EndGameNYC

28 Telltale Signs You've Officially Become A New Yorker

Number 6 and 19 are among my favorites.

Honestly. I don't know why, but during the summer months and through September, the city is filled with (mostly) European tourists who only want to know how to get to Times Square. I haven't been there, except on my way to a better destination, since Times Square was no longer seedy.

No self-respecting New Yorker would go there by design.

HeartsAfire

Ever tried twerking as a coping mechanism?

Sorry, just thought you might need/enjoy a giggle. I love ya, Pam!

Aellyce

Hmm, and what is the cutoff for diagnostic criteria from this 28-point test? I think I pass >60%. So maybe I wasn't truly suffering from early sobriety, but finding home?

I was one of those tourists once, I think in the year 2000, except that it was winter and my non-New Yorker American friend took me everywhere, including Times Square.

I guess alcohol is not to blame for all anger issues after all...

dwtbd

I respect others' opinions and view points.
Then I correct them.

I must be getting mellower or just older and lazy, the caseload is soo big, that I see now that the dent I was/am making is scant at best.

EndGameNYC

Yes. But then, you already knew this, haennie.

So many people talk about how their drinking brought to life an emotional "body guard" tasked to ensure that we don't feel our feelings or, at the very least, change them to our liking, creating a version that we would be less likely to feel threatened by.

Many "experts" tell us that our "drinking personalities" are "not real," that they do not represent who we are as people by virtue of the fact that our thinking and feeling is "distorted while we're drinking," and that this is due in large part to a "disinhibition" of our thoughts, feelings and unconscious impulses. And they leave it at that. This, to me, falls woefully short of providing a comprehensive explanation, and relies on a narrow understanding of 'personality' or 'self'. One could not, for example, successfully defend murder charges by making reference to "disinhibited unconscious impulses," whether drunk or sober while committing the act. And, if it's "not me" who committed the act, then who is to be held responsible? If repressed, unconscious, and often unwanted contents that reside in my mind are not mine, then to whom do they belong?

I would ask, what, exactly, is being distorted when I'm drinking, and where does it come from? What, exactly, is being disinhibited? If a person who is outwardly "easy-going" while sober becomes a raging, verbally abusive lunatic while drinking, is he randomly modeling something external from his inner self, or is this an expression of a repressed (and therefore, unconscious, and for which we have neither ready nor privileged access) internal content to which he rarely consciously attends? My argument rests on the idea that how I express myself while I'm drinking is information about me that I either repress or don't attend to while I'm sober, and not the result of a disembodied "not-me."

I am not here claiming that our drunken behaviors represent the "genuine self" as we commonly know it, but that there is always more to who we are than how we behave when we're awake and sober, and that to dismiss out of hand how I behave while I'm drinking and without further reflection is to do so at my own peril.

As an example, how do we explain why certain people are reliably and outwardly angry, somber, charming, maudlin, funny, promiscuous, reclusive, tense, flirtatious, critical, subdued or emotionally expressive in the extreme while drinking, when these demonstrations of affect stand in stark contradiction to how we are when we're sober? Besides being the result of disinhibition and distortion, these are not equivalent psychological states. This, then (and on a deeper level), begs the question as to whether or not these are (temporary) psychological states, or more permanent (albeit unconscious) psychological traits.

I'm aware that this issue has emerged before on SR, and I've chosen not to contribute to the discussion, if for no other reason than that this problem, I believe, is both controversial and dense. But I'm also convinced that there's no good reason not to address these issues as they may, for some, provide additional insight. Analogous, perhaps, to "walking off" a relapse without submitting my relapse to sober reflection.

My thoughts on this issue are necessarily incomplete and therefore not completely satisfying, but since my drinking behavior has occupied so many years of my life, I cannot comfortably walk away from this issue without giving it giving a closer look.

LadyBlue0527

I just really don't care these days so it's been an ongoing pity party and that's what makes me angry. So I'm just riding the pity party anger carpet until it decides to slow down so I can get off. I'll spare you all the details but give you a push/pull quasi bittersweet awakening. I used to fight with the urge of my usual "run to" when I felt this way. To keep myself from running to a beer bottle when things really sucked.

I have now passed a milestone somehow where I can think about alcohol and not even remotely consider that as a savior. I have a full grasp of the fact that not only does it not solve anything, I find absolutely nothing about the prospect of drinking to be enticing. It's nothing more than a big pain in the you know what that just magnifies problems and isn't worth the brief feeling of relief that the lie said that it was. The fact that I know this is another source of anger but that's just because I'm being pissy right now.

There's plenty of things that I could get off my duff and do to fix this but I've concluded that sometimes you just have to let yourself feel the way you want to feel. Anger and self pity are valid human emotions that everyone has the right to experience as long as it's not allowed to go on for a length of time. That and as long as they don't threaten sobriety.

Sometimes it just is what it is.

Aellyce

Well, I'll be more than happy to contribute to the discussion on this issue without much inhibition. Except some necessary self-control right now so that I can finish a piece of work first This whole area has been quite central to me since getting sober and reflecting on what I did, how I felt, what sort of things I chose, etc during my heavy drinking years. It relates to the question of what can we learn from our drinking and drunken behaviors, are there useful pieces of information about ourselves to reflect on and incorporate into our sober life, to potentially make it more complete and meaningful? Are those years a waste, would it be really good to forget them or reverse the time and skip the experience? I think there can be individual answers to this, depending on many factors, eg. when did someone start drinking heavily, how long, how was/is their life before, during, and after, did they still accomplish many of their goals and dreams in life (before, during, after), or did they live "someone else's life" and were lost in a random world?

In my case, I believe the answer to be YES: I've learned a whole universe of lessons about myself from the years when alcohol influenced my brain heavily, I find it valuable now, and very abundantly so. But it does require a significant amount of post-processing with a clear and sober mind, in my opinion. I definitely do not believe that our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors while drunk are born from an alien entity that decided to make home within us for a while, and when we sober up, it'll just leave or we can just strangle it. Well, maybe we can, but perhaps we lose some potentially very useful information that might enrich our sober life if applied correctly, assuming it's interpreted and incorporated honestly into a sober persona and life.

More later.

zerothehero

I've learned from my drunken years, but it would have maybe been more efficient to choose a different path. No matter now, though.

I've been accused of being a seeker. I see now, however, that I wasn't searching as much as I was avoiding. Because I started drinking regularly in my early teens, I have to go all the way back to childhood and remember that I was an anxious boy in an uncertain world.

Alcohol helped me pretend things were not so uncertain. For me, alcohol was predictable and stable. It worked for a very long time.

When it stopped working and I had to get sober I was pissed. When the anger started wearing off I realized I was back to the anxiety of my childhood.

Monsters in the closet came back to haunt me.

So in sobriety I am forever vigilant to practice nontoxic methods of reducing my anxiety. My work life is stressful, and I'm working on simplifying... but it's basically cognitive/behavioral. I have to think differently.

And this is a central reason why I've learned to meditate regularly. I don't fully understand the neuroscience, but I know that the effort it takes just to focus on breathing for ten or twenty minutes a day yields tangible results.

And so... tonight, for example, I got irritated. In the past I would have had a drink. Instead, I went to a quiet room, set my timer to fifteen minutes, and focused on the present. The irritability born of my recent past melted away, and I had some time to forget about the future.

I'm getting better at it. I'm not a master, but I'm not the madman I was a few short months ago. And I'm not a drunk.