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Quit Drinking with my Exclusive Way Part Two

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Second part of ‘Quit Drinking with my Exclusive Way’

Step Seven: Rediscover Dating

During my drinking days, my seduction technique was the same as that of most British men: have an accent and be bold. Sober, the idea of hitting on tipsy women just didn’t seem right. I could barely even ask a girl out for dinner, paralyzed by the thought of having to make conversation without a beer in my hand. And then I met Molly. Our first date was excruciating, from the moment the sommelier took our order — ‘Uh, I’ll just have a Diet Coke’ — right through to the awkward hug good night. Having scored a second date by the skin of my teeth, I was determined to tell her the truth about my drinking. But she made the first move. ‘So you’re an alcoholic?’ she said, innocently stirring her pad thai. ‘How did you . . .?’ But I knew the answer. ‘You read my blog.’ Molly reached across the table and squeezed my hand. ‘Honesty is sexy.’ I suppose she was telling the truth: We’ve been together for almost two years. Alcohol used to allow me to be bold with women; sobriety has done that one better.

Step Eight: Replace Your Ridiculous Drunken Stories with Ridiculous Sober Ones

One thing about being an alcoholic is that you get to tell some epic drinking stories. Being a drunk gives you an excuse to meet people you wouldn’t otherwise meet, crash parties you wouldn’t otherwise crash. It eventually occurred to me, however, that those opportunities were still there, and there was nothing stopping me from chasing them. The only difference between sober adventures and drunken ones is that you’re more likely to survive — and remember — the former. And so it was that, in April 2011, feeling tired of my (then) home base of San Francisco, I had an idea for a sober adventure: I’d relocate to Las Vegas for a month, staying a single night in each hotel on the Strip. Over the four weeks that followed, I met Oscar Goodman, the mayor of Las Vegas (who once defended Mafia bosses in court), got in a fight with the magician Criss Angel and got thrown out of a strip club while interviewing a clown. The best part: I remember all of it.

Step Nine: Spend Money on Stuff You Won’t Lose

‘Just think how much money you’d save if you gave up drinking!’ teetotalers say, as if alcoholics are simply lacking sound fiscal sense. But while saving money is a terrible motivation for quitting, it does make a pleasant reward. To mark six months dry, I bought myself a Montblanc Meisterstuck fountain pen for a shade under ,000. I’d never have spent that much on a pen while drinking, because of my habit of leaving expensive items in bars and cabs. As such, it’s the perfect pocket-size reminder of how much I’ve changed.

Step Ten: Take a Difficult Test

It was October 2010, and I couldn’t put off the call any longer. A week earlier, I’d unpacked a mail-order home testing kit, pricked my finger, and smeared what felt like a gallon of blood onto a strip of absorbent paper. After I FedExed the sample to the testing company, the results of my HIV test would be available by phone in five days.

Doctors suggest getting a test soon after engaging in certain ‘risky’ activities: unsafe sex with a stranger, needle sharing, that kind of thing. Given my decade-or-so of drunken misadventures, I was somewhat overdue. If you’ve never taken one of these tests, here’s a fun fact: Finding out whether you have HIV is exactly like booking movie tickets. ‘Hi, and thank you for calling the results line. To receive your test results, press 1. For assistance, press 2.’ Beep. Beep. BEEP. Finally: ‘The result of your test was?negative.’ I hung up the phone and cried for half an hour.

Step Eleven: Work Nicer, Not Just Harder and Smarter

For most of my career, I was neither a functioning nor a nonfunctioning alcoholic. If anything, I was an entrepreneurial alcoholic. I created a series of jobs custom-designed to support my love of alcohol. It took me two full years of sobriety until I was finally ready to re-enter the world of entrepreneurship. The first thing I did after announcing my new enterprise was write a long post on my blog, detailing every one of my past business failures. It began: ‘F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said, ‘There are no second acts in American lives.’ On the subject of British lives having second acts in America he was, however, mercifully silent.’

Step Twelve: Forget Everything You’ve Just Read

If it worked for me, it can work for anyone, right? Wrong. The chances that any of the advice here will work for you are vanishingly slim. So, too, are the chances that reading ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People’ will result in your doing either of those things. In truth, all self-help guides are guaranteed to work only for one person: the person who wrote them. This article is sponsored by Hongxing Machinery specializing in mining equipment manufacturing such as [url=http://www.hxjqchina.com/product-list_12.html]impact crusher[/url] and [url=http://www.hxjqchina.com/product-list_35.html]dryer machine[/url].

The real secret to getting sober, and to repairing all the broken aspects of your life, is to take the time (probably through trial and error) to figure out the causes of your addiction and the aspects of your character that can be pressed into service in curing them. To do that, you’ll have to figure out your own list of things you enjoy about drinking (for me: adventures, reckless spending, dating, etc.) and how you can keep those things alive through sobriety. Then you need to figure out what part of your personality will drive you to stay sober (for me: ego).

And then, as every recovering addict will tell you, it’s simply a question of taking one step at a time.

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