Last time I drank was this past Monday night, which bled into Tuesday morning. Over the course of the weekend and Monday, I had somewhere in the neighborhood of 36 longnecks, 7.4% alcohol in each. Tuesday was a miserable day of sweating and shaking at work, and yesterday was an unstoppable parade of headaches.
So today is really my second full day of sobriety.
Anyway, the chief problem I'm running into is that when work gets out on Friday, I'm sorely tempted to buy again.
Here's the thing: I try to make friends, but too often wind up hanging around with people like my abusive parents... except I usually don't realize it until many months into the relationship, when I inevitably get tossed aside the instant I'm no longer useful in some way. Either that, or I get rejected and/or ignored right off the bat, usually with no real explanation, and wind up feeling like I should just throw myself away.
So though I'm trying to find a social life, when the weekend comes, I reach out to people, trying to find something to do instead of abusing my body and mind with alcohol... and it's just crickets all the way around. Can't get any company set up in advance, can't get anything day of, nothing.
Now, I don't think I'm a rotten person. Quite the opposite: I really do go out of my way to be helpful, because I sure as hell don't value myself for my own sake (though I'm getting better at that). I know I apologize too much, and that my lack of self-esteem is pretty damn obvious... but it's not like I'm trying to date, ffs, you know?
So I wind up alone at home, thinking about how alone I am in the cosmos, how purposeless existence is, how odds are I'll be alone the rest of my life, and so on and so forth. It absolutely sucks. Faced with a choice between that and alcohol, for a long time alcohol has won.
I can't do that anymore, because my body reacts badly every time I stop drinking again to go to work or get back to some semblance of a life. I go through a day of withdrawal hell, tell myself "never again," and 4-5 days later I'm back at it. And because withdrawal gets worse each time, I'm setting myself up for some serious misery if I keep on this track.
So I'm trying. I've signed up here, hoping for camaraderie and support, reading and researching. I'm trying to resurrect a long-dormant hobby, and lose myself in a video game if I can't manage that. And that's going to have to be enough this weekend.
Sorry to babble on and on.
I wonder if anyone else here feels the same way? And perhaps what got them over the hump?
Thanks for reading.
