NAVY 1992-2012 — AA, the VA SUD clinic, and the cost of finally admitting it

Twenty years in. Drank the whole time. Career stayed intact until about year fifteen, when I had a DUI scrubbed off my record because a senior chief liked me. Career stayed intact after that too. I retired clean on paper and started drinking harder. Three years post-retirement my wife gave me a choice. I picked the right one, barely. First step was Alcoholics Anonymous. A meeting in a church basement in the same town I had grown up in. The chair was a Vietnam veteran who had been sober for forty-one years. He had the right questions and he did not flinch when I said I was a Sailor and had drunk my way through twenty years of service without anyone really catching it. Second step was the VA's Substance Use Disorder clinic. Outpatient. Twice a week for ninety days, then weekly for nine months. I was already in AA on top of it. The clinic did not ask me to choose between them; it asked me to use both. Eight years sober now. The thing nobody tells you about getting sober at fifty is that you have to relearn how to be in your own body. Alcohol had been my anesthetic for so long that I had no idea what my baseline emotional range actually was. I am still finding out. Some of it is hard. None of it is worse than what came before.