Acheleus

Thank you everyone. I sent an amends letter recently that brought up a lot of shame and regrets. I'm still sober and next week I will be nine months sober. Sometime I forget I am still in early sobriety. It helps to have the help of everyone here. I'm glad I don't have a hangover today. It still feels strange to not smoke or drink. I kind of feel like a ghost sometimes. Today I am going to be calm and work on accepting the present. I need to work on my recovery one day at a time. Every day sober is a good day.

PurpleKnight

That's the spirit Ach!! Keep pushing through!!

Hawkeye13

You are really doing well Ach;

It takes time to get the crap out of our emotional system
but you are making excellent progress.

Keep posting and looking forward to your new life and new studies

Croissant

Like everyone said, you've got a lot on.

I can only offer what I did a few months ago, when I was really stressed and realised some personal relationships were adding to that stress. (To the point I was physically ill and threw up on a couple of occasions.)

I made sure I took time out, alone and journaled how I felt every day. Even if it was a word, or a quote I read here that helped me. Something to help me reconnect and acknowledge my feelings. What I noticed over time was that worrying over stuff, indeed, most of the things I'd worried about, didn't even pan out the way I thought! Yet I'd spent hours and hours and sleepless nights stressing over them!

I also downloaded a couple of books on positive thinking...if only to give me a quote or phrase to hold onto for each day, to help keep me focused. Even if you don't think much of positive thinking, it can't hurt to have something to use as a mantra for that day, and if it works great. If is forgotten it by the end of the day, well at least I'd tried!

Anyway, these were a couple of things I did. Not saying they will work for everyone, nor were they the only things I tried, but I think just looking at different ways, I reinforced that I cared about myself to seek a solution.

Be kind to yourself Ach. It's great to see you posting BEFORE you picked up a drink. That's great!

MythOfSisyphus

Nine months is still pretty early. Your equilibrium isn't 100% yet (or at least mine wasn't). I feel stupid just repeating the same advice again and again but staying the course really is your best option. I can't tell you how to best manage your relationships or your life in general but I can say with confidence that backsliding into drinking will just make everything worse.

Acheleus

Everything everyone has said makes perfect sense. Thank you. These cravings that have come over me the past few days have been scary. I'm about to graduate, and yet I feel more proud that I quit drinking than that I earned a master's. I trust that things will be better if I don't drink, and that I have no idea how bad they will get if I get drunk again. This is so difficult sometimes because I want to just live my life without feeling like a guilty drunk that has this enormous problem. Maybe I just don't know how to live yet. It's great to be sober and at least able to think clearly about possible solutions to my problems.

ReadyAtLast

Drinking again is always a disaster, no matter how much we convince ourselves it will be different this time

I know for me, even if it wasn't a disaster the first time it eventually became so

MythOfSisyphus

And that is some scary shiznit! That's exactly the issue. It's confusing; we spend our lives knowing exactly how we're gonna feel and what's coming next. A little bit of this to get me up, a little bit of that to bring me down (as Mark Knofler sang). After years of getting our moods from a bottle or pill it can be unnerving to have to just take life as it comes like everyone else.

I'm still figuring it out myself. Today I had a real blowout with my boss (who I must stress is a real idiot!). Wound up putting my notice in after many years of working there. I have been miserable there for a while so I actually had a job lined up before the row, so really it was a good thing. But this once would have sent me into a spiral of drinking self loathing.

Sometimes we fall into the trap of thinking getting sober will fix all of our problems. In reality it might save your life, but it won't fix everything else automatically. It does make it possible to solve issues that would be intractable for a drunk. But at the end of the day we still have to deal with jobs we hate, school work we don't want to do, significant others that exasperate us, etc etc.

Now when something bad happens that rocks my equilibrium I try to say to myself, "man, think how much worse this would be if I was drunk on top of all this!"