Drinking too much can destroy your life, that’s no secret.
What most people don’t acknowledge, or accept, is that the destruction is happening to you slowly, almost imperceptibly over time.
Next thing you know is that you’re looking at yourself in the mirror wondering what the fuck happened.
Most people do not get this.
Do not expect them to.
Because alcohol is accepted, marketed heavily and everywhere around you, you must be like a piece of iron to resist it.
You must say no thank you, even when everyone around you is seemingly living their good lives, drinking away, not a care in the world.
Saying no is too much and too difficult for most people. So what they do is rationalize their behavior which leads to destructive habits and ultimately to an unpredictable, unreliable, unstable type of personal character.
When you can’t trust yourself to do what you know you must do, who are you?
The answer is that you are not sure who you are.
Not knowing yourself is like a cancer eating away at your will to perform and to do the duty you have and owe to yourself to follow your dreams.
I’ve noticed that some of the most aggressive and successful people do not drink.
This is not an accident.
It’s a deliberate acknowledgement and acceptance that, for them, to do what needs to be done, they must sacrifice.
This decision is difficult on its own, and thinking about what your friends and relatives will think when you don’t drink, especially during the holidays, is very painful.
The people who have made the decision not to drink have also made another, more painful decision.
They have decided that if they have to choose between not drinking, and leaving the people around them who try to sabotage their character, they will leave the people around them to do what they need to do.
Is the short term pain of saying no to alcohol less or greater than the pain of a character and potentially an entire family destroyed slowly by Chinese water torture?
The short term pain is much less.
Everything is a tradeoff. Yin and yang. Positive and negative. Light and dark. Plus and minus. Negative and positive. Heads or tails.
But you must choose which one you want. Do not randomly flip a coin every day because flipping a coin every day leads to an average life.
And when you look around, how are the people with the average lives doing?
Not so great.
You should want an exceptional life.
I understand that maybe you don’t, but you should.
And you deserve to have one.
On your own terms.