I’m at about six weeks sober, and I knew it would be like this. I knew for years while I was drinking that I had conditioned myself to fall back on drinking whenever I got bored, when I couldn’t think of anything else to do or didn’t feel like doing anything else. I also knew it was keeping me from figuring out other things to do with myself, and I knew I had forgotten or maybe never even learned how to really enjoy myself in any given situation without alcohol. I just figured that it wasn’t such a bad life, and there wasn’t much reason not to live that way (even though there were plenty). Basically I didn’t have any conception of how to live any other way in the first place, and that embarrassed me. Despite all the consequences, and there were always pretty hefty consequences, I just kept the view that my life as I knew it was worth the consequences or that they were par for the course because that’s just the way life is.

Then drinking itself became boring. I became disgusted with the lifestyle, and I quit. I don’t crave it, even though I used to crave it a lot at various times for many years. So that part’s not difficult. A switch flipped in my head. But my fallback activity is gone. My social life has disappeared, and although I knew that kind of socialization was all just BS and superficial and needlessly self-destructive, it was human contact, and it was my primary source of it.

Anyway, I thought your post was in line with a lot of my own thoughts, so I hoped you might have some insight. Thanks. — Evan