How a Forgotten Trip for Batteries Jump-Started a Lawyer’s Recovery
Alcoholic lawyers think they can stop drinking any time, but the reality is different.
A blogger writing under the name “Alcoholic Attorney” talks about his own struggles in a new series of posts at the Lawyerist, a practice management blog that calls itself a lawyering survival guide.
Alcoholic Attorney finally admitted a problem after driving home from a bar and stopping at the hardware store to pick up batteries. He didn’t remember the hardware stop, telling his spouse he had forgotten to run the errand. When he got in the car the next day, the batteries were on the passenger seat. “I couldn’t lie to myself anymore,” he wrote. “I’d driven home in a blackout.”
He decided to take a year off drinking, but it only lasted 7½ months. (The blogger’s gender isn’t identified; we are using male pronouns in references.)
“I am sober, now,” the blogger writes in a different post. “Each day, I am learning how to live sober. It turns out that alcohol wasn’t my problem; it was a really bad solution for my real problems of fear of not being good enough, self-reliance, over-achievement, constant comparisons to other people, and the fear to ask anyone else to help. I was restless, irritable and discontented about my life, my success, my family and my failure. I’m not always that way anymore. I’m learning to live sober. What a crazy idea—living—sober.”
The Lawyerist is inviting others to write in with their experiences. Sam Glover, a Minnesota lawyer and editor-in-chief of the Lawyerist, tells the ABA Journal in an e-mail that all posts will be anonymous and gender won’t be identified. So far, just one person has done the writing, but he hopes more people will come forward in the future to contribute their own stories.
“Someone came to us with the idea, and we said yes without hesitation,” Glover says. “Substance abuse and the law sometimes seem to go hand-in-hand, even if few are willing to admit it. And substance abuse in the legal profession is an issue too often relegated to the back pages of bar journals. We are publishing posts on alcoholism because it needs to be written about.”
The blog series also links to an ABA list of lawyer assistance programs.
