I’ve been very proud of myself for how things have been going with my sobriety. Maybe too proud. Sometime around 6 months in, things just seemed to click and it got easier. I no longer longed for a beer. I was quite comfortable to be around others who were enjoying a drink or two - not hanging out at booze fests mind you, just casual beers with dinner and such. It had started to feel easy. ...
When I think about the first 30 days of my sobriety today I have an overwhelming sense of relief. I don’t ever want to go through that again. I mean, it was incredibly difficult to simply turn it off and stop drinking daily. But that’s what I did. I stopped. I remember overwhelming fatigue. Fatigue that hit hard in the middle of the day. Most days of that first 30, I was down for the count for a solid 1 to 2 hours in the middle of the day. Thankfully I work form home and so I got away with it. I don’t know how I’d have dealt with it if I were in an office or on a job site. I remember not wanting to cook dinner. ...
When I came into recovery, I did not know how much I lacked compassion for other people. I was full of judgement. I saw others as “less than” and framed the world in nice tidy compartments. Drug addicts were bad people — it never occurred to me that alcohol is a drug. Homeless people must have done something to end up in their situation, and it was probably due to bad choices. People with less education than myself were stupid. I framed the world in terms of “otherness.” I quickly learned that I wasn’t so different from these “other” people. My addiction to alcohol was just as debilitating as another’s addiction to heroin or cocaine. ...
We all do it. We all compare ourselves to other people. We compare ourselves to our friends, our enemies, our neighbors, strangers on the street, and celebrities that we will never know personally. In some cases we feel “superior to” and in other cases we feel “less than” — neither view is particularly healthy. Our subjective understanding of ourselves is deeply rooted in our understanding of how we fit in (or don’t) to this world. We come to this understanding by comparing ourselves to others. In early years, this is how we learn to become social animals. It’s how we learn to make friends. I am constantly amazed that my son so easily makes friends when he meets other children his age. I am sure he compares himself to them, but it doesn’t seem to matter. He quickly finds the commonalities and joins in in the fun. Those commonalities may be as specific as the love of Legos or as simple as the mere fact that they are kids and not adults. I have vague recollections of being able to do this myself when I was young. But somewhere along the line I lost the ability to quickly identify similarities and began to focus on the differences. ...
“Hi, welcome to Seastreak. Do you have a reservation?” “Yes, we’re on the 2 PM to Martha’s Vineyard.” “Okay, parking is down the street for $13 a day, or we can valet it for $25 a day.” ...
It’s 90°F and the Friday afternoon before a holiday weekend.My wife is headed out if town and I will have my eight year old son in my own this weekend. It’s going to be hot tomorrow too. Of course, the AC would go on the fritz today. Murphy’s Law. It would be easy to let it get to me and to loose my shit about it. In the past I would have bitched up a storm, maybe thrown my phone across the room, and definitely drank over it – because that was how I dealt with everything, whether it was good or bad. But not today. ...
I’m not a big fan of roller coasters, whether they are real or emotional. I’ve been on and emotional one for the last few days and it hasn’t been fun. I am not quite sure when it started but for certain the idea of a drink came into my head several times over the weekend. There was a lot going on over the weekend and my father in law was visiting. I love the man, but there’s no doubt that I need to take him in small doses. I wanted an escape hatch. The easy escape hatch that kept surfacing was to have a drink. I didn’t, but those urges sure were strong at times. ...
Update: This is a post from another blog. I migrated it to this blog because it’s an important part of my story. This was posted just over three years before I fully surrendered and accepted that I am an alcoholic.In September 2015, I began abstaining from alcohol and attending regular meetings. ...
Update: This is a post from another blog. I migrated it to this blog because it’s an important part of my story. This was posted just over three years before I fully surrendered and accepted that I am an alcoholic. ...
Original image: “Migraines” (not preserved in the archive). Update: This is a post from another blog. I migrated it to this blog because it’s an important part of my story. This was posted just over three years before I fully surrendered and accepted that I am an alcoholic. ...
Original image: “2 Days and Counting” (not preserved in the archive). Update: This is a post from another blog. I migrated it to this blog because it’s an important part of my story. This was posted just over three years before I fully surrendered and accepted that I am an alcoholic. ...