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Old 11-12-2021, 03:05 PM
  # 84 (permalink)  
MissPerfumado
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Join Date: Nov 2014
Location: Australia
Posts: 1,499
Hi Dionysos ... sorry I'm late to the thread. I've enjoyed reading your journey and want to say congratulations on 22 days.

I live alone. Have done for more than 15 years. When I was drinking, I loved living alone because I could keep my drinking secrets to myself. If I couldn't crawl out of bed until 4 pm on a Saturday, who was to know?

Boredom was a trigger in itself. So was coming home after a day at work. I made specific plans around how to address it. I made a list of all the triggers I could think of, and then a list of all the things I could do to counter them. Things like, logging onto SR, meditation, going for a run, cleaning the flat, fixing things around the flat, calling a friend, reading (especially sobriety books). A whole bunch of things. I also wrote down the daily habits, weekly habits and monthly habits I wanted to keep to.

I even stopped sitting on my own sofa to watch TV for a few months. Because that was a trigger.

This was my sobriety plan. I still have it in a notebook somewhere. It saved my life.

When I got sober, living alone became a different thing. I used to be vaguely ashamed of living alone because I knew I used it to cover up drinking. But sober solitude gave me different gifts. I use it for inspiration, creativity, relaxation, respite... I used it as the mental and emotional space to design and create a wholly different life for myself (admittedly, this took many years post-quitting). I hope you manage to move flats to one that has better heating because your physical comfort will be important in your sober life. It doesn't have to be grand but it needs to be comfortable. You can't run away from your surroundings when you're sober.
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