One year, so qick, so slow
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Join Date: Nov 2013
Location: Dallas, TX
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One year, so qick, so slow
Hey everyone. I just recently passed the one year sober mark (Oct 29th) and have been thinking about the journey lately. I frequently looked to pages like this with other people’s stories and insight along the way, especially early on and it really helped. It gave me strength knowing others have done it. I wrote this rant at 7 months in and it was quite eye opening to see how far I’ve come (How scatter brained I was). I highly recommend journaling every few months so when that moment comes around and you think you can go back out, you have your own words to remind you how bad it was. I hope this helps someone out there.
I am 7 months sober. I don’t know how to feel about that, partly because I don’t know how to feel about anything. I’ve been told that after drinking as much as I did and for as long as I did (Age 15-25), it can take a year or even two to get back to some sort of normalcy. I’m not sure I even started normal. I’ve always felt a bit different. I know I know, “Everyone is different” Who cares? Lord knows I don’t. I don’t care about anything really. During this stint of sobriety I’ve put a lot of pressure on myself to figure life out. “Get my life in check.” I like thinking of it that way. “In check” like a chess match. At the moment I feel like life has me in check.
I have dubbed myself emotionally immature. This is the root of my drinking problem. Because I don’t like those feelings that normal adults seem to handle with wisdom and grace, I would drink until they went away, or even in some strange justified twist, they exploded out. Often when I went on an anger rampage, or cried like a baby for an hour, I would think to myself, “Well, now that’s out of my system.”
Drinking was my friend, my enemy, my medicine, and my poison. I fell into a dark pathetic place. Even though I knew my drinking was out of control, I had convinced myself that was the life I was born to live. Drinking alone at bars, driving home trashed and drinking more until I passed out, this was my routine. Sometimes I’d keep drinking through the night into the morning until the gas station started selling alcohol again. I can’t tell you how many times I vomited. I can’t tell you how many times I pissed myself. However I can tell you it was too many. I was arrested driving drunk. TWICE! IN TWO YEARS!
Pretty damn pathetic. No job, no degree, mooching off my father and waiting to die. This is always the weird part of these rants. (Yes I’ve done this before). This is always the fork in the road. “This way to suicide letter” or “This way to therapeutic journaling”. They usually end in the latter; I can’t make any promises though.
Promises, ha! That’s a fun word. I promise! I promise I’ll be there. I love this one, “It will get better! I promise!” Shut the hell up. Nobody can promise that. Relationships live and die on promises (heavy on the die). Trust is a huge issue and a sought after character trait. For some reason this word “Promise” can make anything ten times more serious than it actually is. What is a man who can’t live up to his word? He’s still a man, people, and breaking a promise is proof he is human.
(Whatever whatever whatever whatever. I hate money, I hate social expectations. I hate that there seems to be this stepping stone path to life that every good boy and girl goes down. Go to school, get a degree, get a job, get married, have kids, and make sure they do the same. Whatever whatever whatever whatever. First world problems.)
Alright back on track here… Addict, another fun word; dope seekers, speed racers, winos, crack heads, boozers, pill poppers, burn outs, fiends, hooch hounds. What a loaded word. Somewhere right now people are arguing its meaning. Standing by small details they hold to be the outlying evidence of the difference between addict and abuser. There is a difference by the way. A lot of science has been wrapped into this argument. Chemical dependency, psychological addiction, physical addiction, emotional escape, emotional suppression, social enhancement, these are some of the terms thrown around in their conversations. Their meanings? Who the hell knows? It is just a bunch of jargon thrown around until a few people can agree with the definitions. Jumbling words with subjective meaning together until the definitions are so vague they fit everyone’s original interpretation. Who has any way of knowing how they interpret those definitions individually? It’s the whole my red is your blue argument (barf).
You can’t really know addiction until you’ve lived addiction. I know that’s cliché and a lot of really intelligent people would laugh at that but it’s true. Just like I can’t understand what it’s like to be a scientist or what I would do if I was Tim Tebow.
Everyone has their own opinion of what an addict is, especially addicts in denial. I used to tell myself, “I’m not an addict; I don’t drink during the day.” Then it was, “I don’t HAVE to drink during the day.” Then it was “I have a job.” Then it was “I can quit whenever I want.” I guess my image of a true alcoholic was an old homeless man begging for money to get his MD 20/20… and once I got to that level (and I almost know I would have) It would have been “an old homeless man begging for MD 20/20 money with a toe missing,” or some other thing tacked on to his hypothetical sorrow in order to justify my own drinking, As if to say, “well I’m not that bad.” I even convinced myself everyone else was drinking like I was. “I’m young!” I’d say. “Everyone my age drinks,” I’d say. Well not everyone takes a pull from the whiskey bottle in their friend’s freezer when they go to the fridge for their 8th beer. Not everyone starts buying the bigger bottles to mask the fact that they can drink a 12 pack of 12oz. cans in 2 hours. Not everyone pours a drink from that bottle and hopes nobody noticed. Not everyone closes the bar down every time they go. Not everyone keeps drinking when they get home after the party. Not everyone has a waitress who knows their order before they sit down at the bar. Not everyone knows the “fast way” to the strip 15 minutes before they stop selling liquor. Not everyone stays up all night to buy beer when they start selling in the morning. I could go on for pages here but I’ll spare you.
The point is it is really easy to look back and see how pathetic I was, and now it is really easy to look at someone else and know they are right where I was, but if you’ve never been there, you don’t know. If you’ve never been there you’ll go insane trying to figure out how someone can possibly get to that point, you might even push yourself to that point.
A lot of people think it is a personality disorder. A lot of people think it is genetic. A lot of people are partially right. It’s a little bit of both along with some other factors tossed in. I personally believe in the “learned behavior” theory. It explains both the social side and the hereditary side. There is no straight forward answer. And there is no one type of alcoholic. It is easy to lump them in the same category and try to sprinkle therapy dust on them and cure them all but it doesn’t work that way. Some think they can control it, others think they are hopeless and all of them think one more drink sounds good.
It took me waking up in a jail cell for the second time to tell me to stop, and it took a month of sobriety to really understand I had a problem. Never mind the times I woke up not remembering driving home. Never mind asking everyone at the party to hit me in the face. Never mind passing out in the shower or pissing myself or vomiting 3 times a week or almost burning my house down trying to boil an egg. At the time, those where laughed off and placed on the back burner. They aren’t so funny now. I knew I had a problem when all I thought about after not drinking for a month was “Can I have a drink now?” That’s when all of those thoughts started to cook and smoke together. Now I was at the helm of one hell of a barbeque that could at any moment become a forest fire.
Just because you stop drinking doesn’t mean the problem goes away. It is a fact that the only way to get sober is to quit drinking but staying sober is the tricky part. Your body is going to want it so badly that your mind will beg for it. You have to have hit your bottom. Without knowing how bad it can get and cringing at the thought of going back there, a drink will be in your future. Without knowing that it can’t get better with the alcohol, you will continue to use alcohol.
The more serious understanding that has to take place in the alcoholic’s mind is the fact that drinking wasn’t the real problem to begin with. Your drinking is a symptom of your problem. You don’t make stupid decisions because you are drunk, you make a stupid decision TO GET drunk. I know this sounds a bit ridiculous. Let me try to explain. Yes we do things when we are drunk that we wouldn’t do sober, but at some point before all of those drunken decisions we made a SOBER choice to drink and lose control of our rational behavior. Why? We like pissing ourselves? We like feeling like **** in the morning? Of course not. We chose to drink despite seeing the problematic behavior tied to it, because we thought we could control it. Or this time will be different, and I’m sure you have all heard the definition of insanity.
I have a year of sobriety now and though the water is still a little cloudy, at least it’s calm enough to stay afloat. If I can do it anyone can.
I am 7 months sober. I don’t know how to feel about that, partly because I don’t know how to feel about anything. I’ve been told that after drinking as much as I did and for as long as I did (Age 15-25), it can take a year or even two to get back to some sort of normalcy. I’m not sure I even started normal. I’ve always felt a bit different. I know I know, “Everyone is different” Who cares? Lord knows I don’t. I don’t care about anything really. During this stint of sobriety I’ve put a lot of pressure on myself to figure life out. “Get my life in check.” I like thinking of it that way. “In check” like a chess match. At the moment I feel like life has me in check.
I have dubbed myself emotionally immature. This is the root of my drinking problem. Because I don’t like those feelings that normal adults seem to handle with wisdom and grace, I would drink until they went away, or even in some strange justified twist, they exploded out. Often when I went on an anger rampage, or cried like a baby for an hour, I would think to myself, “Well, now that’s out of my system.”
Drinking was my friend, my enemy, my medicine, and my poison. I fell into a dark pathetic place. Even though I knew my drinking was out of control, I had convinced myself that was the life I was born to live. Drinking alone at bars, driving home trashed and drinking more until I passed out, this was my routine. Sometimes I’d keep drinking through the night into the morning until the gas station started selling alcohol again. I can’t tell you how many times I vomited. I can’t tell you how many times I pissed myself. However I can tell you it was too many. I was arrested driving drunk. TWICE! IN TWO YEARS!
Pretty damn pathetic. No job, no degree, mooching off my father and waiting to die. This is always the weird part of these rants. (Yes I’ve done this before). This is always the fork in the road. “This way to suicide letter” or “This way to therapeutic journaling”. They usually end in the latter; I can’t make any promises though.
Promises, ha! That’s a fun word. I promise! I promise I’ll be there. I love this one, “It will get better! I promise!” Shut the hell up. Nobody can promise that. Relationships live and die on promises (heavy on the die). Trust is a huge issue and a sought after character trait. For some reason this word “Promise” can make anything ten times more serious than it actually is. What is a man who can’t live up to his word? He’s still a man, people, and breaking a promise is proof he is human.
(Whatever whatever whatever whatever. I hate money, I hate social expectations. I hate that there seems to be this stepping stone path to life that every good boy and girl goes down. Go to school, get a degree, get a job, get married, have kids, and make sure they do the same. Whatever whatever whatever whatever. First world problems.)
Alright back on track here… Addict, another fun word; dope seekers, speed racers, winos, crack heads, boozers, pill poppers, burn outs, fiends, hooch hounds. What a loaded word. Somewhere right now people are arguing its meaning. Standing by small details they hold to be the outlying evidence of the difference between addict and abuser. There is a difference by the way. A lot of science has been wrapped into this argument. Chemical dependency, psychological addiction, physical addiction, emotional escape, emotional suppression, social enhancement, these are some of the terms thrown around in their conversations. Their meanings? Who the hell knows? It is just a bunch of jargon thrown around until a few people can agree with the definitions. Jumbling words with subjective meaning together until the definitions are so vague they fit everyone’s original interpretation. Who has any way of knowing how they interpret those definitions individually? It’s the whole my red is your blue argument (barf).
You can’t really know addiction until you’ve lived addiction. I know that’s cliché and a lot of really intelligent people would laugh at that but it’s true. Just like I can’t understand what it’s like to be a scientist or what I would do if I was Tim Tebow.
Everyone has their own opinion of what an addict is, especially addicts in denial. I used to tell myself, “I’m not an addict; I don’t drink during the day.” Then it was, “I don’t HAVE to drink during the day.” Then it was “I have a job.” Then it was “I can quit whenever I want.” I guess my image of a true alcoholic was an old homeless man begging for money to get his MD 20/20… and once I got to that level (and I almost know I would have) It would have been “an old homeless man begging for MD 20/20 money with a toe missing,” or some other thing tacked on to his hypothetical sorrow in order to justify my own drinking, As if to say, “well I’m not that bad.” I even convinced myself everyone else was drinking like I was. “I’m young!” I’d say. “Everyone my age drinks,” I’d say. Well not everyone takes a pull from the whiskey bottle in their friend’s freezer when they go to the fridge for their 8th beer. Not everyone starts buying the bigger bottles to mask the fact that they can drink a 12 pack of 12oz. cans in 2 hours. Not everyone pours a drink from that bottle and hopes nobody noticed. Not everyone closes the bar down every time they go. Not everyone keeps drinking when they get home after the party. Not everyone has a waitress who knows their order before they sit down at the bar. Not everyone knows the “fast way” to the strip 15 minutes before they stop selling liquor. Not everyone stays up all night to buy beer when they start selling in the morning. I could go on for pages here but I’ll spare you.
The point is it is really easy to look back and see how pathetic I was, and now it is really easy to look at someone else and know they are right where I was, but if you’ve never been there, you don’t know. If you’ve never been there you’ll go insane trying to figure out how someone can possibly get to that point, you might even push yourself to that point.
A lot of people think it is a personality disorder. A lot of people think it is genetic. A lot of people are partially right. It’s a little bit of both along with some other factors tossed in. I personally believe in the “learned behavior” theory. It explains both the social side and the hereditary side. There is no straight forward answer. And there is no one type of alcoholic. It is easy to lump them in the same category and try to sprinkle therapy dust on them and cure them all but it doesn’t work that way. Some think they can control it, others think they are hopeless and all of them think one more drink sounds good.
It took me waking up in a jail cell for the second time to tell me to stop, and it took a month of sobriety to really understand I had a problem. Never mind the times I woke up not remembering driving home. Never mind asking everyone at the party to hit me in the face. Never mind passing out in the shower or pissing myself or vomiting 3 times a week or almost burning my house down trying to boil an egg. At the time, those where laughed off and placed on the back burner. They aren’t so funny now. I knew I had a problem when all I thought about after not drinking for a month was “Can I have a drink now?” That’s when all of those thoughts started to cook and smoke together. Now I was at the helm of one hell of a barbeque that could at any moment become a forest fire.
Just because you stop drinking doesn’t mean the problem goes away. It is a fact that the only way to get sober is to quit drinking but staying sober is the tricky part. Your body is going to want it so badly that your mind will beg for it. You have to have hit your bottom. Without knowing how bad it can get and cringing at the thought of going back there, a drink will be in your future. Without knowing that it can’t get better with the alcohol, you will continue to use alcohol.
The more serious understanding that has to take place in the alcoholic’s mind is the fact that drinking wasn’t the real problem to begin with. Your drinking is a symptom of your problem. You don’t make stupid decisions because you are drunk, you make a stupid decision TO GET drunk. I know this sounds a bit ridiculous. Let me try to explain. Yes we do things when we are drunk that we wouldn’t do sober, but at some point before all of those drunken decisions we made a SOBER choice to drink and lose control of our rational behavior. Why? We like pissing ourselves? We like feeling like **** in the morning? Of course not. We chose to drink despite seeing the problematic behavior tied to it, because we thought we could control it. Or this time will be different, and I’m sure you have all heard the definition of insanity.
I have a year of sobriety now and though the water is still a little cloudy, at least it’s calm enough to stay afloat. If I can do it anyone can.
I agree time is a funny thing. Sometimes it feels like a long time and sometimes short. Keep going. You rock!!
to SR and congrats on one year sober! Great work!
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