Reaching one year sober feels monumental and inconsequential at the same time. Yes, it’s a lovely milestone and it feels great to have so many sober days under my belt. But living without alcohol is a daily, ongoing lifestyle choice. I have chosen to never escape reality by blurring the edges of my mind. So even though the hard-out cravings have all but gone, and the big realisations have sunk in, I’m still left with the reality of the situation. And I’ve still got a busy life to lead, and a brain to keep tabs on.
But here is where I consider myself incredibly lucky, for I have my amazeballs blog, my personal, private, online diary, which also happens to offer me incredible warmth and support. As my second sober year progresses, despite being busy finishing the thesis, blog posts keep forming themselves in my mind and flowing out my fingertips onto the keyboard. I can’t stop myself from regularly turning to the computer when I need to vent, celebrate or simply flesh out my thought processes. I blog for me and in doing so I share with others, that’s just what I do.
Mrs D Is Going Without (Day 436)
Rather than whittle on about how I’m stressed again (Master’s thesis) and emotional (kid dramas) and tired (lots of solo parenting) I’m going to try instead to articulate why I think it’s better to go through tough feelings sober and raw, rather than reaching for a wine or five.
I could use all the well-worn phrases like, ‘I just feel more connected to my feelings’ and ‘I feel a lot more whole’ and ‘I can understand more clearly’ but I remember reading shit like that before I got sober and those words just washed over me. They’re such well-worn phrases that they’ve almost lost their meaning.
So why is it so amazing?
Well, I had a major emotional upheaval earlier this year and had to pack up my life and leave a community that was rich with love and warmth and support. It was so hard and, boy, did I cry. I cried and I cried and I cried. I cried so much it was ridiculous. I couldn’t stop the tears. I cried saying goodbye to my sons’ school teachers. I cried saying goodbye to my neighbours. I cried all over my friends. I cried doing the dishes. I cried in bed at night. I cried driving the car. I cried so much I stopped even trying not to cry and was just an openly crying sooky mess. I cried as we left and I cried as we transitioned and I kept crying even after we arrived.
And then I stopped crying, and I kept moving forward, and . . . well, it’s all gone. Not gone like I’ve pushed it away but gone like I dealt with it. I didn’t hide the problem like filing away a bill I didn’t want to pay. I paid it and it went away. Now I feel really at peace and resolved about the whole move. Not that I don’t care about having to leave those people anymore . . . but clean like I expressed to myself and the world my sadness. And unbelievably that alone made it better. Nothing changed except how I expressed my feelings but just doing that made it better.
So (I’m working this out as I write) just expressing and honouring how you feel about something, cleanly and wholly, makes it better even though you can’t change the thing itself.
Now when I think back to that time of the relocation and all that emotion and all those tears, I feel clean. I feel really clean about it. It’s hard to explain but it feels great. Resolved. Done. It feels like I totally honoured my feelings by expressing them so openly and in a way that kind of cleared them.
Okay, even now it’s hard to explain, this is a bit convoluted, sorry.
But to try and apply this logic to general sober life now, fairly regularly I get in funky moods . . . grumpy, stressed, sad (but I am a fucking full-time mother of 3 demanding boys and a bloody supportive wife trying to write a difficult Master’s thesis, sorry, just had to rant there). But instead of pretending I’m not grumpy, stressed or sad (which wine consumption used to help with) I actually just let myself be grumpy, stressed or sad and . . . well, overall it feels much better. Much better. Cleaner. It just feels cleaner. Better.
It’s hard to articulate, and once again I don’t think the words are doing the feeling justice. So don’t just take my word for it. Try it, you’ll understand too.
Luckily my convoluted thought processes are resonating with my readers, and I’m blessed to continually receive lovely cyber-hugs.
Comment from ‘Fiona’
I think you explained that perfectly! I totally got it! I loved your term . . . ‘clean’. I can really relate to that. Dealing with what we are feeling creates a clean slate . . . rather than not dealing with our feelings which leaves our minds and heart feeling polluted and chaotic. Loved this post.
Comment from ‘JoggingGirl’
I understood and related to every single word Mrs D. It’s almost like until we accept, feel and process an emotion, we’re doomed to keep repeating it and re-living that hurt. Just like the bill that we don’t pay and hide in the drawer, it still ain’t getting paid until we deal with it. And in the meantime, they send MORE bills, then they start making phone calls, then they turn off the lights, and that one little bill we didn’t want to deal with has turned into an eight-headed monster that we for sure don’t want to deal with.
Comment from ‘LovelyLady’
Real life is just so much better all around than drunk life. Soooo much better.
The more that I explore my thoughts and try to explain them on my blog, the more I start to understand what I’ve done and what I’m doing. With the benefit of time and hindsight I can see that getting sober and living sober are two very different things.
Getting sober was all about white-knuckling my way through a period of cravings, resisting urges, identifying addictive thoughts (‘I deserve a wine today’ actually meant ‘I need alcohol to feed my addiction’), and dealing with *shock horror!* emotions (holy shit, I feel grumpy, what do you mean I just have to feel grumpy and not drink alcohol to smooth the feeling away?!).
Getting sober involved spending a bit of time feeling boring, then a bit of time realising I’m not boring, then realising that drunk people are boring, then realising that not everyone else gets drunk all the time, then accepting that there are drunks and normies and boozers turning sober and I just fit in the middle of a big spectrum of drinking types and it doesn’t really matter anyway.
I got sober, and now I live sober.
Living sober means I’ve started figuring out the other little things that make me feel good about myself and my life. The really little things.
Living sober means having an overall underlying state of calm, interrupted by phases of emotion that are annoying but manageable. Living sober means realising that phases of negative, tricky or uncomfortable emotion come along and are annoying, but that they pass. They come, and they go. Living sober means every time I face a tricky phase and wait for it to pass without drinking, I feel good about that. I feel great, in fact. Great in a low-key, lovely, normal, stable, reliable, respectable way.
The more time that passes the less I see living sober as merely being about not-drinking. It’s also about being willing to always deal with stuff raw. I can totally understand why people relapse all the time, because bad shit does happen and it’s hard! Uncomfortable or hurtful or tricky shit happens. It might happen on day 5, or day 55, or day 555, but it’s going to happen, and alcohol can take the edge off it for a time. The biggest trial for me in choosing to live sober is deciding that no matter what bad shit comes at me, I will tough it through raw and not reach for any temporary liquid smooth-all.
Of course, good shit happens too! Parties and weddings and celebrations! And I don’t want to miss out on any of it. I still want to go to bars and laugh with my friends and go to weddings and cut it up on the dance floor to cheesy pop tunes and I want to huddle outside on the balcony at parties and rant madly and I want to do all of that without the wine messing me up.
And I do. I always try to think hard about the scene I’m entering into, I think about all the elements that are there, the people, the setting, the atmosphere, the food, the music, the friendship, the giggles, the gossip etc. and I focus on those—those are the things that make an occasion special. It shouldn’t have to matter that the glass I hold has lemonade, not champagne, in it.
At the start of my sobriety, social events were tricky because I felt so flat and odd and out of sorts, obsessed with the fact I wasn’t drinking. But now that I’m used to not-drinking, most events are totally fine.
Mrs D Is Going Without (Day 450)
Sober events. You have good ones, you have bad ones. You have fun ones, you have flat ones. It would be a lie to say sober events are always great. Sometimes they’re shit. I’ve had sober weddings that were so awesome I danced for hours and felt on a natural high for days! I’ve also had sober weddings where I felt a bit flat and disjointed and like a bit of a boring loser. I’ve had sober dinner parties where I laughed so much my cheeks ached, and others where I felt quite removed from the jokes and like I just wanted to go home and crawl into bed.
I’ve been to parties where I was so nervous to be sober I chain-smoked cigarettes all night, ones where I raced around fetching other people drinks like a weirdo, ones where I fixed a false smile on my face and had no fun at all, and ones where the fact I wasn’t drinking was totally irrelevant and I had great chats with great people.
Sober events rise or fall on a peculiar convergence of factors: my mood, my outfit, the crowd, the vibe, the location, the music, the atmosphere, the food, my energy levels. I’ve learned that just because the last event I did sober was great doesn’t mean the next one will be. Nor will the last sober event being shit mean the next one will be.
Sometimes they’re just not great, and I wake up in the morning feeling flat and like it was only really a 75 per cent night and then the ‘is it because I’m a boring sober person now?’ thoughts creep in. Then other times I wake up feeling like the night before was 150 per cent fun and ‘Get me, I’m the coolest sober chick in the world, who needs booze?!’
(Driving home is always great whether the event was boring or fabulous. That fact remains the same. Oh, how I love driving home. And don’t get me started on the feeling when I wake up in the morning. Sheer bliss.)
So if you have a shit sober event, don’t think you need to drink to make the next one more fun. It’s not about the drink, it’s about all those other factors. I don’t think any amount of booze in the world is going to make a boring party more fun. It’s just going to make me drunk at a boring party.
I love all this thinking and writing and figuring stuff out. I love how the words form in my mind and flow easily out of my fingertips. And I love the feedback, I love my constantly shifting online community so very, very much. But I’m starting to feel weird that I have this big blog which I keep secret from most people in my ‘real’ life. It feels strange not telling my friends and family, especially now that I’m through all the really hard work of the early months, my Master’s thesis is finally finished and delivered, and things are flowing a little more smoothly for me now.
I’m feeling at a crossroads, and I’m wondering what to do. Should I open up my blog to everyone in my life? Or should I go the other way and stop blogging altogether? One way or another, something has to change, I can’t continue with this big secret anymore.