A Sobriety Story by Debbie…Day 28 and the Weekend

If I make it through today and tomorrow evening I will have been sober for exactly four weeks. That makes me feel really proud and really anxious at the same time because there are days particularly over the weekend when the cravings to drink become particularly intense. There is a voice in my head that keeps telling me that I can drink now, because I’ve been able to make it for a month without alcohol so I am not an alcoholic. However, when I started this journey towards sobriety I decided to get my spending and diet under control because for me at least all three tend to happen at the same time. I’d been eating healthy up until last Saturday when I decided I really really had to have some Popeye’s chicken, and did. Unfortunately that bingefest still hasn’t ended. That concerns me because since I tend to indulge in all three at the same time, I wonder if I am setting myself up for relapse and I it also reminds me that should I choose to drink again, the odds that I’d be able to have just the one drink that one day are pretty slim. 

When this journey to sobriety first started I’d be sober two days, three days in a row. In a good week I’d be sober Monday to Thursday, Friday I’d have a drink and tell myself that its just this day but that would herald the start of at least a one week drinking stretch, maybe two. It helped to see the difference in my life between the four sober days and the one week drinking chiefly in my finances. Even those four days sober helped bring home the fact that heavy drinking is an expensive habit and that it reduces your inhibitions in all areas of your life. 

At my first AA meeting I met a girl who had thirty days of sobriety. She told me that things got better but a life without alcohol seemed like a myth. How do you live without alcohol? What would I do when I’d had a bad day at work or trouble with the family?

People told me that they’d walked into an AA meeting and never picked up another drink, well I’d go to meetings and then make a pit stop to get alcohol afterwards.

People told me that they’d asked God to help take this lash of alcohol from them and their craving stopped cold, but still even after I’d decided to give AA a real try it has taken nearly 4 months to actually stop completely.

People also told me to keep coming back that I would get sober eventually. 

I guess I like AA especially the closed meetings because when I hear people’s stories I can see the parallel between their lives and mine and it helped to identify things like stinkin’ thinkin’ and the concept that a relapse starts with your thoughts. But to be honest the threat of losing a job, being homeless or losing my family never gave me a moments pause. What’s keeping me sober is that the fallout from my drinking (I’m 80lbs overweight and nearly 30K in debt) has been severe and I want to do better with my life. I want friends, I want to be a size 10 again, I want to be debt free, I want to complete my accounting designation, have a boyfriend, just enjoy life and alcohol is getting in the way of all that because it makes me not care. In my opinion that’s the worst thing about alcohol is that it makes bad situations tolerable. 

Things are definitely getting better. During the week I no longer watch the clock to see if the liquor store has closed yet so I can relax. I live within walking distance of places were I can buy just the alcohol and at least three pubs. I never went into the pubs because I’d feel like too much of a loser to go in there and drink on my own and I don’t think they’d go for it if you tried to sneak the drinks into a flask and take them home with you. The first weekend sober was the roughest. Not physically because I’d already been sober for four days at that point but I never realized how much I’d come to depend on it emotionally to get me through the weekend. I have no friends because I’ve isolated myself so much, and it made me really tired which meant even things like reading or sewing were out so I just hung around the house and blogged whenever I started getting thoughts of drinking. 

I sat down this week and came up with a five year plan for my life in rough draft, recommitted to eating healthy and paying off my debt.

by Debbie

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 9th, 2009 at 9:00 pm and is filed under Get Sober. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.