I've just been diagnosed with cirrhosis.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

12. You have no reason to be ashamed. Your cirrhosis is not caused by alcohol abuse.

It is not shameful to become an alcoholic. People who have genetic predisposition or face big pressures can fall into it. What is shameful is when an alcoholic doesn't recognize it, or recognizes it and does not do what it takes to stop.

You can be proud that in your younger years you recognized it quickly and stopped it.

If you had not stopped it as early as you did, you would not have reached 72 and you would have cirrhosis a decade or two earlier, if you didn't have alcohol-assisted cancer or died in an alcoholic car crash, etc. But regardless, people can get cirrhosis without ever having touched a drop of alcohol. This is effectively your case. A couple of dry decades is plenty long enough for the liver to recover, especially after only 4 years of abuse and stopping at a young age.

You can be proud to have lived to 72, which is a couple of years beyond the approximate life expectancy of a child born in the early 1950s. You did it by making a personal life-affirming decision and sticking to it. In a real sense you won the game already.

Alcohol did not cause your cirrhosis, and may not have had any role in it, because you made the right decision in your mid-twenties.

Lose the shame. You don't own it, you don't need it, you haven't earned it, it doesn't help you, you don't deserve it.

You have earned these kudos and you deserve to hold your head up.