Mistakes in motion

Watching faults unfold hurts

My loved ones will crash and burn because of mistakes that I think are preventable. If only they did x, if only they thought y. But that’s not how it works. 

I can see my loved ones leaning on a lever that will unlock a trap door underneath them literally dropping them in it. I can’t force a person to see what I see. Even if they did see what I saw, they wouldn’t think how I thought. They’ll infer what they want based on what they know and how they feel.

Is this how they felt with my drinking? Did their sadness boil into a simmering frustration then reduce to spite? You can only see someone fold themselves into the same mistake over and over again before you have burnt every slice of empathy you have and only remnants of contempt crystallising in their wake remain. Being on the sober side of alcoholism and having the capacity to research addiction, I now have a simplistic understanding of how alcohol hijacks your brain leaving you craving that synthetic dopamine hit the more you drink. So ‘it’s not your fault’ is easier to swallow but not everyone has my newfound novice knowledge of the effects of alcohol beyond: