I must remind myself that this is all part of the journey. I’ve barely been able to think about writing a blog post this past week as I’ve been struggling to maintain sobriety. I know I start this blog to document my struggles and this includes the ups and the downs, but I just couldn’t stand to report that I’d had to reset back to Day One twice in the past week. “Back to Day One again”… I sound like a broken record. And who likes broken records?
But, I know that there’s value in this. I don’t want to sound like a broken record and this is the point. I want to finally surpass this broken cycle and heal those deeply carved grooves in the soundtrack of my mind.
So, I must continue to document. I read Sunny Sanguinity’s post today about “blogging like no one was reading” and the value of trying to be more honest on her blog (I love that expression, BTW. My husband and I travelled in India earlier this year and we thought the tag line for India should be “India- Eat like no one is watching”. The food was beyond amazing! We stuffed ourselves silly).
It’s a bit of a negotiation, isn’t it? Trying to decide what to put out there. When I think about what I wrote in my drinking story, I realize how much I just skimmed on the surface of my story. I didn’t talk about how, at my worst, I hid alcohol from my husband and family. The stupid, dangerous things I have done drunk. Or the many nights- and days- I have spent vomiting and not being able to keep anything down because of binging, the times I haven’t been able to go to work because I was hungover, or the friend I lost to an overdose at the height of our partying days.
Essentially these sober blogs are for our own healing, yet, the public nature of them gives it double meaning as we are also writing for an audience, perhaps for the audience’s own possibilities of healing. I think there is a lot to be said for recognizing ourselves in another. I know the blogs I read give me hope, comfort, inspiration and make me feel less alone in my suffering. And I find that in the honesty of the writing.
While I’m not proud that I have had two more Day One’s in the last week, I am proud that I keep trying. I know that I will figure this out with time. Last night, a Friday night, I was sitting alone at home thinking how amazing it was that I was sober! It would have been so easy to pop to the liquor store and get a bottle of wine. There is strength in me somewhere that wants to do this. I think it’s because I am starting to finally realize that any life sober is going to be better than the life I was living caught in that nasty drinking cycle. I am not going to stop giving up. I miss myself too much.
I know it’s going to be hard. But I read other blogs and see that I will be able to enjoy sunny BBQ’s again, road trips, vacations, holidays, dinner parties, and perhaps even some dancing, sober. I miss that carefreeness of my youth and early adulthood and I think I am still connecting it to my partying days. I need to rewrite the story and focus on how the activities themselves, not the booze, gave me feelings of joy and freedom. And I think a tool for my sobriety is continuing to write this blog, even when I can’t stand to see what comes out. Then I can re-read old entries and remind myself, when my selective amnesia kicks in, why I don’t want to go back to drinking.
Happy Saturday!