Happy New Year!

Tomorrow will be the first day of 2018. For the year ahead that is about all we know for sure.

Do you have some of the usual New Year’s resolutions? Will any of them actually last beyond Valentine’s Day?

Will you cut back on your drinking? Lose 20 pounds? Stop smoking? Dump the loser boy/girl friend? Get divorced? Get married? Write that book? Go back to school? Change jobs? Manage your health issues? Go to the dentist/gym/eye doctor/audiologist? Live? Die? Get ready for either eventuality?

Or will you sit around and self-medicate so as to avoid all of the above for yet another year?

Because, when all is said and done, excessive drinking is all about avoidance. It’s deciding not to decide (a decision itself, I am willing to note), it’s putting in time, it’s making other’s decide for you in a passive-aggressive way, and it’s evading responsibility which is not actually possible.

So I suggest, rather than making a list of resolutions you won’t keep, that, instead, you make a list of all of the things you aren’t going to do. Be honest. This is a list no one else need ever see. Go back to paragraph 3 if you need some prompts.

Then try making a list of what you might actually do if you simply removed alcohol from the equation.

That would be our wish for you. Give yourself a chance. See what your alternative life might look like and feel like. Obviously, if you don’t like “getting a grip and getting a life” you can always go back to medicated oblivion. But why not make an active choice instead or a passive one?
In either case, we wish you a Happier 2018!

Ed & Mary Ellen