One of the first things you hear in AA -- one of the first things that makes core, gut-level sense--is that in some deep and important personal respects you stop growing when you start drinking alcoholically. The drink stunts you, prevents you from walking through the kinds of fearful life experiences that bring you from point A to point B on the maturity scale. When you drink in order to transform yourself, when you drink and become someone you're not, when you do this over and over and over, your relationship to the world becomes muddied and unclear.
You lose bearings, the ground underneath you begins to feel shaky. After a while you don't even know the most basic things about yourself--what you're afraid of, what feels good and bad, what you need in order to feel comforted and calm--because you've never given yourself a chance, a clear, sober chance to find out.
Alcohol offers protection from all of that, protection from the pain of self-discovery, a wonderful, cocooning protection that's enormously insidious because it's utterly false but it feels so real, so real and necessary.
And then, tragically, the protection stops working. The mathematics of transformation change. This is inevitable. You drink long and hard enough and your life gets messy. Your relationships (with nondrinkers, with yourself) become strained. Your work suffers. You run into financial trouble, legal trouble, or trouble with the police. Rack up enough pain and the old math--discomfor + drink = no discomfort--ceases to suffice; feeling "comfortable" isn't good enough anymore. You're after something deeper than a respite from shyness, or a break from private fear and anger. So after a while you alter the equation, make it stronger and more complete. Pain + Drink = Self-Obliteration.
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