Searching for Excuses to Keep Drinking

How I enabled my addiction.

Photo by Ante Hamersmit on Unsplash

I was a heavy drinker for a decade. Although my habit didn’t last as long as some alcoholics’ drinking careers, ten years is still an extraordinarily long time to spend getting drunk every day.

It’s not as if I didn’t want to quit. I thought about getting sober almost every day. The trouble was that I was full of excuses for continuing to drink. It’s a common pattern among alcoholics.

I’ve heard some addicts push back against this characterization. They say that their problems are real—not mere excuses. I believe that this line of thinking misses the point.

In today’s newsletter, I’m going to write about what it means to me to “make excuses” for my addiction, and how I moved past the addiction-justifying mindset.