Boleo

What state are you in? I know some good FREE rehabs in Colorado.

Carbonized

I don't need Rehab.

What i need is work and shelter in the short term and serious in-depth mental adjustments in the long term. The way i feel now, life is a futile gesture. The more i think about making it to the top the more i wonder "why bother?"

Thinking of relocating but wondering what are the chances of anything coming out right.

foolsgold66

I think you have a decent attitude for someone in your situation, Carbonized. You know you need to make changes and you are doing your best to get there. I hope your ID shows up soon so you can find some work.

TopFlight

I workout quite a bit....i'll lift weights for an hour, swim for another hour, play tennis, etc. Since I graduated this last June, I've been applying/interviewing for jobs, but nothing has come to fruition yet. My daily philosophy has just been to keep it busy and productive as much as I can.

Also, for anyone that battles depression or feeling stressed out a lot. I really recommend martial arts, particularly Muay Thai or Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. Not once have I gone to a class and left feeling bad. It definitely has a way of stripping all that bad energy from you.

Nuudawn

Crikey Carbonized...I am awed by your tenacity and puzzled as to how you ended up in the situation you are in. You are articulate and not short on sense. Forgive me, this is the first time I have come across you on the forum. I will look around for ya more. I would love to see you rise....

And as to the OP, I'm a fan of getting my blood pumping but for the first 3 months of my sobriety I had to work on awareness of my own thoughts and getting to know myself (my hypersensitve, overreactive self a wee bit better). I'm getting more comfortable in my own skin (and sobriety) so in this next season I'm all for exercise of the physical self. Seems to me there are so many facets to over all well being...spiritual, intellectual and physical. In sobriety I hope to get a better handle on them all.

Boleo

Denver Rescue Mission

Carbonized

Thanks Bolero,

but i'll pass on that one. Bad enough i'm feeling so tired lately i'm thinking about partaking of small bumps of meth, but having religous BS forced onto me is a repulsive notion.

Spirituality is the last thing on my mind. I know EXACTLY why and what i quit for and no pie in the sky nonsense has anything to do with it. I quit to iprove myself. Not to be enslaved to something that'll prevent my full potential from being realized. Every once in a while i'll get to feeling just right, basically like i was born to rape the world. THAT is how i want to be 24/7. Anything, and i do mean anything, that prevents my becoming is to be disregarded.

I want and i will have.

The only reasonable alternative is death.

Sobriety is merely a means to an end.

karate

Small bumps of meth ,damn sure wont lead anywhere good .

Carbonized

Most of the ways i make a living requires speed, strength and endurance. Say for example unloading a 48ft trailer containing 2,000 boxes each weighing between 60 and 100 pounds. You have roughly 55 minutes to unload one then it's off to the next trailer then the next until you are done for the day.

If you can't you're fired.

That's just one of many examples.

How do you do this if you are constantly tired?

Boleo

You might consider getting into some other kind of work. If you continue to burn the candle at both ends (so to speak), you will not only fail to stay sober, you will end up so sore at the end of the day, you will end up hooked on pain killers.

Recovery is not a patch that you put on your old life, it is a whole new way of living. Want it or not, you are going to have to give up your old ways sooner or later. Drugs and alcohol will eventually rob you of everything worth working for.

Carbonized

Unavoidable situation.

If i want to work, i must be able to function at a high level. There is absolutely no way around this. Every, and i do mean EVERY single job i can get will fire you in a heartbeat if you can't perform. Period.

In what i'm trying to move into requires mental concentration and endurance for periods that at times will go for 24 hours at a stretch. Maybe even longer if needed.

No way around it. If i can't cut it, why bother?

karate

I do think the endophorins (sp?) kick in after you work a while .

The harder I work ,the better I feel .

DayTrader

Hopefully one day Carbon you'll be able to make some changes. From the "tone" I'm picking up (and that's 50/50 at best in a written forum on the web) you seem fairly comfortable where you are and focus more on why you're "stuck" than what you can to do move out.

I'm NOT in any way making light of your situation and I'm not even insisting I'm right. I'm just reporting what I sense. Try not to get hurt feelings. One of the main ppl I learned about recovery from was in your spot....well, he was worse off but that doesn't matter, for a long time. He's taught me a LOT about life, recovery and being a responsible mature adult.

So long as I tried to run my own show and dictated how I wanted my recovery to look and feel, I pretty much stayed stuck. Of course I stayed stuck, I would only change the things I felt like changing......wanted to change.....thought I could change, but little else.

That same problem exists today, sober....in recovery, just to a much smaller extent. I still think "I've got this"and that I know it all. I still tend to seek comfort rather than solutions - solutions almost always involve some level of discomfort before the freedom comes. I still tend to lean towards those things that make sense and ignore what's worked for others - insisting it won't or can't work for me or that I'm not able or lucky enough.......bla bla bla... Difference now is I know that's just fear talking.

Carbonized

To put it bluntly, i hate my life.

Name prominent facets and it all is a catalog of shortcomings and outright failure. Physically, materially, economically, socially, you name it. There's winners and losers, know which i am. It's easy to see.

What i do is what i know i can do. And doing it is increasingly a painful endeavor seeing as i have some bodily damage that requires serious medical attention. Work = pain. Simply getting my shoes on in the morning can turn into disaster if i'm not careful. Hospital and surgery? Who's going to pay for it? I'm not a welfare parasite so that route can't be taken. Ideas?

Here is the grim joke...I felt much better overall BEFORE i was sober. I may have been sleeping on a piece of cardboard but i didn't feel like i do now. This morning i had to force myself to get up and the walk to the shelter was an endless slog that was a rather easy walk awhile ago. Even now i feel very tired. You know what i'm dreading? The walk to get fresh clothes. That entails a 10 mile walk carrying a 30 pound load. Before all this it would have merely been a hassle, now it is something formidible.

I quit drinking so as to improve myself but the opposite has occured.

ru12

Man, I have no similar experience and dont have much to offer at all. Any local charities or homeless coalitions? I wouldn't last long on the streets. I'm much too soft. Can you get to a warmer climate for the winter? D@mn I just don't know where to begin.

Boleo

Drinking worked for me to right up until the day it stopped working for me.

DayTrader

I know exactly what you mean. I heard so many people say that they quit drinking, did some exercising, changed their diet to a more healthy one and wham-o......they had a wonderful life again. I was in the same boat you find yourself. I quit drinking and I wasn't getting arrested or having anymore drinking-related problems but just about every other facet of life felt worse. I've heard and read about PAWS but what I had was something more. They were old feelings......things that had been part of my life for almost as far back as I could remember. Only now, newly sober, they seemed to have gotten worse.

I sat in that spot for quite a while, thinking I just needed to be patient and everything would straighten out like it seemed to for so many others. Even many months after my last drink, not much had improved. Maybe it wasn't getting any worse but the thought of living like this, with these feelings and this mental anguish was depressing.

Long story short, it wasn't until I ran into some alcoholics active in recovery that I learned what was going on. I discovered that my drinking qualified me as an alcoholic - no shocker there. I also learned that these ppl had the same deal....that periods of sobriety were full of constant reminders about what they used to like to drink. It was suggested that what I was experiencing was not something more than about 10-15 percent of the population experiences: the agony of untreated alcoholism. Alcoholic drinkers solve their problem by not drinking. Drinking is the problem so not drinking is the solution. Combine "not drinking" with some healthier life-choices and they're off and running. For the brand of alcoholism I had, not drinking was a necessary start but not the solution. Like you, I felt worse (mentally, emotionally, in regards to depression, inability to focus or sometimes just think, decision making, and so on) in sobriety than I remembered feeling even on the bad drunks. The concept of my alcoholism having a greater effect on me when not drinking that when I was seemed like it was spot-on. It didn't seem to make sense but here I was, experiencing precisely that.

It seemed like I just couldn't catch a break. I couldn't take the trouble (mostly legal troubles but there were also marital issues and problems at work) that came with drinking. On the flip side, I couldn't take the feelings and thoughts that dominated me when I wasn't drinking. It was lose - lose..... Perfect, I thought, for a loser like me.

I say all of this in the hope that if this is what you're experiencing, you can know that you're not alone. Your problems aren't unique to you. Even better news, they're consistent with and present in a small group of people. Best of all, there IS a solution. There IS a way out. Everything CAN improve.

Time isn't on your side though. I found for myself and I've watched a lot of newly sober ppl who are in your spot and the clock is ticking. It's usually find the solution quickly or go back to what you were doing in the insane hope that this time it'll be better, the trouble won't be so bad, and......if nothing else.......at least you'll get a reprieve for a little while. Door number two is a lie we convince ourselves of though. It's never better and that reprieve, eventually even that goes away and then all you get is drunk/high AND you keep all the shame, guilt, and self-hatred.

Nuudawn

That's pretty much addiction in a nutshell.