I do not write it according to the order of someone. I want to write it because three months ago I could not even hope that I would ever be so relaxed, without my head aching and really happy to be alive. And I think that, even providing at the same time that one of them experiences this and finds himself/herself reflected in my narrative, it is well justified.

I'm 41 years old. I live in Porto, Portugal. Within the past eleven years I have worked as a project manager in a mediocre logistics company. High salary, company car, a group of employees who respected me, or so. On paper, my life looked solid. Stable. Successful, even. I had reached all that I was supposed to reach when I was my age. Yet there was no quantity of it long that seemed to me to be inadequate. It was all like nothing, really.

I do not know when alcohol started becoming part of my delights and began to only need it. Crossing that line it is so indistinct. It doesn't happen overnight. It happens in a thousand lesser ways, the glass of wine that has turned into two, the two into a bottle, the bottle you start to open before dinner, not it. The liquor you pour after every one is asleep, since one cannot stand the silence of the house unless you pour you something to turn it into a cozy beverage. I told myself I was tired. I told myself it was stress. I continuously said to myself that, a man who reports to work and does not miss his deadline, creates no scene in the office, that man is not a problem. I had a success in telling myself stories.

By the age of thirty-eight years, I was already a daily drinker. But If you ask, what to do if a person drinks every day, I can tell you from the inside - it does not always look that dramatic. Physically, spectacle-wise, never was I the man who dropped in the street, or said unprofessional words at a trade dinner. I was the other kind. The functional kind. That kind of it is slightly inferior to what is terrifying, as no one expects. I kept my performance appraisals high. My emails were professionally maintained. I went on smiling at the right time. But, when I was alone in the apartment, at night, I was disappearing. Personal life I had somewhat fallen apart, there was a final serious relationship that had been broken two years before my admission to seek the help, and I took the blame on the incompatibility rather than alcohol. I was no longer interacting with friends frequently. I no longer enjoyed weekends. I had lost the enjoyment in almost everything. Alcohol was not delight any more. It was maintenance. The only thing that was keeping the engine running was that it was working.

I would like to, at this moment, insert a remark which, though I do not think its object is to be dramatic, acts the purpose of importance: I was not dramatic. I had to fall on the bottom of some filmic blatancy. And the thing is that I feel that this is what is made it so dangerous. In any case, suppose that I had lost my job or had been hospitalized, somebody would have intervened earlier. But because I was still working, need to give birth, need to appear, then it became easy to make everyone, myself inclusive, think that things were okay. The problem of the label functional alcoholic is the word functional. It makes it sound almost fine.

It wasnt fine.

I surely needed help

It was a colleague, who opened this, who said the word, which no one was going to say to me, who told me that they had to say it. His name is Dmytro. He is an Ukrainian who arrived in our company four years ago on project coordinating contract and he is native to Odessa. Our time of association was about a year and a half, where we attended the same client meetings, where we spent hours together in the airports. we were friends, you see I got to be friends with people I have to be around. He knew me well. And that was the reason why one night, following a client dinner at Lisbon, as I refilled my third large glass of port in the hotel bar, and was about to pour him a fourth drink before he had exhausted the first, he said something.

He didn't lecture me. He never identified himself as a drunk. Instead, he just glanced and spoke to himself, Anthony. I'm worried about you. Not as a colleague. As a friend."

I repudiated it immediately, needless to say. I joked, changed the subject matter, laughed. I could not sleep that night, however. Because the thing is that when a person who really knows you, says something like that, there is a part of you which knows that she is right.

It was not referred to later a few weeks on. Then Dmytro sent me a message. This is nothing, a tie, a few ephemeral words: I know you said that you are okay. I believe you believe that. But in case it is a venue in my town. I trust it. Think about it."

It was linked with Vector Plus, a rehabilitation hospital located in Odessa.

I didn't click on it for a week. On the part of the eventual visit I took a significant amount of time on the site. I read everything. No decisions that I had made that night. But there was something stirring me away, as it were, something I never felt even a year before. A glimmer of dreadful hopes that maybe things might be different.

Decision on going was not an easy one. It was, I must say, the hardest decision I have ever decided to make in life as an adult. I had to take a medical leave at the workplace - one month, which I vaguely attributed to burnout treatment to my human resource department. I had to take flights to a nation, where I had never been before, to be treated in the language that I do not speak, without having a lot of confidence in almost anything, in the fact that I had to do something, only because I was emailed by one of my friends, and the feeling of desperation and the necessity to do something. I was terrified. I have almost quit three times.

But I went.

My arriving to Odessa

In Odessa airport I was greeted by Dmytro. That by itself was more to me than I can sufficiently accountly entering a foreign city, not knowing what to expect, and having a face I knew. He even drove me there alone to the clinic. We didn't talk much on the way. I feel that he was cognisant of the fact that there was not much left in me then.

I was shocked to realize that what had come to my mind initially when hearing Vector Plus was that it was not as hectic as I imagined. I think I had formed some kind of black and institutional image in my mind - something chilly and clinical and somewhat penal. It wasn't like that. There was light in the rooms. Given that it was encouraging and not judgemental, the reception staff were careless and communicated professionally and without being judgemental. Nobody looked at me as though I were a problem that had to be addressed. The stare made me feel like this is not the first time they have done it and they know what to do. That is a minor matter. It isn't.

The main process of rehabilitation

Medical detoxification was also being treated in a professional manner i was under medical supervision. It is not that I deny that I had been abusing alcohol to the point where it was not pleasant to withdraw. But I was strictly observed, and I got out what I wanted, and not by myself. That matters. That is crucial, actually, as one of the primary features of the place I had lived in psychologically was a feeling of profound loneliness. This is a little clinical fact because somebody was studying me, adjusting my care, following my progress, etc., and so forth. It was more of a thing with me. And if you are wondering about things like medications for alcohol withdrawal at home or trying to figure out how to come out of a binge at home, I can tell you doing it alone is DANGEROUS! I thought about things like how to come out of a binge in one day or even how to quickly come out of a week-long binge, but the reality is that safe recovery requires medical support.

The therapy was not soft. I do not refer to that on a heartless sense, of which was the line assumed warm and cordial all the way through. But there were things I had to do at work. It asked me to reflect on the trends that I have been avoiding in the last ten years or so. It challenged me to understand why alcohol was my fix to the state of affairs and that is to ask what the questions were what would have been the loneliness, the fear of inadequacy, how I had been conditioned at a young age of life that I had to combat the discomfort, but not to go through it. He does not like to see all this. All of it was necessary.

The employees, the physicians, the psychologists, the nurses, all of them, were carrying themselves like a very useful silence, which, in my feeling, was very stabilizing. There was nothing that they had blown out of proportion. They failed to provide change through inspirational words. Instead, they were just doing their duties daily and seemingly doing it well. There was something much too homely in it.

How my life changed after rehabilitation

I cannot say what exactly has changed in me, which I cannot strictly define even then and I do not know whether I will be able to do it at that moment which I write this. I do not know any better than that, that I had already stopped feeling like I was white-knuckling my way up through sobriety and start to feel as though sobriety could be a place where I could live. As though, it was not that, but it was the existence of another thing. Space. Clarity. A kind of silence, unbearable not.

Five weeks ago I flew back to Porto. The homecoming flight was no more like the outgoing flight. I did not feel scared, just that, I shall not say that all is smooth sailing, but it is not, and he who tells you that early recovery is only a bed of roses is omitting something. However I felt there in a manner that I had not felt in years. I noticed things. The vibrants of the city as I landed. The air. The appearance of my apartment as I entered it, the same one I had been fading into year by year, but visible to me this time.

My continuing care plan is the one that I have developed with the help of the staff at Vector Plus prior to my departure. I have a therapist here in Porto which I work with. I attend support group meetings two times a week. Some of the people that are close to me have been informed by me about the truth of where I was and the reason why. That frankness in itself, the very process of uttering it to people, of whom I hold no secret, has altered something in my way of going about the world.

I still have hard evenings. I do have occasions when the old pull comes about. I do not mean that to be alarming, I mean that because I believe that honesty is far more important than a neat resolution. But I possess now what I did not know, before, tools, insight, the experience of existence which teaches me that I have already accomplished the difficult thing. I already sat in a hospital in a place that I had never visited and told the truth about myself to people I had never met, and it did not kill me. It did the opposite.

I would like to say something to Vector Plus and to Dmytro, and to any other reader of this book, who is now where I was a few months ago.

To the clinic: thank you. You give me the stability of your employees, the completeness of your work, the kindness, with which you treated all individuals in that building. You have stolen a guy who had ten years of training to evaporate and made him have a reason to reappear. I am not a melodramatic individual and I do not say things casually but I am very sure that without that month the path I was on was not heading to any nice place.

To Dmytro: You see, there's a word I cannot say on either of our tongue to you. You watched me when I was unable to see myself. You did not nudge, nor did you preach, you simply left a door open. I walked through it. You have it on you, best you can.

and to any reader who can see a bit of him or herself reflected in this description: I understand how it is so easy to tell oneself he is okay because he can still perform. I experience that story how much it is convincing to the inside. I told it to myself for years. The action is actual and the issue is real, also. It is possible to have both. Should there be anything within you, which knows that, I wish that you might have your own Dmytro. I hope you find your own way.