New-ish
 

Hello everybody.
This isn’t my first time here. I was a member under several different names in the past going all the way back to 2004 if I remember correctly. Can’t recall the last time I posted here but it’s been several years at least.

Happy to say though that I have over 10 months sober right now. It’s taken a lot of false starts over the years but this is the longest stretch of sobriety I’ve had in my life since I was a 12 year old and started using. I’m 41 now and it saddens me some to look back at all the time that has passed that I wasted. But as they say I have today and the rest of my life to start living in.

Anyway felt like it was time to comeback here and start learning more about how to live life sober. I’m well past the detox stage but I can’t help to feel at times I’m still sick like I was during the first 3 weeks sober except a more milder version of it I guess.

Welcome back, and good job on 10 months of sobriety and recovery.

Hi TSN. 10 months is amazing. At 41 and drinking through those formative teen years, you likely never really learned to identify feelings and the temporary nature of them. If you feel a bit unsettled or as you put it - "sick" - it is probably just one of life's moods that hits everyone. People like us always drank through all of our normal feelings - ironically leading to even more awful horrid feelings - and so we need to learn now what they are. Anger. Resentment. Jealousy. Loneliness. Grief. And so many others. It is good you recognize it as related to alcohol and sobriety. Our AV's are always at work I think. But everyone who walks the earth deals with those very same feelings. Sober we can learn for the first time to deal with them in a healthy way.

If there was one benefit from having a lot of false starts over the years was I did learn a few things about the recovery process over time and what having PAWS is like. Just took me a long time to finally hit a point where enough was enough.

But even at 10 months I would of thought everything would be “normal” and life would just go on. But I still find myself dealing with a lot of unwanted emotional baggage with month 9 being the absolute worse anxiety/panic episodes I’ve had in my entire life. So bad at points where I knew a quick 5min drive to the store would have me feeling better. But then the sickly thought of having to start all over again would snap me back into reality, I don’t ever want to go through this s**t again!

Hello TSN - it's great to have you here. Congratulations on your 10 sober months. We know how hard it is to get started & stick with it. I agree, we can never go through that again! I've proven to myself many times that there's no control once the first drink hits my system. I wish I had admitted that when I was 41 - I was quite a bit older. You're doing great.

welcome (back) :)

D