Coping

Day 3 again, and Day 3 is usually when I convince myself to have a drink (or 10).  Not today, not gonna happen.  I have had several triggers and risky situations and close calls in the past 2 days so I truly am lucky to have made it to this point.  When I drink I feel awesome for, oh, I’d say about 2 hours.  Then I get lazy, lethargic, and usually eat some crappy food.  Then I go to bed, pass out, and hit the snooze button three times the next morning (my phone is set to only let me hit snooze 3 times, otherwise it would probably be more).  But when I’m not drinking, at least in the early days, I will usually be agitated and irritable but will at least eat a healthy dinner, work out, go to bed at a decent time and read, wake up somewhat refreshed and sometimes even go for an early morning run (hey, it’s happened).  I spend the rest of the day in a productive fury, actually doing the job that I am paid to do and being damned good at it.  The benefits to being sober outweigh the benefits to being drunk or hungover ten times over!

But.  Buuuuuut.  It’s effin’ hard.  It’s hard because, since I entered university, alcohol has been my #1 go to coping mechanism.  It’s how I dealt with stress, or with the breakup of a relationship, or a shitty grade on my Poli Sci report (why did I ever even consider that politics were a thing for me?).  It’s also how I handled positive things.  Thursday through Saturday bar crawling with my friends, celebrating a new job, weddings, concerts, family reunions, holidays.  Alcohol has just always been there, and somewhere along the lines I slipped from regular, social drinker, to problem drinker or alcoholic.

So I need to train myself to cope in other ways.  Fill my life with plenty of other options, of things I can do or foods I can eat or people I can talk to, so that when any of the above situations come up I don’t flounder and end up drinking because it’s the only thing I know.

Aside from alcohol, my second biggest addiction is sushi.  I could live, eat and breathe sushi.  It is my second most expensive habit, so much so that I’ve got my local sushi restaurants on speed dial and they call me by name when they see my number show up on their call display.  Yesterday I was having a particularly crummy day and was feeling like I wanted to run out and buy my usual coping mechanism, but instead decided to dial up the restaurant closest to my place of work.  Wrong number.  Tried again, wrong number.  Checked their website and facebook page to confirm the number, and it was still wrong.  Googled their name in the news.  FIRE.  The place caught fire and is CLOSED.  I feel like a toddler retelling this story, but if I could have laid on the floor and kicked my feet and pounded my fists I would have.  I work in a bit of a rough area, and sushi restaurants are absolutely not common around here.  In fact – and I did my research – this restaurant is the only one I would have been able to get to and back and eat my lunch in the 30 minutes I’m allotted each day.  I was at a loss yesterday and totally down because I couldn’t have either of my two favourite things in the world.  I’ll be honest, if a co-worker hadn’t cornered me at the end of the work day, in the 10 minute gap that I have to sneak out and get to the liquor store and still get home to my kids on time, I would have drank last night.  I was furious with her in the moment, but woke up thankful for her intervention.

So, sober warriors, how do YOU cope?  What do you do when you’ve had a particularly bad or good day?  How do you arm yourself when going to events or gatherings where alcohol would have otherwise been your go to?

Reaching out

It has been a whirlwind of a weekend and I haven’t had much time to post.  My relationship with booze has been on and  off, but better than before.  Belle says that when you continue to have Day Ones, it might be indicative of the fact that you need to change up your support system.  I have a doctor’s appointment in 8 days and plan to ask for a referral to their social worker.  My biggest fear is that they will contact child protective services, and my next biggest fear is that I will be judged (though I guess you can’t have the first without the second).

Cognitive dissonance

How many more posts are going to begin with, “Here we go again…”?  

 

I am feeling very unbalanced.  I like to think that I am a good person.  A person with values and morals, a person who makes good decisions, a person who puts her children and partner before anyone else in the world.  But it’s as if alcohol turns me into an entirely different person, a person that I don’t recognize, a person that I don’t want to admit is me.  Alcohol turns me into a liar, a manipulator, a thief.  It turns me into an angry, raging beast.  And this isn’t after 5 drinks, it’s after 1.  Sober me will say, “yeah, sure, just one beer.”  But alcoholic me will be scheming my way into the next drink before I can even feel the effects of the first.  

 

Cognitive dissonance.  I have values and beliefs, but I am not behaving in a way that is congruent with these values and beliefs.  I have goals that I want to achieve (lose weight, run a race, save money), yet I am being counterproductive in my behaviour.  My behaviour will not only disallow me from achieving these goals, but it will actually lead me into the exact opposite direction.  A counsellor once told me that I was “sabotaging” my relationship, but perhaps it goes deeper than that.  Maybe I am unconsciously sabotaging every single facet of my life.  But now that I’m aware that this is a possibility, it isn’t exactly unconscious anymore.  Which means that I have to act, I have to do something about this.  I know that cognitive dissonance is a very important step when it comes to affecting change in one’s life, so although I am still actively engaging in a behaviour that is damaging, I am on the path to change.  

 

If I were to look at the material on motivational interviewing (MI) that I use with my clients, I am hovering on a daily basis between the contemplative stage of change, preparation, and action.  I am only contemplative when I am drinking, or when I am trying to convince myself to drink.  It’s funny how the brain can trick itself, even days after a very scary withdrawal related experience, into thinking that the drinking isn’t as bad as I thought it was.  (Seriously?  I hide vodka in my child’s room.  How is it “not that bad”?)

 

Back to the MI.  In the preparation phase, it is important to set a date, go public, and have a solid plan.  Once I begin to act on that plan, I am in the action phase, when the benefits of change outweigh the costs.  The tricky part, for me at least, is that I know that the benefits of stopping drinking outweigh the benefits of drinking, BUT I STILL DRINK.  So clearly my error is in the planning, because my plans suck.  I somehow think that I can continue to live my life the way that I always have, putting myself into risky, triggering situations, and “just don’t drink”.  To an alcoholic, those words are a friggen joke.  If you tell a non-alcoholic just not to drink, they will say “ok” and move on with their day without a second thought.  But when you tell an alcoholic not to drink, they will say “ok” and spend the rest of the day thinking about it.  They will be triggered by songs on the radio, something a colleague says, or driving by a certain store or restaurant.  And they will go on like that for a while, until they say screw it all and convince themselves that it is far more exhausting being sober than it is being wasted.  Then they wake up the next morning…. “here we go again.”

 

I need to work on my plan.  I know that today I will not drink.  I am worried about several upcoming events and how I will handle them (colleague’s engagement dinner, Pride weekend, stag and doe, baseball game, camping…), but for now I just need to focus on today.  On going home and spending time with my beautiful family and actually remembering putting myself to bed.  

What the… followers?

I never started blogging with the expectation that I would have followers.  And I have SIX!  I am so excited to see you all on here and thank you for coming on this journey with me.  Hiiiiiiii!  So since you’re reading this and getting to know me, tell me a little bit to help ME get to know YOU.  It is beyond helpful to know that there are people out there who are reading and (hopefully) rooting for me.

 

Day 3 here.  It’s funny how your brain starts to forget all of the bad things about drinking after just a couple of days in.  After the horror that was Monday, I knew I wasn’t going to drink that night.  I didn’t, and although the next day I still didn’t want to drink when I woke up, I was a little less certain of myself by the evening.  Still didn’t.  But as the days go on, I am finding myself less and less sure that I’m going to continue along this path.  In my line of work we call this “stinkin’ thinkin’”.  It’s a way of thinking that sets us up for failure.  What cognitive behavioural therapy will teach you is that you need to change your thinking so that you can have a positive impact on your feelings, behaviour, and ultimately the consequences of that behaviour.

 

This is something that I have always been bad at.  When I get an idea in my head, it’s hard to shake that idea and behave differently.  When I was in school I would have a fleeting thought that I would skip “x” class the following day.  No matter how many ways I would try to convince myself to attend that class, I would almost inevitably resort to option A, which had been to skip the class.  

 

I am already telling myself that it might be ok to drink this weekend when my dad and his wife are in town.  I am having thoughts of, “How am I going to get through a weekend sober with the two of them?” (long story that I will likely get into during a later post.  Coles Notes version is that they are both narcissistic, bigoted, “functioning” alcoholics).  “Wouldn’t it be alright if I just had a couple glasses of wine?”  And I worry that by thinking those thoughts 2 days before the weekend, I am only setting myself up for failure on the actual weekend.  And I can’t have another Monday like this anxiety riddled one.  

 

This is where you, dear followers, all six of you, come in.  Advice!  Encouragement!  Distractions!  HELP.

 

Otherwise, day 3 feels pretty good.  I have been monumentally productive at work, which is wonderful considering that I have some tight deadlines coming up.  It’s great knowing that I can do people justice without worrying that my negligence is in some way impacting their lives.  We worked out last night and it felt good to sweat, but I hit the snooze button this morning when I had intended to go for a quick run.  In terms of emotion I’m feeling a lot of frustration / annoyance / anger at home in the evenings, likely due in part to the fact that this is when I would normally be drinking.  Drinking just made the mundane, everyday mom things slightly more exciting.  Singing “the wheels on the bus” is just way more exciting and animated when you’re drunk than the 37th sober rendition!

 

OK, onward and upward.  Today, I won’t drink.

A scary thing happened today

I got to work this morning and immediately regretted going in.  My kids get watched at our house, so I didn’t think that coming home was really going to make my day any easier.  I figured that I would just reschedule my clients and have yet another unproductive day at work.

I had left my 1 pm client a voicemail to reschedule, but he showed up anyway.  My anxiety had been steadily on the rise since this morning, but I wanted to try to do right by this client and see him.  2 minutes into our appointment I realized that I made the wrong choice.  I was absolutely crippled by anxiety.  My heart was literally pounding out of my chest, my ears were ringing, I couldn’t stop shaking, and my vision clouded over. I thought I was going to faint.  I had to call for my colleague to escort my client out while I collected myself.  I never did get it together and had to leave work early, which is highly embarrassing for me.  I pride myself on my work, but lately that has taken a back seat to my drinking.

My drinking has negatively impacted every single aspect of my life, and day ones are getting worse and worse as we go on. I can’t have any more day ones, I can’t be crippled by my addiction any further.  Today, I am being driven by the desire to never feel this shitty again.  One day, I hope to also be driven by how awesome being sober is.

Well, fuck.

Ugh.  I am so effing mad at myself.  I was doing well all day but was self sabotaging by 4pm. Wife was having a friend over before the party she was going to later that evening, and I don’t socialize well sober.  I told myself that I wanted to drink and started coming up with excuses to run out to the grocery store conveniently located next to the liquor store.  I said “shut up, wolfie” and quashed that idea, but still convinced myself to have just one.

What the fuck was I thinking,  knowing full well that I never ever have just one? The interesting thing is that I drank monumentally less than normal (4 shots and 2/3 of a bottle of wine) and yet the blackout was HUGE. Wife and her friend left for the party at 7:15 and I have very limited memories between then and 12:30, when I woke up on the recliner. I remember putting the kids to bed as soon as wife left, and I have vague memories of sitting in the recliner and texting / surfing / watching crap TV,  but nothing solid.  I have a cut and bruise on my shin as well as a bruise on my left wrist, and even though I’ve retraced my steps this morning I have no idea how I sustained these injuries.

Anyway, why the crazy drunk when I drank way less than nornal?  It was rum that we had purchased in Punta Cana, so would that matter?   I normally drink vodka, so would switching up the alcohol make a difference?

When I woke up wife still wasn’t home.  She didn’t tell me when she’d be home and I didn’t care if she drank (yes I did, her drinking made it easier for me to be drunk), but I had asked that she send me an ETA earlier in the night.  Cue drunk angry texts. Luckily I seemed to shake it by the time she came home and she was way drunker anyway so I don’t think she suspected anything.  Doesn’t matter either way because I am so mad at myself.

So here I sit, hungover, unproductive, lethargic.   I’ve eaten like crap this morning when I had intended to run.   I’m already trying to convince myself to drink tonight.   How is it that with all the incredible benefits of being sober that I continue to drink?  Why can I not string together more than 2 days?

Come on, Belle, please tell me I’m close to the top of the waiting list for the 100 day challenge!

Here we go

I first stumbled upon the sober blogosphere a couple months ago, and found myself looking for the blogs that started when people were still stuck in their addiction.  I wanted to read the stories about relapse, not the blogs that started when people were already weeks or months or years into their recovery.  I realize now that I was only looking for those entries so that I could continue to justify my behaviour and delay my own recovery.  

 

I admitted to myself that my drinking was problematic about 3 years ago.  I told my partner (yeah right, like she didn’t know) 14 months ago, along with my mom, dad, and sister.  I had expectations that everyone would rally around me and encourage me to change, but the issue has been largely ignored by most.  As far as my family of origin is concerned, I think that if they addressed my drinking then they would need to address their own, and I don’t think they’re at a place where they’re ready to do that.  I can only assume that my wife tip toes around the “issue” because she worries that it will start an argument.  I’ve been angry with my family for not grabbing me by the shoulders and shaking me, but I know now that it isn’t their responsibility and that my anger towards them was just another excuse to drink.

 

I drank last night, and I cried.  I freaking BAWLED.  Alone, in my pajamas, with a bowl of popcorn in my lap.  I cried because it has gotten so bad, but I also cried because I know that I can never, ever drink again.  Not at the 2 weddings I will be attending this summer, not during our upcoming camping trip, not during my first child free vacation over my partner’s birthday weekend, never.  Never ever ever ever ever.  

 

When I woke up this morning my first thought was “Day one.”  Something is different this time, but I can’t quite put my finger on it.  It could be the blogging aspect of it, regardless of the fact that I have no followers, as I’ve always been better at expressing myself in writing than verbally, and maybe this allows me to hash things out in my head.  Either way, I’m going to do it this time.  I have to get through the work day and then I’m going to go home and bbq with my family, spend some time in the garden, work out, and then curl up with a good book.  I can do this.