January 24 – Silencing the Alarm
"Same old story, same old song and dance.” — Aerosmith
At some point, we became the people who “fixed” the alarm by taking the battery out of the smoke detector. It wouldn’t stop beeping, so we pulled the Power. Problem solved, right? Except now it couldn’t warn us if the house was actually on fire. It was quiet—but useless.
That’s how it is with problem drinkers. Somewhere down the line, the battery slipped out, and we are the last ones to realize it. Friends and family tried to tell us, “You might want to slow down.” But we got used to the smoke. We got used to the lifestyle of living in fire. The noise of our own denial was easier to live with than the truth that something was burning.
We didn’t lose control overnight—it just got quieter. A little less warning, a little more smoke, until eventually the flames were surrounding us and we finally started to feel the heat.
Powerless doesn’t mean we're weak; it means the system that was supposed to keep us safe stopped working a long time ago. We can’t fix it by pulling the power again. We need to find the right battery to put back in.
What alarms have I silenced in my life just because I didn’t like the sound of them?
