In two days, I will be sober 5 years and 7 months. In the beginning of my sobriety, I often felt bored and had too much time on my hands. So to counteract that, I started dabbling in resin. I began a jewelry business out of necessity and I quickly started saying, "Jewelry saved me!" But as I reflect now, I know that, really, I saved myself. I was self aware enough to turn to something else while an infant in my sobriety. Oh how I just replaced one addiction for another. One of outside acceptance and praise. I would get high on the fact that I got a lot of followers. I would get drunk on the sheer number of post likes and comments. I was addicted to the amount of money I was making and addicted to the attention. I eventually was creating just for "them" - not for me nor to heal my poor, broken soul.
I mean, let's face it, alcoholics become alcoholics because something is broken. I felt extremely broken after my dad died in 2018 so I spent the next 2 years developing a salacious thirst for the beer that drowned my sorrows and quieted the deep, sad thoughts in my head. This week someone said, "Feeling your feelings is gross." LOL! So true but also it's important to feel them... all of them... the good and the bad. But am I really prepared to feel that gross? Anywho, I digress...
Now that I am further into my sobriety I am finding that the real battle has only just begun. I am no longer new to a life of sobriety. I have had the experience of replacing one addiction with another and succeeded for a time. But now, I know that I have to face things. I can't ignore or distract myself from this. This feels harder than just "not drinking." Creating a beautiful life out of the ashes of my life prior to sobriety is harder than just taking the beer away. How do I begin to do that? How do I add things to my life and not turn them into replacements for beer and thus just continuing to remain unhealed? I know this is the journey of a lifetime, never ending, but I am flying by the seat of my pants and need to know where the fucking manual is for this?
I also learned that craving sugar after giving up alcohol is a normal problem. I just thought that was unique to me and another way to highlight the fact that my self control is in the toilet. Nope. Normal. It is a total replacement for beer. I turn to sugar usually late at night. The song "Bad Habits" by Ed Sheeran comes to mind now. Lyrics like "Every time the sun goes down, I let you take control." I wonder why the night is so much harder? Is it because I am busy during the day and then by 8pm I am tired and almost just doing it unconsciously and strictly out of habit? Why though? Am I bored? Am I feeling the need for comfort? Can't I just maybe snuggle for 20 minutes with the hubby instead? Do some breathing exercises? Why is this so hard? Why can't I get it together? Is it shame? Recently I read a quote that said, "When you are ten, shame stitches itself into you like a monogram, broadcasting to the world what holds you, what rules your soul." Oy. Recently, I did an exercise where you pull up a photo of yourself as a child, before "the world got ahold of you," and you need to really look at it and tell your child-self what she needs to know. I didn't even get that far. I just looked at her and sobbed.
So, sobriety just feels harder now. I don't feel like I can't maintain sobriety but I need to heal these hurts in order to not feel tempted as much. Although, maybe that's a pipe dream? I don't know. I've never done this before. It just feels harder to add to your life than it is to take away from it.
I am currently reading Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar and the main character is sober from drugs and alcohol. Some of the wording and descriptions really, really hit close to home. "How strong his addict reflexes remained, in spite of his sobriety. In the back of your brain, your addiction is doing pushups, getting stronger, just waiting for you to slip up, an old-timer once told him." "Before addiction felt bad, it felt really, really good. Of course it did. Magic. Like you were close enough to God to bop him with an eyelash." "In Cyrus' active addiction it had taken dread and doom bringing him to his knees, or euphoric physical ecstasy elevating him half-literally out of his body - to break through his dense numb fugue. In sobriety, he still sometimes erroneously expected this of the universe - a stark shock of embodied rapture, the angel dropping from the sky to smack him with clarity's two-by-four. Cyrus was beginning to realize that the world didn't actually work this way, that sometimes epiphany was as subtle as a friend showing you something on Twitter." Too bad I deleted all my social media this week. Looks like I have to do this by myself and for myself. No outside influences. No audience. No likes. It's how I should of done this to begin with. Social media may just be the other thing I need to remain sober of. No beer, no sugar, no facebook. Maybe that will be the title of my memoir that I never publish.
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