‘2 hours clean!! Be proud of me!!’ No you aren’t. ‘24 hours clean!!’ No, you aren’t? You’re basically still running off of the high of it at that point and if you feel like you’ve made groundbreaking progress off of a few hours, you likely aren’t ready for the steps to recovery and being clean. The time between one episode and another is not being clean if you don’t intend to be better, and if a couple hours is a big stretch to you, yes I’ll be happy for you that you aren’t at immediate crisis but you sure are close to it (at hour rates definitely are at crisis) and have bigger concerns than wether you can dub yourself ‘clean’ or not. I’m not gate keeping the term because that’s both stupid and impossible I’m just honestly kind of pitiful of those who post up about some ‘20 minutes clean’ (ESPECIALLY on TikTok) even though that’s barely enough time to clean up afterwards from your add*ction let alone break the emotional barrier of deciding to recover…. Baby you aren’t getting clean you are actively engaging even though you put it down 20 minutes ago. Everybody’s first milestone with breaking addiction is different and I’m very aware of that, however people need to stop deluding themselves. It really is more self deluding and disappointing than proud because if you’re proud of something you’re likely going to relapse in with that clear crisis timespan, the concept of breaking clean is far more emotionally distressing than it is to accept that you’re spacing it out instead of cold turkey, and therefore will cause more addictive impulse.
