LiLo 'fesses up for Oprah

Lindsay says she's her own worst enemy. We all are, Darling - we all are!

And being addicted to alcohol doesn't have to ruin your life, unless you want it to. And being in rehab isn't the end of the world - it just might possibly be the beginning of the rest of your life, if you really take it seriously. 

How do I know? May I tell you? I was addicted to alcohol myself from my late teens until I got fired from my job as an electrical power station operator at the age of 38, and went crawling back home to my long-suffering parents, sick, sober and sorry, and very nearly flat broke, and thoroughly ashamed of myself.

I was lucky - I had an uncle who was 'up there' in the government's health care program at the time, and he gave me a lecture I richly deserved, and then told me that he would make sure there was room for me at an alcoholism and drug addiction treatment center his provincial government employers operated in another city a couple of hundred miles from my parents' home. 

About then, I felt that I'd lost just about everything that mattered, and had nothing left to lose by taking him up on his offer, so I went in there for treatment. They told me that I could stay as long as I felt that I needed to, and
until I could handle life's challenges without reaching for help from 'Dr. Smirnoff' and his friends. I took them at their word, and stayed there for three months.

Before I left, the Director asked if he could do anything to assist my return to the world outside, and I asked if he would please write to my former employer
and inform them of where I've been and how long, and give them his personal assessment of my recovery efforts, so that I might try to get my job back.
He very kindly granted my request, wrote the letter, and my former employer made me a very simple deal: stay sober, and you stay employed; fall off the wagon, and it's 'goodbye forever'.  I stayed sober, and later got a promotion,
and if I can do it, then you can too, Lindsay.

When that whole thing first hit the fan, I thought for sure it was the end of the world, but it turned out to be one of the best things that ever happened to me,
because it made me really think about who I was and who I wanted to be, and how to work toward reaching those goals, instead of being an embarrassment  to all who knew me. I'm not going to give anyone a lecture on the joys of belonging to 'AA', because I never did have any faith in that gang who came to their meetings smelling of booze. There's only one way to quit drinking, and that's the same way we quit smoking: just stay away from that next one. Promise yourself anything, but don't pick up that drink, or don't light that smoke. There's no magic cure. And it helps to remember all the horror stories you got into before you got smart. Like I said, if I can do it, so can you. And please don't wait until you've ruined your health.