That I'll never be able to have another drink, and therefore I'll never be normal again.

If you take the time to think about how quitting drinking affects your life, there's a lot more to it than just abstaining from alcohol. Not being able to drink is a daily barrier. It separates you from people, conversation, good times, and social normalcy. You can't relate with people when they say what a good time they had at the bar last night. You can't "have a couple" while you watch the game, or play golf, or are at a business event. You always have to be the guy who gets a club soda with lime. The guy that's looked down on by old-school thinkers who think I must be weak because I can't just have a drink or two. All you can do is make people uncomfortable when they're discussing their good times with alcohol and suddenly remember you're listening. Or when you're watching TV with people and Barney comes on The Simpsons, there's always that unspoken awkwardness because you're in the room.

I don't do AA anymore. Hell, I still go to the bars and I don't mind when people drink around me. But just my presence is enough to make people uncomfortable while they're drinking, and who wants that around? No one, and I don't blame them. One of my closest friends told me the other day he doesn't like to drink too much when I'm around just because he feels like it might make me uncomfortable, and it absolutely broke my fucking heart; even though I know he has the best of intentions. It hurt my feelings so much I don't have the words to describe it.

I just want to be normal. I hate this barrier between me and everyone else so much I want to FUCKING SCREAM. And it never goes away not for a minute, a day, an hour, it's always there...

...but the only other option is to start drinking again. And that road ends with getting way too plastered at every social event, drinking every night even when you're alone; no -- especially when you're alone; feeling like shit everyday, crashing cars, pissing your bed, puking 3 times a day, scaring the shit out of the people you love and that love you. No motivation, constant depression, crippling anxiety, thoughts of suicide, drugs to help with the hangovers from alcohol, alcohol to help with the come-down from drugs. Throwing away every paycheck, never gaining ground, always losing it until there's simply no ground left to lose and no reason left to exist.

So what can I do? I accept the fact that there is a good-sized chunk of society that I will just never be a part of, I will never be normal, and these barriers that I hate so fucking much will always exist and they will always apply, and I have to swallow it because the other option is a thousand times worse.

And then I take it day by day.