Aegis

I'm 37 and have been trying to remember what it was like to be sober/not hungover and for the life of me I can't remember a day that I wasn't either drunk or so hungover that the day was a complete mess. Has anyone else experienced this? I see my friends going on with their lives, having a good time, while not having a drink in their hand and it is completely foreign to me. I know I'm an alcoholic, but I go to work every day at 5am, I stay the entire day, and haven't called in sick in over 15 years. Why do none of the obvious signs of alcoholism point at me?

DoubleBarrel

What signs do you think you are looking for?

Sounds like its not too much fun right now.

Lots of us kept up a job and other appearances for quite a while, until we couldn't. This is a progressive condition.

Have you ever stopped for a while, and try and sort out your thoughts on the matter?

erics

Hey,

I can relate. I burned out on drinking at 39. I kept drinking like I was 21 the whole time. I started when i was 16. The delusion of me having a job, college degrees, mortgage, money in the bank kept me from thinking I was alcoholic. Truth is, most alcoholics are functioning. The stereotype of the bum in a trench coat only accounts for a small percentage of alcoholics. I was drunk for 3-4 days a week, hungover for 2, and only really "sober" for a day before I did it all over again..... For years......

Boleo

I said the same thing throughout most of my 2nd & 3rd decade of drinking. Then there came a day when my life fell apart like a house of cards.

Alcoholism is always progressive... Never digressive.

Jfanagle

After I got sober at age 46, I tried to explain to several people why I had found it necessary to stop drinking and start attending AA meetings. I was greeted with, "yea your a heavy drinker, but you never miss work, have a great house, car and wife and family. You are seldom apparently drunk and in fact have an amazing capacity for alcohol."

Inside I was dead and like yourself could not remember the last day I didn't drink. I learned to function in a haze and worked so hard at "holding it all together" until one day in 1999 I just couldn't do it anymore. I stopped on Oct. 15th and that was my last drink.

"obvious signs of alcoholism?" Obvious to who? Not being sober and hung over all the time ARE obvious signs. Do you want people to greet you with, "Good day BTW aren't you an alcoholic? I too thought being at my desk by 6AM and working until 6PM or later, attending all the baseball, soccer and football games and never causing an embarrassing social situation made me just a guy who drank a lot of whiskey. Most people do not want to create a scene and just because they don't say anything doesn't mean they aren't well aware of your drinking problem.

I can tell you from experience, if you should decide to get sober and achieve any time staying that way, there will be a time when people will begin to tell you all the stories about what the saw when you were a drunk. That is much worse than if you are still drinking and simply don't notice the looks and the whispers after you aren't around to hear them.

If you are a drunk, and I suspect based on your admission that you may well be, then here is the bad news. YOU ARE EXIBITING FAR MORE SIGNS THAN YOU KNOW and people simply don't want to embarrass you or have any uncomfortable conversations with you as long as you aren't directly impacting their world.

You get sober for yourself, but the rewards of a better you are shared by all whose lives you touch.

Good luck,

Jon

gaffo

Even though the days are still a complete mess, being sober is really great.

EndGameNYC

Even when you think you're doing okay in important aspects of your life, what you can never know is how much better your life could have been had you been sober.

Nuudawn

Making it in to work everyday shows perseverance...something alcoholics aren't short on. How sad it is that we measure our problem by things we have not lost since we are actually quite unable to think about we have.

Amajorityofone

What is it like to be 100% sober every single day of your life?

If I could only use one word, i would say that it feels sublime. I wrote this in my journal on my one year anniversary.

23rd August 2013-

3:27am

Today marks the one year anniversary of my clean and sober journal. What a remarkable year it has been. Easily the most productive fiscal year of my life.

I have traveled extensively, resting in seven different states, attended the Indy 500, read over 17 books, and exercised consistently and vigorously.

I have watched or participated as my six year old son competed in four sports, football, basketball, baseball and tennis….and swim in this spare time. His reading level was at H at the end of his kindergarden school year ( it was supposed to be at a level of E) AND he’s already on a 2nd grade math level.

Six bills that were coming into the mail at this time last year, Lowes, Pottery Barn, the truck payment, the Harley payment, the lawn care service, and the home equity line, are all gone, paid off in full. I have also detached myself from my local barbershop as I now cut my own hair.

As a direct result my margin line has come down from 17000 to 7000 ( saving me $796 a year in interest) and my equity portfolio has exploded to the upside by well over $70,000 dollars. By comparison, it took the first thirty two years of my life to amass my first 70,000 in savings.

Amazing.


I have paid off more than 4600 dollars of debt, over funded my home escrow account, reduced the interest rate on my aggregate debt from 4.6% to 3.29%, re-roofed my house, painted my bathroom-bedroom ceiling, retiled my bathroom floor, replaced my bedroom trash can, replaced my bed sheets, replaced my kitchen trash basket, have had the house professionally cleaned, twice!, maintained all of my assets, replaced well over 10% of my wardrobe AND acquired a brand new John Deere riding mower, edger, and trimmer. All of which have been paid for in full.

Pull up production has increased by 17%
Push up production has increased by 14%
Stationary bicycle production has increased by 62.5%

Yesterday I swam for more than 30 minutes and put together my very first fantasy football team.
Tuesday I bicycled 13 miles
Monday I ran 3 miles
Today – 2.5 mile walk

Amount of money spent on drugs and/or alcohol over the last twelve months – 0.00

Amount of drugs and alcohol consumed over the last twelve months- zero.

Word of the day- Tryst

An appointment made in secret, especially between lovers.

This quote comes once again to the front of my mind.

“You look at where you're going and where you are and it never makes much sense, but then you look back at where you've been and a pattern seems to emerge. And if you project forward from that pattern, then sometimes you can come up with something.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values



My mantra remains the same.

Stay, straight, ahead…
Amen.

sunrise1

It feels amazing. And- I remember feeling like you feel right now! I remember thinking- how can I possibly not have a drink in my hand, or never again? I couldn't contemplate how it might feel for better or for worse. It wasn't until I actually did it that I realized it's much more amazing than I even hoped for.

GracieLou

I never knew what it was like to be sober. Not because I started drinking when I was young, I did, but because I never knew what it was like to drink normally. The people I see that have an occasional drink for social reasons or have a beer or wine with dinner, those people are not sober because they are not alcoholics. They will never know what is it like to come back from hell as they were never there. The word sober has no real meaning to them.

I can relate. I knew I was an alcoholic for years and I thought, like you, that many of the signs were not there, until I got sober.

I looked at myself as a functioning alcoholic.

For many years I went to work, paid bills, took care of my kids, took care of my husband, cleaned the house, did laundry, cooked dinner, went shopping...the list goes on.

Then after 24 years many of these responsibilities fell away or were minimized. I found as one fell off the more alcohol poured in. As one got smaller and it took less time then I had more time to drink.

I did not associate with people that did not drink. I was hiding how much and how often I drank. I placed myself around people that were like me so I could feel normal and I did feel normal for many years.

Then I wanted to be away from them too so I drank myself away from the people that drank. At 42 I was alone which is were I wanted to be all along. I wanted to be left alone to drink. Other than work and some small household chores and bills, I could finally do what I wanted.

It took two years for me to fall off the edge. I still worked and paid those bills but I was heading for full isolation.

It took some sober time for me to see not only how unmanageable my life had become but how it always had been. When I look back now I can see the millions times that I shifted bills and people around so I could drink. It was my number one concern. If I had that, then I could cope with the rest.

I am an alcoholic that is now sober. I know now what sobriety is. I am new to it but I can say with all honesty that my worse day sober trumps any day I did drinking.

It all starts with day one or I should say one day. One day, 24 hours, we all started there.

sugarbear1

Can you stop drinking for 3 months? Without any problem?

If you can, you may not be an alcoholic.....

If you can't stop or find it too difficult, you may be an alcoholic.....

Of course, stopping abruptly requires a proper detox, so seek medical attention to be safe.

Tamerua

I was just like this, got up, went to work, sometimes with a ferocious headache, sometimes not. Some days, I even worked out before work! Then pulled a 12 hour day to come home and drink so that I wouldn't think.

I was driving to work, maybe three years ago, with a nasty hangover and a commercial came on for a recovery center and it said something to the affect of, "you're a functional drinker. But shouldn't life be more than functional?" Took me another three or four years to get sober but man. Now that I am, I can see the spiral I was on. This would have gotten worse.

Try it for today, good luck.

JustODAAT

I was an extremely functional drunk. I was great at my job and great at getting drunk. But I was also exhausted and anxious and obsessed with two mutually exclusive thoughts that rattled around in my head constantly: (1) I should not drink so much (2) I need to get enough to drink.

Once I quit I realized how much a relief it was not to be obsessed with alcohol all the time. I realized how much energy I was wasting on worry and shame and scheming to get drunk. I also realized that there was more to life than just functioning.

Being sober is a feeling of calm relief peppered with occasional urges, which I have learned to "surf" by reading this forum every day, and occasional moments of joyful reflection when I realize how much better I feel about myself and particularly my relationships, particularly my relationships with my kids.

Quitting forever, however, was an idea that was too big for me at the beginning. I was a string it together one day at a time person (hence the name). I'm wondering if that is something you could try for yourself: See if you can be sober today.

jazzfish

I was a functional drunk for decades. I achieved great success academically and in my career. I got married, had kids, bought two cars and a house. But, I was an alcoholic the whole time. However, the thing that was constant was the pain and misery in my life, and the exhaustion from the effort of trying to keep it together. Eventually, I could no longer keep it together and started to lose things in the classic sense of an alcoholic.

I wish I had paid more attention to my drinking and the pain and suffering, because that was the real mark of my problem.

Getting sober now means I am free from the bottle. My time and life are my own. My mind is 100% available to me to focus on whatever I want to focus it on. Getting sober is so much more than the body processing the alcohol out of your system. It is about healing, and starting to feel emotions again, and stopping suffering, and being able to think, and recognizing how exhausted you have been for a long time, and feeling hope again, and calmness.

LDT

You pose a good question, Aegis....."What's it like...?"

For me, a textbook "HF Alcoholic", it means freedom. Ironically, the year of my greatest downward alcoholic spiral was one of my best years professionally.....and I used that as an excuse to keep drinking. I couldn't possibly be an alcoholic because I was having a superb year, right? Truth is, I was literally and figuratively dying on the inside. The price I was paying for being the "perfect" person for everyone was killing me.

So in a word....becoming sober means pure freedom to me.

FBL

I drank for nearly 30 years, the last 10 years I was drunk nearly every single day. I was always on time for work, never had a sick day, paid all my bills on time, etc. How could I possibly be an alcoholic? Well, I found out one day when I had a severe panic attack at work and ended up in the ER. I hope you quit before it gets to that stage.

susasober1

I was a functioning alcoholic until I wasn't...I was close to your age (37) when I started realizing my drinking wasn't normal...I finally was able to get sober in May of 2012. These days whenever I romanticize the drink (the way it was before things got really bad) it seems I have a "drinking dream" and wake up realizing how crappy I would feel if I were to drink again...and that would just be the best case scenario!