Old 05-19-2018, 02:37 PM
  # 6 (permalink)  
JeffreyAK
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Join Date: Jan 2015
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I felt similar after I quit, and I think it's pretty common.

What I came to realize was, it wasn't that I was angry all the time, it was that I was feeling anger (and happiness too sometimes), and it made me anxious because for years I had felt just drunk. That anxiety, feeling real emotions, kept me on edge a lot of the time.

It wasn't that didn't look forward to anything, it was that I just wasn't looking forward to drinking, which is all I had looked forward to.

Life wasn't boring, it was just life - minus the one thing I had looked forward to every day, scoring alcohol and drinking it.

I think a lot of early sobriety is just coming to terms with life, on it's terms, and life has ups and downs and anger and sadness and everything else. When we were drinking through it, that's all we felt - looking forward to drinking, drinking, and making it through the next day until we could do it again. So sometimes we have to kinda relearn how to live life, the way everyone else lives it, and that can be stressful and can cause anxiety.

It does get better! 125 days is awesome, but for many people that's still quite early. It can take two years to really get fully over it, same as it takes two years to fully deal with a major life event like a divorce. And in a way, quitting drinking can be very much like a divorce.
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