AwkwardKitty

I have been thinking a lot over these past few days, I'm in a very calm and thoughtful place mentally. I have always approached quitting alcohol with a sense of shame, guilt and anger. A feeling of deprivation and missing out. Anger that I'm not like everyone else. Fear that the rest of my life will be spent yearning for a drink and never being fulfilld again.
But i have started to develop a lot more compassion for myself. I have thought a lot about my pain and my experiences that led me here. And not with self-pity or anger, but through a lens of compassion. And a desire to give myself a gift of wellness, health & sobriey.
Its not a punishment to not drink again, its a GIFT, I am giving myself clarity, safety, health, time, rationality, sleep, calm, routine, stability. Instead of punishing myself angrily by drinking through the pain I am telling myself I deserve sobriety, I deserve this gift. And it feels good to be kind to myself.

I just wanted to share with you too because YOU deserve this gift too, some love and compassion and some kindness to yourself.

ReadyAtLast

A fantastic post kitty thank you.

PurpleKnight

Great post Kitty!!

Exactly right, why should everyone else get to live the life that they want, striving to fulfilling their hopes and dreams, getting that slice of happiness, and reaching for the stars.

We all deserve a part of that too in life, and alcohol has no right to limit us to the contents of a bottle . . . there's a big universe out there to go at!!

Liesinthesun

What a beautiful sentiment.

Suzieq17

Great post and congrats!

This time around I am feeling the same sentiment. It’s like letting go of one life, and starting a brand new one. I’ve definitely felt much calmer this go around too. I was talking to my mom about it the other day and said that I’m not living in the past anymore and that it only makes sense to leave the past in the past— with all those feelings—guilt, shame, anger, resentment. I’m just living for now and I am more than ok with that—like it was just time to move on and do something new.

DriGuy

That's the way it went with me. I didn't want to quit drinking. I just wanted to drink and not suffer the physical and mental consequences. I wanted to do it without the shame and the guilt. I was embarrassed at first to go to AA, but after the first meeting where I observed a bunch of grateful happy people who had years of sobriety, I decided to quit. I never looked back. It turned out that there a lot of people who don't drink and many of them are quite normal. What an odd perception I had while I drank. I could not imagine a normal life without alcohol, even though I never felt normal as a drunk.

least

I love my sober life. It's so much simpler and better.

Dee74

D

AmbyMarie

Unshackled

Great post and message. I do deserve to be sober and happy with a new attitude of gratitude and hopefulness.

August252015

Great post! I do believe it is the best & indeed most peculiar gift of my life. Believing I deserved better than my life as a drunk took a little time - it came.

Thanks for the comment about being in a calm and thoughtful place. I've been wrestling to get back to that the past few days as my anxiety has been really high. Having tools to get thru these truly passing times and remembering that I am worthy is important.

Glad you are here and sharing!

H379

AwkwardKitty, you are spot-on. Thanks for reminding us about what we deserve.

Thank you!

MLD51

Beautiful. We DO deserve the gifts of sobriety.

Took me a while to feel worthy, but I got there. I pretty much hated myself toward the end of the drinking. I quit in desperation. I was scared, and thought I'd be missing out for the rest of my life. But I didn't want to live the way I was anymore.

After some time, I really did begin to see the gifts of sobriety, and came to realize I was deserving of them. It's a good feeling.

lessgravity

Nice job and thank you for the post.

One way of thinking about this that was helpful for me was "treat yourself like someone who you are responsible for taking care of" - it's a riff on a chapter in a book by Jordan Peterson.

If you were responsible for your self, as a stranger, as someone who wasn't self-judging/criticizing, what would you do? How would you talk to yourself? What would you tell yourself to do?

Sobriety is truly a gift, and one that, once we embrace it, flows out to everyone else in our lives as well. The parent, business partner, husband, brother, son, neighbor, stranger, that I am sober is someone I always esteemed to be while deep in the bottles.

AwkwardKitty

Lessgravity, thats a fantastic way to look at it!