughout my adult life, during periods of particularly dismal depression or outrageously disproportionate and wild anger, I sought the services of mental health professionals. On each occasion, I had decided upon my own diagnosis prior to meeting with the doctor, and presented to that person my symptoms in the context that I'd read about them - mainly "I'm depressed, here's how I experience it, and it often contributes to disastrous drinking which then exacerbates my depression. The two feed upon each other, ravenously."
.....I first visited a therapist in 1995. In the week previous, I had punched through a storefront plate glass window. I came within a hair’s breadth of losing my right hand to an enormous dangling shard of glass. In my flight from the police, I nearly bled to death from the severed major artery in my wrist. As a means of pacifying the court and convincing them to drop any serious charges, I sought anger management counseling. I lasted 3 sessions with him before deciding I was “all better”.
.....In 1999, I saw a psychologist for several months, some of it during my self-imposed six month sobriety stint. It seemed helpful at first, as did the sobriety, in alleviating a lot of my depression symptoms. At the time I believed myself to be autonomously able to heal myself as I saw fit. I was strong and competent, full of hearty ego and willful pride. Again, I decided after a short time that she'd given me as much help as she was capable, and my sessions ceased.
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...MHSA PROP 63
....MY RECOVERY