Yesterday made three years
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Join Date: Jan 2011
Posts: 1,126
Yesterday made three years
And a big chunk of that accomplishment is owed to SR. I still troll the Newcomer threads hoping to offer bits of encouragement here and there. But to be honest I do it more to remind myself where I have come from.
The hardest thing for a newcomer to chalk up is time: Those hard initial days and weeks and hopefully months that separate the successes from the failures are singularly the hardest thing an addict or alcoholic can accomplish. And we fail miserably more often than not.
The only advice I can honestly give is that it's going to be very hard, that acceptance that the first drink will lead to another and that each initial day has to be treated as the milestone that it is.
I do offer a bit of sick, counter-intuitive advice: If you's stumbled onto SR after hitting a bottom, embrace the despair and misery and bedevilment that brought you here. You don't have to ever feel this bad again. Today will suck. You'll feel sick, depressed, anxious, regretful, resentful, you'll fee as if you can't go on. But all you have to do is get today behind you. And, yeah, that may mean no sleep, it may mean chain smoking, it may mean dealing with the detritus of your using life all around you and the collateral damage may include loved ones that have given up.
But just embrace that misery. Relish it. It's a gift of desperation that brought you here and you, indeed, are not unique or alone. I've been there.
I won't go into my bottom but will say that a few decades of booze, benzos and pot left me a couple floors above that bottom of jails or death but did entail four trips to the emergency room and an ambulance ride that ended with 10 days in a hospital. My bottom entailed coming from the hospital to a cramped, high-rise condo in a third-world Southeast Asian country with my possessions fitting in a suitcase and two boxes.
For a month I couldn't boot my computer, follow dialogue on CNN, walk without my legs feeling like jelly, I could barely make it to the corner store to buy a pack of smokes without breaking into a panic.
I read everything I could on recovery and at three months sober I stumbled into an AA meeting, only to be embraced by folks who had been exactly where I was right then, and who took me to coffee, laughed at my pitiful state and gave me a knowing smile that only one who had been where I was at could give.
It's been a long strange trip. I'm still a dysfunctional anus on my best days, but I'm pretty sure that if follow the advice of others who are sober, if I hang here and encourage someone just posting on SR for the first time, and if remember the humility of walking out of that hospital room in the craziness of the central business district of one of the largest cities in Southeast Asia, I just might lay my head on my pillow sober tonight.
The hardest thing for a newcomer to chalk up is time: Those hard initial days and weeks and hopefully months that separate the successes from the failures are singularly the hardest thing an addict or alcoholic can accomplish. And we fail miserably more often than not.
The only advice I can honestly give is that it's going to be very hard, that acceptance that the first drink will lead to another and that each initial day has to be treated as the milestone that it is.
I do offer a bit of sick, counter-intuitive advice: If you's stumbled onto SR after hitting a bottom, embrace the despair and misery and bedevilment that brought you here. You don't have to ever feel this bad again. Today will suck. You'll feel sick, depressed, anxious, regretful, resentful, you'll fee as if you can't go on. But all you have to do is get today behind you. And, yeah, that may mean no sleep, it may mean chain smoking, it may mean dealing with the detritus of your using life all around you and the collateral damage may include loved ones that have given up.
But just embrace that misery. Relish it. It's a gift of desperation that brought you here and you, indeed, are not unique or alone. I've been there.
I won't go into my bottom but will say that a few decades of booze, benzos and pot left me a couple floors above that bottom of jails or death but did entail four trips to the emergency room and an ambulance ride that ended with 10 days in a hospital. My bottom entailed coming from the hospital to a cramped, high-rise condo in a third-world Southeast Asian country with my possessions fitting in a suitcase and two boxes.
For a month I couldn't boot my computer, follow dialogue on CNN, walk without my legs feeling like jelly, I could barely make it to the corner store to buy a pack of smokes without breaking into a panic.
I read everything I could on recovery and at three months sober I stumbled into an AA meeting, only to be embraced by folks who had been exactly where I was right then, and who took me to coffee, laughed at my pitiful state and gave me a knowing smile that only one who had been where I was at could give.
It's been a long strange trip. I'm still a dysfunctional anus on my best days, but I'm pretty sure that if follow the advice of others who are sober, if I hang here and encourage someone just posting on SR for the first time, and if remember the humility of walking out of that hospital room in the craziness of the central business district of one of the largest cities in Southeast Asia, I just might lay my head on my pillow sober tonight.
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