I’m sad

I’ve been sad all week.  My boyfriend and I broke up this weekend, and I am absolutely devastated.  I’m mad at him for not talking to me more about our issues before he got to the point where he believed breaking up was the only option, and I’m mad at myself for not doing things differently.  But mostly I am just heartbroken, because I thought I’d found the person I was going to be with forever.

I’ve never dealt with sadness soberly.  Alcohol is such a powerful and effective anesthetic that I’ve never had to.  Stressed?  Have a drink!  Anxious?  Have a drink!  Totally, utterly consumed by sorrow?  Well, now I can’t have a drink, and I’m having to deal with this pain in sobriety.  And it sucks.

Some perks of not drinking

• No more fearfully checking your outbox, facebook, and myspace to see if you sent anything embarrassing and irrevocable.

• Similarly, not looking at your phone call log and wondering just exactly what you said when you called your ex 12 times between 3:34 and 4:17 a.m.

• Where’d this stain on my brand new Marc Jacobs blouse come from?  Is it related to the stain on my comforter?  And are either of them related to the half-eaten chalupa on my pillow?

• Not trying to catch a cab at 2:15 when every other drunk person in the city is trying to as well.  Parking is cheaper than the fare home, too.  Especially considering you waited in the Taco Bell drive-thru line to get the aforementioned chalupa with the meter running… when every other drunk person in the city is doing so as well.

• No, I did not try and beat up that bouncer.  Really?  No, seriously, are you making that up?  OH MY GOD.

And that non-exhaustive list only covers nights out on the town.  There are many times I miss drinking, but I certainly don’t miss doing any of those things… over and over and over.

Drinking dreams

For the first few weeks I was sober, I had frequent drinking dreams.  They were very mellow, and in them, I mostly found myself in social situations.  I didn’t have any particular feelings about them upon waking.  Then my dreams changed; instead of drinking, I became that really nice person who takes care of her drunk friends at the end of the night (during my drinking days, I was never that person, I was waaaaay too drunk by closing time to be her).  These actually made me feel pretty good, as if something in my psyche had changed and I no longer viewed myself as a drinker.  Then I just stopped dreaming about drinking situations completely.

Well, not completely.  Just until a couple of weeks ago.  That’s when I had my first “feel bad about it” drinking dream, and it was awful.  It was a dream so intense that I woke up feeling as if I really had gotten drunk.  After several minutes, I woke all the way up and realized that it had thankfully just been a dream.  

Last night I had another such dream.

90 days!

Today I’ve been sober for 90 days.  Well, that’s the official story anyway.  The last time I consumed alcohol was June 17th, 2008 but if we’re being perfectly frank, I am pretty sure I was still drunk well into the 18th.  Yeah, it was a pretty big bender.

Having 90 days feels really good.  I didn’t honestly think I’d make it this far, but now that I am on my way, I can’t imagine turning back.  Slowly but surely my ways of thinking are starting to change, I’m starting to look at myself honestly and each day I’m just a little bit less overwhelmed by the huge amount of work I have ahead of me.

The 3rd step and my wary introduction to prayer

Tomorrow I will be celebrating 90 days of sobriety (Yay!), and I’ve just recently completed the third step.

Step 3: Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood him.

Sounds simple enough, right? The third step even comes with its own nifty little prayer to help you out, on page 63 of the big book (please not that I’ve updated the language as all the thees and thys confuse me):

“God, I offer myself to you–to build with me and do with me as you will. Relieve me of the bondage of self, that I may better do your will. Take away my difficulties, that victory over them may bear witness to those I would help of your power, your love, and your way of life. May I do your will always!”

There’s a huge problem here, however, for people like me who don’t really have any understanding at all of a God. As a teenager I attended church youth group, and would have identified myself as a Christian if you’d asked, but mostly I just went because I liked the people and the activities. For years after that, I considered myself an atheist which was for me–and I mean no disrespect to atheists, I know many who believe (for lack of a better word) very strongly in their atheism–a knee jerk reaction to realizing the whole Jesus business made absolutely no logical sense to me beyond being a nice, if inconsistent, mythology.

Recovery is hard

 

My first month of sobriety felt amazing.  Well, most of it anyway.  I woke up the morning of June 18th, 2008, with a bad case of the shakes, a vile case of nausea, and the worst case of regret and remorse I’ve ever experienced.  Oddly enough, the night before wasn’t my worst binge.  I didn’t drive drunk, I didn’t end up somewhere without remembering how I’d gotten there with no way to get home, I didn’t even drunk dial anyone.  But the next morning, I finally realized that something was very, very wrong with me.

 

I imagine that most alcoholics can relate to that experience.  By some unexplainable miracle, the denial was gone.  I knew that I was an alcoholic, I knew I had to quit drinking, and I knew I needed help.  Throughout my drinking career, I’d always looked down on Alcoholics Anonymous.  While I believed alcoholism was real, I, like many, believed AA was a cult.  I believed that sitting around in a room affirming one’s powerlessness was a bunch of religious garbage.  ”Of course you’re powerless if you sit around fixating on being powerless.  Of course you can’t control your drinking if you constantly tell yourself you have no restraint when you pick up a glass.”  

 

And then, boom, suddenly–and it was sudden–I had a revelation that I was powerless over alcohol.  I became aware of the innumerable instances over the years that I’d set out to “only have [insert number of drinks].”  I also became aware that on the rare occasion I was able to limit myself to said amount, it was only because I was concerned about who was, gasp, watching and judging me, and those occasions were almost unbearable.  They also usually ended with me stopping at the store to buy a bottle of wine on the way home.  So it was with this newfound clarity that I turned to AA.  Yes, because I realized I was powerless, but it would be dishonest not to mention that it was in no small part because I didn’t know what else to do.