alphaomega

Hi there brother-love ! So glad you good.

Cow

I where you was Robot, where not care enough about self to do hard/inconvenient/uncomfortable things to get sober, but not want to die either, so will has to do it anyways. Always thought I be dead before 30 and never cared, you know, until my OD at 28, and then drunken rebel live hard die young thing not so appealing anymore. Yes, I has to learn to live without alcohol and caffeine.

AO, I not feel okay to bring pet into home until I can be responsible owner. I likely to feel overwhelm and end up give it back or resent it or not show proper attention. I has addiction, depression, anhedonia and detachment issue, and poor little pet not gonna cure all this issues. Having say that, when I sober and more stable, I want dog, cuz I want to train it and take for walks.

RobbyRobot

I believe an "uncaring of self" philosophy (not to mean same as in selfless though) can be leveraged and morphed into a useful advantage when learning to live differently with alcoholism and addiction while keeping sober. The uncaring can be useful for letting go of what only has importance when one is drinking and abusing. For me, there was much to let go of because drinking was my usual go to solution before I stayed quit.


Change brings responsibility. Responsibility creates and nurtures self-preservation. Learning to initially survive without addiction abuse in play is a worthy achievement. Eventually I got past just surviving and made a good life for myself. I'm now (almost) lovable and more importantly I care and love others as I love myself. This was impossible while drinking...

Cow

Ah, you most lovable Robot I know.

Okay, I biting, how I morph and leverage "uncaring about self" to advantage in staying sober. I would say my "uncaring about self" is conglomeration of general beat down of addiction, plus early learned dissasociation, plus severe clinical depressions and anhednoia, plus having live in zombie borg fugue state for entire adult life. Many peoples think "uncaring about self" mean I not like self, or down on self, or has no self esteems, but that not case at all.

You say, let go of what is important only when using. Hmm... expound please.

Lenina

cow, you could start with daily grooming ritual. Shower, clean hair and teeth. Use lotion on your arms and legs. Style hair neatly. Fresh, clean clothes. Maybe get a table manicure.

that's some self care you deserve.

And clean sheets.

Love from Lenina

Cow

Jesus God! Who does you work for?! Dial? Loreal? Tide? Colgate?

Hawks

I can relate to your character Cow.

I idolised all the rock stars that checked out early.

Morrison, Moon, Bonham, Joplin, Vicious, Hendrix etc etc.

I remember watching Leaving Las Vegas and thinking "f##kin way to go " drink myself to death in a last binge to end all binges.

Truth is, drinking yourself to death takes far more commitment and stubborness than I had.

I puked and shat blood and all of a sudden realised that I probably had months of this to go. Puking drinks and keeping on trying till one stayed down.

It was much harder than I had anticipated, painful too.

anyway, long story short, one day something changed, I decided I wanted to live.

Lenina

Bwaahahaha! maybe even the Giant of them all, Proctor and Gamble. You know they are in league with the Devil, right?

XXOO. Kisses. Lenina

Cow

I wants to live too, Hawks. Or maybe, I wants to wants to live. It a dream of mine. I not would call what I doing living, not in any pleasant sense of word. (But just so you freaking knows Lenina, even if I live, I gonna live in greasy hair and sweats, bitch!) Excuse me, that had to be said. Anyways, I glad something change and you life start to blossom. Sometime I think I feel that, but next moment or next day, is gone again in cruel ether of depressions or anhedonia. I think for me, is not gonna be revelation type moment, and then path change! I think I gonna has to really slog it out.

I know what you means about crazy determination of the drunk. One time I puke guts out in club bathroom, then go right back to bar for next drink. Bartender know me and is like, shht girl, come on, you got vomit chunks in you hair! I not gonna serve you! Lord has mercy.

Hawks

I went through the stage your at now Cow, at around age 28.

No one knew what a unique little snow flake I was, no one could tell me much of anything.

I'd describe it as my "deaf know all" phase.

Hard to tell a deaf know all anything right?

Besides that, I had my head well and truly planted up my own backside.

That didn't do much for me, but it did give me a rather sh#tty view of the world.... Lol.

One day you'll hear an explosive sound, that'll be the sound of your head popping out of your own backside.

When that happens, you'll be ready to actually take the necessary action to get well.

I hope that day arrives Soon.

Till then, try and decide if this "existence " is what you want deep down.

silentrun

I think Robby is on to something with morphing your survival skills to your addiction advantage Cow. Like you have said before you should be completely catatonic by now. For crying out loud you can dissociate at will. So WTF are you waiting for? Do it and get this started.
I love the future past Cow dialogue. I'm glad to see you did that. I had a little mini meditation session with myself Monday night after I posted to you about not being able to get started with the sugar and the smokes.
SR: Hey! You still in there? Help me out here. I can see where I want to be but I can't get there. I keep screwing up. Could you do some woowoo thing and switch this up for me. OK I'm going to sleep now and when I wake up I hope you have figured something out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2y_9hwW1eV0
When I woke up I just decided I didn't really need these things.

RobbyRobot

Alrighty then! Let's not expect an answer in a single post but more in a conversation. I mean, we hardly know each other, hahaha.

Uncaring self is a position taken which embraces zero tolerance for owning responsibility of whatever. Its no secret many of us authentically drank and drugged ourselves no matter what anyways and so to hell with the consequences. I'm more than guilty of being drunk by my own hand back in the day. Sure, we can blame being under the influence for some specific times, but this does not mean that years of addictive abuse can be blamed on whatever substances are being abused. Being a chronic drunk required my complete participation. Sure, I'm an alcoholic drug addict by definition, and my alcoholism is not my fault as much as its my responsibility when I'm being sober, and not my responsibility when I was being drunk. Yup. I really didn't care about responsibility while drunk. Not so much as escaping into my drunk. More like being drunk brought my most uncaring sides of my personality into being top-dog. I hated the consequences of being drunk of course, but I didn't hate being uncaring while being drunk.

Nonetheless, my accepting my deep uncaring for having been drunk helps me to no end in my accepting my real responsibility to my keeping sober. Importantly, I'm the same drunk sober as I was drunk. I'm a *different person sober* than I was drunk, but as an alcoholic nothing in my alcoholism changed. A drunk is a drunk is a drunk. Importantly I changed as a *person to keep sober.* I'm sure others can chose to play the semantic card on me and dismiss my views. No worries for me. My 33 years of unbroken sobriety speak best for me. Why is it when we returned to drinking its eventually not better no matter how long we might previously have stayed sober? Obviously because as drunks nothing in our actual relationship with alcohol being drank changed just because we quit... so for me to be a caring person I can't be a practicing drunk because by my own hand I couldn't have cared less about myself when I drank. This not caring attitude can be useful when I need to be more than just a drunk who doesn't drink. being sober requires me to do a lot of not caring about this, that, and the other thing, if I expect to stay sane and sober. I have a responsibility to mind my own self as much as possible else I risk getting in over my head and wanting to be less than responsible which means entertaining a return to drinking.

So I don't care if God is real or not I just care that I have made my choice on God being real. I don't care about my family and friends any more than I ever did but now I do care if they are harmed by me in my carelessness. I don't care about my misfortunes in life enough to drink over them and yet I don't care about my fortunes enough to drink over them either, lol.

The bottom line for me is I'm the same drunk, and I use all the tools and tricks I can use to live my life as a person who is a sober drunk and not simply as a person who doesn't drink anymore or doesn't have a drunken past life. I'm informed now of my personality being sober compared to my ignorance while being drunk. I thought I knew myself drunk. I was delusional about myself when drunk. Now, not so much, lol.

I reached an alcoholic tipping point in my early teens about my darker side of not caring about consequences and responsibilities. Back when, taking a long ride on the hell train into crazy land offered a gratification that can't be realized by being all good and proper and moral. Lying and cheating and doing whatever it takes is an acquired taste which can become as sophisticated as needed to justify whatever effort - like wasting a life as a drunk for example.

It takes real skills learned in stupidity to destroy a life over a span of years and then dissociate from the trail of garbage left in the wake of said destruction. Alcohol and drugs readily makes the job so very doable, and so naturally addiction abuse is ideally suited for living a wrecked life down the rabbit hole.

Nonetheless, making out like being the walking dead is a lousy way to live even while drunk, and so I eventually couldn't drink enough to escape from myself. When even being drunk is as useless as not being drunk then clearly there is no where but up if being dead is authentically not on the menu.

There are consequences for wasting a life, and it becomes a real matrix of challenges to change things around remarkably enough to not fall back into abuse of alcohol and whatever else.

I understand how commonly hatred works against the so-called good life far more than I know how truly love always trumps when the game of alcoholism is finally ended. You know, I don't need to know how gravity works to not float off into space, and I don't need to know how planes fly to buy my seat and get from here to there. Its remarkable just how much we don't need to actually know about whatever to nonetheless get enough out of life to make it all worthwhile and even livable.

I'm a different person now then when I was lost in my addictions. I'm different because of what I do with myself. Quitting was just the beginning of being different. Quitting wasn't enough for me. I just suffered when I didn't also change. Even today with decades of sobriety, its still the same game: keep changing in real life or suffer a harvest of outcomes and fates worse than physical death.

Still though, it takes more than lipstick on a pig to make things intelligently right, and my knowing how to be dishonest with myself far more than my knowing how to be honest gives me pause. I've learned not to leap and simply hope for the best. I come from a place of real life gone wrong, and such wrongness can't be denied and if denied I thereafter can't keep my sanity. The denial itself becomes the force of destruction. To live the good life I have now I had to embrace just how incurably bad it had already become. We can't escape our past doesn't mean though we have to succumb and drown in our own flotsam.

I believe in the awesomeness power of imagination. Imagination is easily the best remedy to the absurdities of life. Imagination is the real deal bar none. I would be disingenuous to suggest I'm a victim in my own life. I'm the captain of my fates if nothing else and when I finally quit drinking and drugging I made a true promise to go down with my own ship in sobriety same as I had promised myself in drunkenness.

courage2

I'm 100% with this. I don't rise to these challenges all the time but the adoption -- the creation -- of a sober self can be a great, beautiful, and ongoing act of generation. This idea of leveraging the uncaring self is interesting -- as a drunk I was a master of betrayal, destruction, and reversal. I find myself now taking actions to discard the few, last things I tried to protect -- my fragility, my fears and shame -- the things that were the meager food for my alcoholism at the end, having long since given up caring about anything else. Caring about my self is my last discard.

Sometimes I feel like a body that's been turned inside out so the meat and veins show to the world. Giving up my skin can not possibly be worse than all the other things I gave away.

Y'all know my current avatar, right?

alphaomega

((((((Robby)))))). I read your post 3 times yesterday, and twice this morning.

I'm pretty sure you wrote it for me.

Thank you for this. What a gift. Exactly what I needed to hear. Exactly.

jerri11

I wanted to chime in and say thank you to Robby for this post. This in particularly really hit home for me. This is where I was at last November; a perfect, description. And this is wonderful reinforcement for me that sober is the right path.

Cow, I've been following this thread for a while, and I have even gone back and read older threads. You always make me smile and think -- often at the same time. I'm rooting for you.

Cow

Mmm. Mhmm. Mhmmm.

Okay, let see, Amazon, search, "Robot Reader Companion"...Doh! Is sold out! ...okay... "Robot Cliff Notes"....Doh!....also sold out!

No, I mostly understands, but need to digest some more you wise words. What you not say is how exact you make actual pivot from drunken captain of Titanic to sober drunk captain of Barge of Life. I understand, "to be drunk became as useless as no to be drunk" but this realization and logic not ever seem enough to propel me through crucial pivot.

Thank you very much for this Robot. And thank you for everybody root for me, I root for you too.

RobbyRobot

I'm of the opinion sobriety is not achieved and realized from a here to there kind of journey. Sobriety doesn't require a destination or movable goalposts. It can't be fully appreciated empirically, and so how each individual thereafter makes good on their sobriety is entirely personal and their own unique responsibility to resolve whatever challenges arise by way of their living a sober lifestyle. Having said this, we can establish a fulcrum point to pivot from drunkenness to sobriety by means of *revolutionary change* in how we do what we do when we live our lives after quitting alcohol and drugs.

As a concrete example of pivotal opportunities for informed choices, let's start talking about suicidal ideations with respect to alcohol and sobriety and mental illness. My being drunk and suicidal was an entirely different thing then was my being sober and suicidal. My drunkenness was itself a fulfilment of suicidal ideations. Sobriety itself isn't as such, and so offers a sufficient remedy against certain alcoholic death. In the quitting though my ideations didn't simply quit on cue and life became all cake and cream. At this point one needs to decide if they are moving forward in their sobriety with alcoholism as an illness tethered to all future ideations, or do they do better to isolate present suicidal ideations as uninfluenced by their past drinking?

For me, since I went down with my drunken ship into the alcoholic abyss, I'm forever after consequenced with the surety that my alcoholic mind cannot simply be put back into state existing before my alcoholism owned me. So logically, I subscribe to alcoholism as an illness of mind, body, and spirit, and not simply a series of tragic drinking events within my life experiences. For the record, my alcoholism illness is in remission. However, I continue to deal with the responsibilities and consequences of requiring a sober lifestyle else my alcoholism will come back to own me yet again. These responsibilities limit my opportunities for personal choice inasmuch as I can't simply abandon myself to my own whims and desires because to do so is to invite the very philosophy that nurtured the beginnings of my alcoholism back in my day. I am required to be diligent and honest with myself as much as I'm able, else I invite circumstances being established which create opportunities for a return to drinking.

These limits can be useful when applied to suicidal ideations and without fail I have time and again made use of my past alcoholic experiences with suicidal ideations to mitigate any and all post-alcoholic ideations.

For example, knowing how far down I went with my alcoholism and yet didn't actually off myself and here I am sober allows for me to buffer myself from and successfully detach from the emotional hurricane of fears which all to often accompany suicidal ideations. With the emotions curbed because I have certain fears on a chain, my mental state on suicide is not nourished by raw fears, and this results in my not being overly distracted by suicidal ideations. This is a remarkable experiential difference for me when compared to my alcoholic experiences, which these differences can be applied on many other levels in my present sober personality. Detachment skills learned in my alcoholism serve me well in my sobriety is the point being established. In fact, since I also subscribe to the understanding of suicidal ideations as being a subset of general mental illness, and my alcoholism is itself described as a mental illness, this allows for me to cultivate a revolution in how I embrace my sobriety as a remedy for my mental illness with respect to my drinking experiences. Being a present recovered alcoholic wouldn't be possible had I not become a chronic alcoholic in the first place. When one honestly masters the fear of dying, there is little else that can't be mastered as well, including all fears attached to sobriety.

I've made every attempt to keep my opinions on this topic light and simplified albeit alcoholism and sobriety are inherently difficult to keep simplified in a discussion, lol.

And thanks peeps for the personal comments and affirmations related to my posts. Much appreciated.

Cow

Ha ha moo ha ...ha ha ...ha ...wait, you not kidding is you?

Not that is total fly over my head, but I has hard time to apply you wisdom practically. I need "Robot for Dummies." But Amazon out of that one too.

How is detachment serve you sobriety? Is mostly detachment/anhedonia I think that keep me from making more advantageous choice during "pivotal opportunity." It take a preponderance to make different choice, but is no preponderance of anything, and is no initiative, and so inertia win out. Inertia very powerful.

trachemys

I didn't know inertia and ennui were synonyms. Make different choices because you want different outcomes. You already know where the same choices will take you.

Preponderance?

pre·pon·der·ance
noun \pri-ˈpän-d(ə-)rən(t)s\

: a greater amount or number of something
Full Definition of PREPONDERANCE
1
: a superiority in weight, power, importance, or strength
2
a : a superiority or excess in number or quantity

The preponderance is "I don't want to die!"

RobbyRobot

No worries.

Okay, well, for sure we actually do have a preponderance of evidence drawn from our own personal experiences from which we can easily conclude drinking alcohol for whatever justification is a bad choice to make for persons such as ourselves. Does this surety in itself offer a pivotal opportunity? Choose wisely...

When we choose to not drink, we at the same moment choose to own a responsibility to our past drinking as well as to our non-drinking future. As for the ongoing present moments in our day to day lives, we are tasked with resolving our relative addictions to alcohol and drugs so as to have a life worth living. Not initially resolving our addictions relative to our ideals would create circumstances for an early relapse. Relapsing is all about active addiction seeking to be fed. Recovery and relapse do not share the same bed. They are entirely different life experiences. For some, these differences are ignorantly chosen to be grey and fuzzy, and if so, much opportunity for recovery is sidelined and undermined from the get go. Knowledge is power, and established practical boundaries of what is and what isn't a sober lifestyle for each of us as determined by our own honest evaluation of life experiences is an essential knowledge to prevent relapse.

I'm expert in being able to detach and dissociate myself from whatever it is I don't want to deal with, for whatever reasons I may choose to invent. I don't require actual truthful facts to detach, I can do so on lies as well as truth. I'm not alone in this skill set, lol.

Since I've already proven to myself by my alcoholism I can by use of detachment drink myself to an early death, I didn't actually need to die to be certain I was headed for an early grave as a young man in his 20's. Sure enough, consequences didn't stop my drinking. Being almost dead did though, and this pivotal opportunity to not die had to be made on faith I was going to die in a drunken hot mess if I kept drinking. Faith is a curious thing, yes? Detach religion and supernatural whatever's from pure faith and things become much more interesting, yeah?

Back in my early days of recovery, I had a doom n' gloom attitude based on my years of relapsing making it a probable long shot I would ever actually become recovered. In a practical sense and to make a long story short, I had to lie to myself that I was sure I would make it. I simply couldn't and didn't have what it took to be truthful to myself about my chances to become recovered. Seriously. I was a real dysfunctional mess. Yeah, I wanted to quit because I didn't want to die, but besides that, I really believed I wasn't going to make it out, you understand? Clearly I was FUBAR when I put down that last drink.

A couple days of not drinking didn't make me less FUBAR. A couple weeks? Nope. A couple of months? Yeah, began to realize I had something going on with my sobriety. Before my first sober year was out, I knew I would never ever drink again. I was finally not FUBAR as an *individual person*

In my first year I didn't care what was truth or lies as long as I was not drinking. Standing on the shoulders of others before me, I learned about my alcoholism and my sobriety. I also learned how to detach from my own ******** without needing alcohol to help me dissociate from my challenges, responsibilities, and everything else, lol.

Being able to detach myself from the noise in my head and the hurt in my heart gave me at least a chance to learn how to make different choices all the while not drinking. Its super easy now to not drink. Back in my early days of recovery, not so much. I absolutely struggled to not pickup in those first early months.