defeat look like for me?

An amazing question and as I write this, I can’t believe I’m going to say this, I was completely defeated about 6 months ago.

From a professional and personal perspective, I had achieved all the checkboxes one would want at my age – healthy kids, still married, professional success. As a very focused, self driven individual, there was nothing I thought I couldn’t achieve when I put my mind to it.

It takes courage to acknowledge to oneself that you’ve lost. But, at least for me, while admitting defeat, you can enact the change to win. Defeat isn’ta finality but to overcome it takes hard work. To use a sports analogy, it means you’ve been in a soccer match playing 1×1 and you’re down 10-0. It’s halftime. Coaches give you a pep talk. They tell you to involve your teammates, play a team game. Time to recruit/play like a kickass team and win. But you’re down 10-0, it won’t be easy.

Earlier, I was a poker addict. 7 years ago, I quit cold turkey. Further evidence to bolster my false suppositions. The first time I went to rehab, I said all the right things but had no intention of leaving alcohol forever – I thought, “I will make my family happy and ‘learn’ how to drink like normal people”. But last year I actually tried to stop. I went to another rehab in the US and went to a sober house after that. I told myself that I’d done it. I was sober. I’d done it on my own terms – no intervention required. Subsequently, for 6 months, despite all best intentions, I went on benders and then periods of, not sobriety, but just knowing if I drank, I would be ill. So maybe I didn’t drink 2 days at a time. I tried and tried to stop the next bender, but sure enough, eventually at 7 in the morning, 7-11 would be calling for me to come buy my morning vodka. So I had 2 choices – drink myself to death, or seek help.

As crazy as it sounds, seeking help at the time meant defeat for me. It meant I couldn’t do it on my own. I had tried every intellectual, physical, and medical solution

something beyond my control sabotaging all my efforts and furiously gunning for my death and destruction.

For me, defeat came in waves. If we look at the word in the dictionary it tells us that the meaning of the word is ‘to lose a battle or a contest’. However, if we look at this from a military or tactical perspective, being defeated in a battle doesn’t necessarily mean you have lost the war.

Complete defeat is your last loved ones turning away from you. The final moments where all you have worked for is slipping through your hands.

It is crawling broken on hands and knees into a room of complete strangers and begging for help. The old battle plans will never work.

My life seems to have been a relentless series of battles. I don’t recall ever winning any to be honest, and even when I have been blessed with a victory it is always short lived. You see, I was at war with an enemy I could not perceive, touch or hear. An enemy so skilled at subterfuge that it would have me fighting those that would be my allies, or myself. Such a skilled assassin was it that I never knew it was there.

For me, complete defeat came on white wings, because it led me to understand the reason why I have lost so much before, why I never won. It led me to the doors of AA and the grace of a meeting, to the hope that I can get better and to the tools to start building a new life.

Complete defeat showed me I am not so bad.

Now if we add another word and make it into ‘complete defeat’, it takes on a whole new meaning entirely. The war is lost at this point, our allies gone, diplomacy is over and we are bleeding out on the battlefield. Many of my battles during my 20-year war have resulted in what appeared inevitable at the time – loss of jobs, loss of relationships, loss of health.

The final throw was not necessarily anything new. The difference in this case was when I saw the enemy. When I heard them. Complete defeat came when I realised that I am not a terrible person. That I am worth something. Complete defeat came when I realised there was