So many folks in AA would talk about how they felt the need to drink when they were either angry or when they were sad. Those both sound like the kind of plausible motivations any screenwriter might give to an alcoholic character, and they certainly make sense from a psychological and storytelling perspective, but I found it difficult to relate to these reasons on any sort of personal level. I was not especially sad or mad. I was (and am) generally quite happy and good-humored, actually...

I’ve found that a lot of nonalcoholic people and teetotalers also tend to assume that alcoholics are depressed/angry people, who then turn to drugs and alcohol to solve their problems and/or make themselves temporarily feel better. This line of reasoning I have always found extremely irritating, mainly because it never rang true to me. And yet, it is perhaps the most prevalent assumption: that alcoholics drink because they are mad or sad.

Well, I was the complete opposite. I might have made this term up, but I was a happy, “celebratory drunk.” Initially, I drank as a reward, or when things were going well, or to congratulate myself for a job well done… and as luck would have it, I constantly thought I was doing a fantastic, amazing job! Who’d thunk it?!

But eventually, I got to the point where I just wanted every single day, and every single activity I engaged in, to be the absolute best, most exciting, most fun version of itself that it could possibly be. I wanted every experience to be better than the last, or better than the day before, or somehow more intense or EXTREME… and therefore there were very few activities that I didn’t think could be improved by adding drugs or alcohol.

Not only did the Anger/Sadness Drinkers not make sense to me, neither did the bar flies or partiers. I always wanted to drink (and do cocaine) while working on something or creating something or accomplishing something. I did not want to drink at home while watching tv, or even waste time drinking at bars or parties. For me, alcohol and drugs were a way to make boring things fun, or fun things even funner!

Don’t you know? You can add liquor and cocaine to a tedious work assignment or a laborious home improvement project to turn it into something super fun! Or, if it’s a recreational activity or an adventure sport, you can add liquor and drugs to take it to the NEXT LEVEL, BABY!

The problem of course, is that we alcoholics often get the recipe wrong. We don’t know when to stop adding, or what the correct proportions should be. Adding a little extra sugar to a recipe might be great, and just what a dessert needed to make it extra special and super-duper delicious, but my alcoholic brain would probably decide to just go ahead and replace every single ingredient in the cake with pure sugar. The sweetness is what people like about cake, right? So it makes sense that a cake made of nothing but sugar would be the absolute best cake, right?! RAAAAAAA! CAAAAKE!!!!!!

I’ll take this cake analogy one step further, because it’s just too fitting. Imagine that now I want to bring this insane and sickeningly- indulgent Sugar Cake to every function and every event that I attend. The cake might be appreciated if I brought to a birthday party (or even as an occasional surprise to something mundane), but suddenly now I’m trying to bring my cake with me everywhere. To lunch dates, shopping excursions, morning business meetings… places where not only is the very addition of my cake quite odd, but places where most people refuse to partake in eating it with me altogether. Surprisingly, they are not interested in eating cake, first thing in the morning. Or before taking an exam. Or while BICYCLING...

And don’t forget, it’s not even a normal strength cake I’m toting around, this is my weird, All Sugar Cake creation, not really for the desert-dabbler or the faint of heart.

And yet, I was still baffled. See, I was assuming that everyone was just like me, and interested in turning every second of every day into a party, and making every event listed on our calendars into the most fun and happy time it could possibly be. Go Cake!!

I couldn’t understand why everyone else wasn’t interested in living their lives in a perpetual state of celebration. Don’t they realize that so many of the boring, repetitive, or just mandatory tasks that are required of a person don’t have to be that way? They can be fun! I mean, how much mental acuity does it really take to mow your own yard? Not very much, so why not make it enjoyable and amusing? Business meetings are boring, but they sure don’t have to be!

This was my logic for about 20 years. Does this sound like a depressed, angry, person to you? Do you see why the Sadness Drinkers didn’t make much sense to me? I wasn’t drinking to make sad things bearable; I was adding alcohol to make bland things fun, or make already good things even better!

If you were accidentally thinking of the Sad/Mad alcoholic archetype, or when I first started with a cake analogy, you were perhaps erroneously picturing someone crying and shame-eating a birthday cake alone in their car, then you’d be completely misunderstanding the point of the cake/alcohol/drugs entirely, as it existed under my philosophy. The constant consumption of alcohol and drugs wasn’t due to sadness, it was meant to add fun and merriment for all!

As you might have guessed, this is obviously not a sustainable way to live. In the cake scenario, it would inevitably end with diabetes and obesity. With alcohol, excessive daily consumption usually leads to many, many, undesirable outcomes, including (but certainly not limited to) job loss, imprisonment, and death. Oh, and also diabetes and obesity, too.

But before we go, let’s have one more allegorical serving of cake together, shall we? Because this next cake comparison works in one more very enlightening way. This is a more traditional analogy, and one I have heard several variations of in the past, especially when someone is trying to get an alcoholic to acknowledge that they have a drinking problem. I apologize if you struggle with an eating disorder, and this does not ring true to you. But it was very helpful for me to look at things in this way, mostly because it helped to realize the difference between something I highly enjoyed —(actual) cake, for example— as opposed to something I was addicted to— drugs and alcohol.

My sponsor was trying to get me to acknowledge that I consumed alcohol in an extreme and unnatural way. You see, sometimes when you surround yourself only with people who also use drugs and alcohol in the same excessive way that you do, it becomes hard to gauge what is normal anymore. The following is not a complex analogy, as it just involves repeating my own actions back to me but replacing the word "alcohol" with the word “cake.”

“Everyone else at the table either shares a slice of cake or orders a single slice for themselves. But not you. You order slice after slice after slice, until you eventually pass out. You had cake before dinner, with dinner, and after dinner. In fact, you started sneaking slices of cake shortly after you woke up this morning. You hide cake around the house and office, for fear of running out of cake. Even when no one else is eating cake, you still order it anyways. If eating cake is inappropriate in a given situation, you sneak slices in the bathroom or in your car anyways.

When you aren’t eating cake, you still think about it, and even when you are eating cake, you're thinking about how you can possibly obtain more.

You have untold legal troubles and health problems because of your cake eating, and people have even begged you to stop. Your fascination with eating cake has resulted in the loss of jobs, the loss of cars, the loss of loved ones and relationships, and is even inhibiting your own personal goals.

You have been told that all of this can go away, all you have to do is give up cake. You can’t ever have a slice of cake ever again; BUT, the good news is, you can have your life back. What do you do?”

Well, the answer seemed very simple when put like that, I said my cake eating could quite obviously be considered unhinged, and if it were that simple, I’d very easily agree to never eat cake again, for the rest of my life.

And then the question became, “Okay, so why have you not decided to make that same decision with drugs and alcohol? Can you honestly tell me that alcohol is continuing to add ‘fun’ to various situations, the way it once did? Does it really continue to increase the intensity of anything in your life, other than misery and chaos?”

This is where you can start filling in the story yourself, based on all the screenwriting tropes you’ve seen on television or in movies, and tempered with whatever knowledge you might possess concerning classic addiction behavior.

But one thing I will point out, is that unlike the drug world, which a person can almost completely remove themselves from, there will never be a world without alcohol, a world without cake. It’s going to continue to be around you for the rest of your life. You’ll see it in stores and in restaurants, you will see people enjoying it around you, maybe even in the extreme way you once did.

And you must find a way to become okay with that, without bitterness or regret. People will continue to consume it in front of you and even unknowingly offer it to you. You have to find a way to be cool with that, and to continuously say “no,” for the rest of your life.

It is very hard in the beginning, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned, you cannot live your life trying to avoid it, nor can you try to force your newfound abstinence on everyone around you. In short, you have to find a way to make peace with it, and to let them eat cake.

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Had enough cake and ready for something more substantive? You can read all about rehab and my search for a Higher Power HERE.

Still not ready to call it a night and go home? Click HERE to read about how God and an alcoholic created the Corona Virus together.