Originally Posted by
gneiss 
When I say I thought my life would get better I never thought that meant without problems. It's life, after all. I thought I would feel better overall, not feel like a loser all the time, have a clear head in order to take on those problems. Several times I've made it to 2 months. Even then I still feel like a loser, like no one really wants to be friends with me unless they are high or drunk. And I don't feel qualified to make decisions about life's little problems, stuff I'd never waffle about when high will keep me baffled for ages. I don't feel like my head is clearer, I feel like it's more muddled, more full of all the static from other people.
Dude, honestly, I felt crappy for 4-5 months. I don't get the people that quit and instantly feel awesome. Part of me hates when people say that because I think it perpetuates this myth that that is what should happen in good recovery. In a way that is sort of like chasing another high. I mean if getting sober gives you a quick fix, a quick good feeling, it is kind of like what the alcohol or drugs was doing all along. When something takes a long time to change, like yourself in recovery, it creates a lasting change, not something fleeting. When I was drinking nothing in my life lasted. Everything was so impermanent. My motivations, everything was sort of based on these impermanent states I experienced and it made me feel so disconnected. Finally that is changing.
In early recovery, I just had a lot of crappy sh*t that I had to deal with— painful feelings about life in general and stuff like grieving alcohol. But even while I felt sad, it wasn't like that was lost time. I was building a lot of skills during that time. Skills I didn't even realize I was building. Skills like learning to deal with crappy feelings sober, self-nurturing skills, dealing with craving skills, etc. I was sort of a hermit for the first six months of sobriety basically because that is what my body and self was telling me I wanted. So now, at 10 months, I have definitely cut down my friend base but a lot of the friends that remain were ones that I drank with. While they aren't necessarily alcoholics, they may have been used to me as a different person or I just didn't know them completely, and I have been really disappointed in them lately, as in they are not showing up. So I am at 10 months feeling similar to you right now in that I feel low in the friend department. I want to go shopping for new ones (like actually I might go to AA meetings and try to find some recovering people). So recovery is one of those things you just got to keep at. But for me it is kind of fun to notice my challenges and work through them now because my progress is so quick in a way. Actually quick is the wrong word but I notice my progress so much and i love it.
Which brings me to one final point. It will blow your mind how much better your mind functions in six months. It is amazing. You don't even realize you are functioning at a deficit now. I certainly didn't. You know I breezed through top-tier schools and stuff so you can't really take that stuff as markers. But it is more like the cognitive and the emotional and interpersonal all sort of come together. It may be the one thing that I am most grateful for. I notice so much more about my own mind and the world around me and it wasn't like I wasn't paying attention to that before that is the crazy thing. It really blows my mind.