fini

jgray,
well done on two years. good stuff
ever heard of the concept of living between the fives? it's to do with re-setting ...hm...the gauges, the thresholds, of pleasure and pain. when drinking/drugging, these things get exaggerated. then, after quitting, we usually get nowhere near those "high" or "low" perceptions of emotion. this can feel very flat. nothing igniting, so to speak.
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this link should take you to a post where a participant on my lifering forum posted about what she'd heard at the LR congress of that year from a speaker . i wasn't there, but found her post and the concept interesting.

maybe it's of some use to you.

at about a year and a half, i remember i was extremely frustrated because i felt nothing really touched me. was as if i had a screen around me, or teflon all over...i couldn't understand it. i'd always thought of myself/experienced myself as quickly and easily 'moved'. and i wasn't. couldn't cry, for example. nothing went deep enough or came close enough....

it stopped being like that. looking back, no, i wasn't depressed then (i was depressed a couple of years later, though). it seems to have been a "phase" i went through and my sense was it was a protective thing. as if really feeling at that point was somehow dangerous. don't know...but it did go away.
the thing about not having a passion...it seems like quite a few discover we don't have one after we're sober a while. makes me wonder if we just expected there would be a buried one that would now emerge???? seems to me not something that a hobby would take care of. feels like a different thing...

sorry; your post got me rambling all over.....

Boleo

There came a point in my recovery when I realized I no longer needed an "end of drinking program" and started working an "end of suffering program".

"In this life - pain is inevitable - suffering is optional"
(unknown author)

Sidney14

Hi I can relate too I have been clean from alcohol for 3 years but I have noticed over last 3 months the things that I used to enjoy like jogging etc have also lost its shine, ironically enough I lost a good friend being sober, I lost motivation in general and I have days where I don't care anymore. My days are filled up with full time job, being a single mum with three demanding daughters, on weekends I am so exhausted and I have been pushing myself lately to the brink of exhaustion plus I feel completely alone too. But like you have no desire to drink......sometimes it does feel like not living but just existing......

RobbyRobot

Sure have, more times then I want to remember, lol. For me, it was all about changing up my game style to catch up to my better awareness of myself and my life. When things changed for me by quitting drinking, responsibilities as well came along with those changes, and all though much was obvious, much was also like looking thru a glass darkly.

I've bolded an important statement your expressing suggesting you previously were on fire for things. I suppose you mean before you quit drinking?

Feeling dead to the world was an important (justified) reason for why I drank alcohol. I really wanted out of the world, and short of dying, being drunk worked for me. Until it didn't. Dying came back on the menu all too soon, and it was quit and rejoin life or be drunk and dead as like in the ground dead.

Apathy is no friend of mine, but we sure have been introduced enough times over just about everything I can imagine. In some sense apathy has its upside in the way it can create a barrier of indifference to worldly concerns and at times this is required. In the best sense though apathy is a place where life becomes blah and without some personal intervention into the state of empathy the empathy will survive and unfortunately normalize into a weird justified lifestyle. Been there I have too many times to mention.

Intervention is best when done with awareness and purpose. Clarity of vision of the desired goals is essential when working against empathy. It is all to easy to complicate the whole thing and this will only lead to more empathy to justify abandoning the intervention.

I guess it becomes important to ask what created fire for you before you quit drinking that you don't have fire for now? Or was it simply the drinking that made the fire?

BTW - congrats on your 2 years! Well done!