#sliceofsobriety

Written from day 6

So last night was my first sober Friday. It didn’t go too bad, but it wasn’t as easy as I as hoped. Earlier in the evening I had seen my sibling in an awesome play at their high school, and afterwards had plans to meet up with Chris at our old local watering hole to watch the end of the hockey game. I started not looking incredibly forward to it by the end of the play. I wanted a beer, and I was going to a *bar* where everyone else was going to be drinking, and it tanked my mood a little bit.

I called chris on the way over to ask him to preemptively order me a soda water and cranberry, so as to avoid having to turn away an already poured beer from Kim, our friend and the bartender there, who knows what I drink. I also asked him to order me a sandwich, as by the end of the play I probably had low blood sugar that was contributing to my attitude, but that’s no ones fault but my own.

I got to the bar and it was indeed in full swing. Packed with people drinking and people watching the hockey game. And everything just seemed so…so much more. Like my energy dial was set to 10 but everyone else in the bar had a dial set to 20. I think I was just being grumpy, but I ended up just becoming impatient with everything. I wasn’t very engaging with chris and our friends, and I probably wasn’t a lot of fun to talk to.

Chris asked if I wanted to leave or stay around, and I told him that if he wanted to get 1 more beer he could. I wanted to *go*, but I felt bad tearing chris away from his friends on a rare Friday night off, just because I was being a party pooper, mad at my own self imposition. He got one more, and we probably weren’t there for more than 15 minutes, but my mood *tanked* within that time. I was just so aware of how *not* fun the bar scene was during this time, and I just wanted to go.

To his credit chris called me as we drove home (separate cars) and asked me if I was ok. He had noticed my agitation. I explained to him that I was really tired (and I was) and wasn’t having any fun at the bar. Once we got home my mood improved a little. We watched a documentary that he hadn’t seen and had some late night snacks, but I still didn’t feel like me. I was still grumpy and short, and not very engaging. I felt bad, and I still feel bad. I know he doesn’t hold it against me and understands what’s going on, but it’s not his fault and he doesn’t deserve all this attitude from me.

-sigh-

I am by no means an alcoholic. I’ve gone stretches of time without drinking before, I’m not drinking tonight, and I don’t need it to function. However, I like to drink, I drink a lot, and I drink often. I feel like 30 days is a good period of time and long enough for me to hopefully see some affects at the end of it. I understand that to most people 30 days without drinking doesn’t seem like a big deal but, when my previous stretches of not drinking were only a week, 30 days could be a little daunting.

I started this blog to talk about how I feel when I’m going through this month. I think it’s going to be a little bit harder than I feel like it is right now, but I also feel like it’s not gonna be as bad as I think it is. Maybe 30 days I’ll pass by and I won’t even notice and this blog will never get updated again. On the other hand maybe I’ll want to talk about it every day. Maybe I’ll realize that I really like having a beer when I get home at the end of a hard day, and this page will be filled with me pouting at my self-imposed punishment.

I’ve picked April 18 as my starting date. So I have this week, and this weekend, which I’m spending with one of my girlfriends. I know that I wouldn’t want to go down to visit and have to be sober at the very beginning of my challenge so I figured Monday would be a good time to go ahead and start.

I hope I’ve conveyed that I don’t look at this as the end of the world. But I do think that I might want support, or to look back on this later and see how I did, so that’s why this blog is here.

I’m posting this because I didn’t post last night because I was just one heap of tired girl.

Day 4 went fine, didn’t want to punch anyone (or Chris) for drinking around me. I have noticed though, that there’s this like 3 hour window when a lot of my thoughts are ‘Why the fuck are you doing this?’. It’s usually between 6-9, when I’m on the way home, or already home, and I want to have a glass of wine and sit on my couch and just chill. I think part of is that it’s some weird habit I’ve gotten myself into, where booze = relaxation, and I think another part of it is that I’m acutely aware of how much I want a drink because I’m not having one. I think that this is just that 'hump’ that people talk about getting over, and maybe by mid next week I won’t think about scrubbing this challenge once a day.

I’m also hoping to find new ways to relax. Hannah is going to be gone from the house for 2 weeks coming up, and Chris will be working those evenings, and so I’m going to *have* to find something to keep my occupied, and to keep those nagging, over-active imagination thoughts about burglers and intruders from creeping into my head. I’m thinking about starting a month free membership trial to the gym Hannah and our friend Adrienne go to. It’ll be something that maybe can replace the booze to help me relax, but also it’ll tire me out before bed and hopefully make sleeping easier. I might go take a yoga class with H next week and see what I think of the place.

Day 2 kinda sucked. My period on the way, and the car ride home was spent fuming over chris forgetting to buy garlic bread at the store. I had to work extra hours at work and kept felt like was being pulled in 5000 directions by people who were just too lazy to do it themselves. I kept thinking about how silly it was to create this challenge right at our busy time at work, when all want to do at the end of the day is have a glass of wine. I debated scrubbing it all and trying again in June.