GreatInquiry7

Hi all...

End of last year until just after the middle of this I had ~10 months. Then I thought I could "drink normally", which ended up in stops and starts of 3-4 day, 1-2 week, 2 day heavy benders. I'm always the one drinking once everyone has stopped.

I caught myself in a free fall after ~1.5 months of that, and now I have 3 months again.

Overall I would say I like sober life a lot better. But as I'm sure many of you have experienced - the big gap in my life is the social and dating aspect which I miss a lot.

Anyway here's the question, "does anyone deal with this", and it's kind of a series of things:

- When friends are going out or having parties, I really want to go but I refuse because I can't drink
- So I don't go, even though I want to and then I have major "fear of missing out" when I know or see them having fun and I'm sitting on the side lines
- This is when I say "maybe I should just drink again", it'll be fine
- When I think about just going and hanging sober, or even when i do (which I do from time to time)... it's just not the same. I feel strange, not fun, self conscious...

So all in all - its a vicious cycle of thought. I want to go out and hang, but don't because I can't drink, and then because I don't I feel the trigger to drink, and then I get even more aggravated with myself because when I eventually do go and don't drink I feel like an outkast, strange, and it's just not fun.

So it leads to feeling lost on the social side of things.

And because I'm relatively young, I feel like i'm missing out on parts of life that are once in a life time - aka can't go back and do them because of all of this.

My bigger goals in life are much better without drinking: financial, business, health, peace of mind - but this is a big issue internally..

Anyway that's really i t- wondering if anyone dealt with or deals with something similar.

Thanks!