ZeeSeraphina

I am having a better day today then normally.
I’m so great full for that.
I have on comfortable clothes that make me feel better then normal.
It is really hot out and the heat feels good against my skin.
I often used to hide myself from sunlight because I feared to see my flaws.
I embrace the outdoors now because it was really my perception that was flawed.
I wonder about a lot of things and how they became to be.
If it’s one thing I am confident about is, becoming sober. And staying this way.
Things I used to have pleasure in was lost when I decided to do drugs .. as bad as I wish I could jump right back into the things that once gave me pleasure - I am discovering new things, throughout the process.
I don’t feel alone, except when my mind tricks me I am alone.
In these moments what do you do?

Anna

I'm glad you don't feel alone Zee because you are not alone. We're here for you. When your mind tricks you into believing things that will lead you back to drugs or alcohol, try to pause and step back and ask yourself 'Is what my mind is telling me right now true?' Trust your heart to have the right answer. I'm glad you're finding things to do that you enjoy.

Steely

Hi Zee,

Becoming sober is the biggest confidence builder! And it grows.

Enjoy the sunshine Zee. It's yours to bask.

GerandTwine

When I decided I would never drink/drug again, my humanity began to reemerge in a way similar to what you are experiencing. Instead of spending my intelligence and energies on keeping my ongoing cycle of drink, dry out, coast along, drink, dry out, coast along as safe and without trouble and trauma as possible, I realized I had a whole new way of expanding my humanness within myself and all around me in the world of nature and people.

No longer was I a servant to the drunken me. No longer was I sacrificing my life to manage all the problems created by trying to make sure I could go out again and become drunk or high and not get in trouble. My finances were about 5 percent of what a typical peer of mine ought to be. An extra $20 was something to salivate over. Budgeting was always just barely making it. Basically, my life was a tragic example of someone caught in the throes of chemical dependency, and trying to keep that cycle manageable. As we all know, it eventually wouldn’t work any more. Things got worse and worse. Then, when I turned traitor against the drunken me and finally decided to kill it off, my outlook on the future completely changed.

And here’s where I think I see what you’re experiencing. What I didn’t know was going to happen was that I found myself experiencing grief and sadness over having lost that connection to ME thinking and acting while drunk. When drunk, I was a different, volatile, unpredictable personality. The drunken me was a personality of its own. And here I was killing it off, never to experience it again. Somehow that created a sense of loss and grief, sort of like your loneliness, maybe. The positives in my new abstinent life far outweighed this loss, but I knew it was gone forever, never to be reconstituted again through drunkenness/drugging.

Where I think a lot of people who have tried killing off the drunken them’s run into a problem, is that they don’t make it a FINAL killing off. They make it temporary, and there are a LOT of forces in our brains and in society telling us “don’t make it final”, just go one day at a time. To me this would be torture. It would offer me the obvious power to magically bring back to life, an entity that should not be brought back to life - the drunken me who had sunk my life as a human being so low, and with so many failures, that it required that I decide once and for all time. I will never drink/drug again and I will never practice that magical ability to bring IT back to life from the dead. I see that bad magic happening all around me all the time.

That loneliness may actually be something you need to experience to motivate you to begin to leave it behind and live within your full humanity with and in search of others you care for. You can make that loneliness fade away as your drugged self fades from memory.

dustyfox

Hi Zee, When you have been an addict, whether to drink or drugs or both, and when you realise that by taking drink or drugs into your body you are destroying your life, both physical and emotional, it is a hard and often lonely moment. It's hard to believe that for all those years this thing you have been doing has finally caught up with you and it's time to stop. Fortunately, in the days we live in now, there is no need to go to a meeting and sit in a room and face other people, not if you don't want to, but you can still connect and find support through this forum and I guess other forums that may exist. When feeling alone is too much, and you need other people you can be with others who support you right here.