Reflections on Drinking
I downloaded an app today called SoberTime. It has a direct connection to their Talking Sober forum where someone posted this link: https://boozemusings.com/guide-to-your-first-month-of-sobriety-why-and-how-to-quit/ - it got me thinking. It was a really good article and I really connected to a large part of it. It prompted me to make a post about it, so here it is:
About 90% of her article I can identify with. And while this might be true for many:
“it has not become the best and most important thing in your life on its own merit (i.e. because drinking really is that wonderful). It has become the most important thing in your life by eating away- diminishing, destroying- all the other important things in your life until alcohol is the one pleasure left. When I say this, I don’t mean that your life has necessarily fallen down around you, that you’ve lost everything. The problem hasn’t necessarily progressed that far. What I mean is that things that used to be pleasurable, inspiring, fulfilling (before you had a drinking problem) have lost their glow, their inherent beauty.”
- for myself it was a bit different
Drinking became one of the best things in my life because it gave me something to look forward to, or at least FELT like it. My husband hated watching the kids for me to go anywhere. He called it ‘babysitting’, I felt depressed, and felt like a loser. For me drinking was my ‘mini vacation’ because I couldn’t go anywhere. I had already developed a connection with alcohol as a young teen because it helped me not feel terrified of the world and I was perpetually afraid of everything. I could go weeks without it or months - but when i would drink again, the feeling that it would bring, that numbing warmth would cause me to drink faster than my body could process and I’d black out.
That stands true today. Although in the past few years I still had the ability to not drink for weeks at a time, when i would , unless being absolutely diligent and in an amazing head-space I would drink until I passed out. Caitlin had died and everything hurt. Nothing felt good except alcohol because then things felt different. My husband was still fond of saying cruel hurtful things, and barely interacted with me or with the kids, I felt alone. Nothing in life felt beautiful anymore. Except the sadness - there was a strange warped beauty in that. And that beautiful sadness I found while drinking made my emotions feel real and made me feel different than the brain-fogged, depressed woman who had woken up that morning.
Drinking had become important to me because everything else felt destroyed - in my case my broken life wasn’t CAUSED by alcohol, it was caused by other life choices I had made (marriage) and the loss of my daughter, but the sentiments she writes about are very similar.
Making the choice to not ever drink again was like making the choice to keep an abuser out of my life for good. Taking a stand for myself. I know people can have non abusive relationships with alcohol - i see this in my boyfriend, and in a (few) others. But it absolutely does make me view the alcohol scene in a very new way. And for those drawn to abusive relationships it’s a slippery slope. What can be a casual rendezvous for someone else is an ass-kicking for me. Life without alcohol feels great, it’s like I can feel my brain healing, brain cells growing, density and mass improving. I know they teach the ‘one day at a time’ method but for me I don’t ever think ‘i’ll quit for now” - because then it leaves the nagging little question of “Til when?” - for me it is NEVER AGAIN. Or as I’m fond of saying… “Fuck that shit”