Amp - I agree, sobriety sure has given me a chance to get reacquainted with me!
Dizzy - Great job with the driving! It's amazing how anxiety cool without adding alcohol to the fire.
BBB - In time the answers about how to proceed with work. The best advice I can offer is what people told me - stay sober. Keep at it and the right thing to do will become clearer.
BF - It seems like you drink when people aren't around? I wonder if exploring that can lead to some clarity for you around your relapses? I try to only speak from my experience in recovery. I've come to see just how much of a trigger isolation and loneliness are for me. Ironically, in active addiction, many of my behaviors hindered intimacy and interdependence with other people. I wasn't nurturing the right relationships.
In AA I hear lots of different people discussing how the program improved their relationships with people. Whatever toxic patterns they were prone to, be it secretiveness or lying or smothering or shutting people out, boastfulness, you name it, they've learned to overcome it and live really good lives in the program.
For me personally, I am naturally pretty comfortable socially, yet I struggled with feeling like I fit in at AA meetings. It took me going time and again, trying different meetings, and signing up for service commitments to get settled there. I will tie into Toots' suggestion to seek a sponsor. Doing so has been so beneficial to me. It's great to have someone to unload to, with problems big or small. It keeps the small problems from growing and festering and becoming bigger ones. To tie into what Gilmer, who always has good advice, said, a sponsor can guide you into digging deeper into the issues that drive your addiction. I encourage you to listen to people who are successfully avoiding alcohol.
I'm not saying AA is the right way. It's certainly not the only way. But AA is accessible to anyone and works for a lot of people, including me. It provides valuable face to face support, which I personally need.
Toots - Great post. I don't know if I was blue because I didn't know how to live sober, or if it was a physical effect of alcoholism, or if it was something that I had for a long time and used alcohol to deal with it, but I agree with you that I've felt more engaged in life as I've developed tools to live well.
Last weekend I had an unintentional engagement with poison ivy. I'm so allergic to it! I was hoping that the rash would remain contained but today the rash popped head to toe, so tomorrow I will start steroids.
Grab all the great stuff this sober life offers, Undies!
(But don't grab the poison plants!!!!)