I admire your courage to speak out about your alcoholism on a public forum. You're not alone. I myself went through a rough period of alcoholism for about 5 y

I admire your courage to speak out about your alcoholism on a public forum. You're not alone. I myself went through a rough period of alcoholism for about 5 years. You're absolutely correct about social support: when I finally kicked the habit (about 3 years ago), I was only able to do it because I switched jobs and made some new friends. The stress of my previous job combined with the loneliness of being isolated from all my friends were, in retrospect, huge players in my alcoholism. In fact, once I was in that new position, I found it remarkably easy to reduce my drinking to social norms. Nowadays, I hardly even drink at all. I haven't had a drink since before Thanksgiving, and I don't even think about it anymore. Hang in there. If there's any way I can help, let me know. I'm a fellow PL enthusiast and designer (I still refer to one of your concatenative programming articles now and then, thanks for that!), so perhaps we can chat sometime :)