dilemmas
Well, I somehow managed to stay sober for a year and for a while it got better, going to AA and getting back on my feet.
Now, I'm back to my same life as before the economic collapse. I have a good job that I actually like, a decent apartment with nice neighbors and amenities (including a bus line) nearby.
Only this time I don't drink.
And I don't have my driver's license.
While I can get to and from work with the bus, the process takes a couple of hours and I can't get to meetings regularly in the evening. At first, I would call up people in AA and talk, but I guess out of sight out of mind, they usually don't answer the phone any more. I leave messages and every couple of weeks, if I get an early day and go to a meeting, I will hear all about how every body got my message and thank you. I brought up in a discussion meeting that those phone calls made the difference when I leave work in a flood of people talking about which beer they're going to buy as soon as they get to the store, but to no avail.
It's Sunday on a long weekend here, and all the messages and texts I have left since I got off work at 7pm Friday... still no answer. I'm nigh dying here, this is really reminiscent of my college days when I was trying to quit and was hanging out here on SR, only the chat room isn't quite the same on this coast's hours.
I brought this all up to my sponsor a couple weeks ago (well, minus the holiday part, which hadn't quite kicked in yet) when I started noticing that people would be quite eager to give me a ride... as long as I could plan it in advance. Where I work, hours are highly irregular, to the point of me usually finding out minutes ahead of quitting time when quitting time is. My sponsor suggested if I quit my job and applied for McDonalds or something, I might have a better schedule for the convenience of others. Of course, then I'd have to find another apartment etc... couldn't afford this one on part time minimum. But I would make life easier for people to be able to give me rides to meetings.
Sometimes I wonder if/when all the work stops being on my part. I'm supposed to help others and not impose on anybody. Call people and don't expect to be called. Yes, I realize I'm getting bitter.
I spent my first ten years of adulthood trapped in a twisted world where I was the youngest person on my block by about 30 years. I have never dated as an adult, never been asked out by anybody who didn't assume I was a ***** or a teenager (I look young... attract pedophiles who don't maintain any interest when they find out my age... ugh). I didn't know anybody my own age or close, or anybody I had anything in common with. I worked and had a car and a tv, my neighbors relied on welfare and smoked drugs. We had a passing relationship (social companionship is a human need) but never spent much time together, since I was always wanting to go out to events and such, and they had no time or money for that. My coworkers lived in a different realm, with families and such. I felt lost between the cracks, until I finally snapped and left that city for parts random. It has been better since, up until about two weeks ago.
For a brief moment before the Christmas season (I work in shipping) I was having the time of my life, going out camping with other ladies in AA and dances and generally having something to do. Now, it's back to lonely he-, and the people in this city (I moved about a month ago, about 10 miles) seem to think that's great. If you don't go out, you can't get into trouble, right? Well, I think we're on different levels. Social isolation and weekend loneliness is what led me to the bottle, not sexual impropriety and wild nights on the town.
I don't want to drink, heck it doesn't even look good anymore, watching people come in hung over. But they have someone to talk to, even if it is superficial, and I'm here in my apartment wondering where everybody went for the weekend. I know why they didn't invite me, I'm stuck in Saturday morning DUI classes and that's killed my social weekends ever since. They tell me in AA that it'll all be back to normal when I get out of those classes. I want to cry. It'll be over a year.
Sorry, just venting.
Running off the bus stop right now, run across state lines for the sake of doing it. I don't care. I'll take buses all day and look at stuff while listening to my ipod. I can't take no more of this loneliness I'm wrongly associating with the state I live in. It's not its fault, it's mine. If I hadn't drunk, I wouldn't have gotten the dui, if not for the dui, I wouldn't be inconvenient to hang out with on the weekends.
Ironically, the dui was after a period of sobriety, broken by the tantalizing wisp of the promise of being treated like a normal 30 year old woman...
Right now I'd do the whole pattern again for another night of being normal.
Take care all y'all,
TB
ps. even my ipod is teasing me... as I posted that, Billy Joe Shaver, "Fun while it lasted... but it didn't last long."