35 Weeks of Sobriety

Most of the people in your life don't care about you, and it's actually a great thing.

Dec 20, 2022

Today I have been sober for 35 weeks. 245 days. Two days ago I passed the eight-month mark or two-thirds of a year. In a lot of ways, it doesn’t feel like it’s been that long. In other ways, it feels like I’m only just beginning…

Sobriety

I get self-conscious that I can be repetitive at times. So I’m going to try to work on that this week. I get self-conscious about fuckin’ everything, so what’s new? My sobriety remains mostly unchanged. Every day I understand a little bit more than my issue is and has always been my mental health. The substances were a temporary escape from them that only made things worse later on. I’ve said this before, but each week I consolidate that understanding, and writing it is almost like signing off on another week of progress. Like once I write about it, I can’t regress past that point. Like a checkpoint in a video game.

Gradually, and somewhat organically, my focus has switched from doing whatever was necessary to stay sober, to working on my mental health and improving myself every day. So whilst I have to remain mindful that sobriety is earned, not given, particularly as we power towards the holiday season, it’s not something I’ve had to give too much thought of late, fortunately.

The Name’s Ken, Ken Tantrum

Please, don’t think for a moment I am making light of this situation, or mental health in general, in any way. If it seems like that is the case, just know that this is what I need to do to make heavy shit like this easier for me to write and process.

On Saturday night and Sunday morning I experienced some fairly significant stressors. The details aren’t important to the context of this story. But ultimately I ended up having the biggest panic attack I have probably ever had, into the biggest mental breakdown I have ever had.

It caught me off-guard. Up until then, I had been handling things pretty well, or at least I thought I had. I think I had got so caught up in the momentum I had generated “improving myself” that I was starting to get short-sighted and I was failing to do some of the things that got me to this improved state in the first place.

Something triggered a reaction in me and I burst into tears, mid-sentence. I tried to compose myself, but I couldn’t. I was crying uncontrollably. Like most Australians of my generation, I’ve always been told that crying is bad. It’s something we shouldn’t do and needs to be stopped by any means necessary. I tried to talk through it, but I couldn’t. I’d catch my breath, and try to mutter a few words, but it was hopeless.

At one point, I genuinely felt like it wasn’t going to stop. I had a legitimate fear that maybe I was going to cry for the rest of my fucking life, haha. it hurt physically. Not many times in my life have I had emotional pain hurt me so physically. That’s when I realised that whatever it was, it had to come out, all of it. So I just let it go.

After maybe 30 minutes of crying uncontrollably, then another 30 minutes of intermittent crying, trying to talk, kind of talking, mumbling whatever I could, with the help and support of my partner and my son, I was finally able to bring all of my shit back together and compose myself.

I felt better. I didn’t feel great, but as they say in Rugby League, I was better for the run.

We have the ability to cry because we are meant to cry. It’s a tool we are supposed to use when we see fit. We have conditioned ourselves not to do so because it is inconvenient to those around us. As kids, we get told not to cry because if we are crying that means our parents will have to do something about it. It’s much easier if they can just teach us not to cry.

Fuckin’ job done. Bang bang. How good.

I’m not having a shot at my parents, or anyone. They did what they thought was right. Crying sucks. You do it when something hurts. No one wants to cry or be sad. But teaching people, especially kids, not to cry, and not to be sad, is working against our own physiology. we need to teach kids how to be sad. Let them know it’s okay to feel how they are feeling. it starts at the very fucking start.

What I felt on Sunday, was a build-up of months and months of tension and avoidance of how I was feeling. Most of the way I was feeling was due to my own actions in recent weeks or months. But I hadn’t been able to express the way I was feeling properly.

These are the neural pathways I have developed over my 34 years. Though not the fault of my own, or anyone else’s for that matter. It fucking sucked. It hurt. More than a punch in the face. More than any car crash I’ve been in. I don’t want to feel like that again. I don’t want my son to ever feel like that, ever. We are so quick to blame other people and things for the way we feel. We invest so much energy into blame and not nearly enough energy into accepting responsibility for how we feel.

Sympathy is not what I am after here. Believe me, I don’t deserve it. I’ve done some horrible things in my time, particularly over the last two years. In reality, I am lucky that the people I care about the most have stood by me through it all. Particularly my partner, I am grateful that she hasn’t walked away when there have been many circumstances where it would have been justified. My inability to talk about my feelings when they first arise leads to them building up and manifesting in undesirable ways. I know that there are no excuses. I know that this isn’t acceptable. And this is why I am trying to change.

I don’t want anyone to feel the volume of feelings all at one time that I did on Sunday, especially when we can avoid it by managing how we feel more efficiently. I am responsible for how I feel. I am responsible to let people around me know how I feel when I feel it. How can I be upset at others for not knowing or caring about how I feel, if I don’t fucking tell them? People aren’t mind readers. I am responsible to do all I can to practice doing so, in order to prevent things like the weekend from happening again. And you are responsible for doing the same thing for yourself.

The thing that triggered me on the weekend was feeling like I wasn’t enough. I never really felt like I am enough. I have never felt as though people are proud of me. I feel like I have never reached my potential. Even the diagnosis of ADHD at 28 years old didn’t relieve me of much of the self-loathing I exhibit. Even though every school report that read the same, “Sam has so much potential, he could do so much better if only he could apply himself” now made sense. I could finally explain to my parents why I was never able to finish anything. Why I never reached my potential. I had an excuse for so many of my shortcomings. But the thing is, excuses don’t, valid or not, make you feel any better. The traumatic experience doesn’t get resolved the moment a doctor explains to you why you are the way you are. Medication doesn’t do that for you either. So whilst there was some relief in my newfound understanding, the trauma remained unresolved.

I think in my case, the fact that I was diagnosed in my late 20s kind of paralysed me. I maintain that getting diagnosed and medicated is the best thing that’s ever happened to me in terms of the things I’ve achieved in my life, but at 28 it’s like, “oh k cool you have an excuse for all this shit you fucked up all your life, the problem is, your brain developed into what it is before we knew about your condition so now you kind of have to unlearn 28 years worth of shit.” So whilst it was great that I could finally use more of my brain and start working towards some goals, having my past explained to me didn’t, and will never, change any of it.

It didn’t make me feel better about any of the shit that I’d fucked up. It didn’t make me feel like my fuck ups were okay. They still haunted me. My life post-diagnosis improved, but I never did anything about any of the trauma I encountered due to my undiagnosed ADHD. Taking a few stimulants each morning doesn’t do that for you. After the euphoria and excitement of my brain working semi-properly wore off, mentally I just wound up back in the same position. I was just better with money, better at my job, and better at maintaining a healthy weight. and level of fitness.

If you can’t tell, six years later, or, right now, I’m only just starting to realise this. I write this shit to help me understand it. I’m starting to see that none of the issues I have are mutually exclusive. They are all interwoven. The drinking, the drug use, the low self-worth, the inability to tell people how I feel because I didn’t want to be a hindrance, the going out for a 20k run and deciding to run 50k instead because I was thinkin’ ‘bout shit. All of it is interwoven.

It all comes back down to having low self-worth. And it sucks.

I developed it because I always thought no one cared about me. I felt like I didn’t matter to anybody. It’s weird. It’s not that I wasn’t told. It’s not that people didn’t or don’t do things for or to me that should make me feel important. This is why it’s no one’s fault, and even if it were, what’s the fucking point in being upset about it now?

I just don’t have the ability to accept when people do nice things for me or give me compliments. I just, don’t believe it. I can’t. It’s as though my brain literally doesn’t have the thing that most people have where it can believe good things about itself. Like it’s broken.

I wish I was a machine so I could just order a dodgy, aftermarket replacement part from a sweaty old bloke with questionable dental hygiene in overalls at a wrecking yard somewhere out the back of Gundagai. But I can’t.

Amidst all the tears and guttural cries on Sunday I had a realisation.

Only I can fix this.

No one has ever intentionally made me feel less than anyone else. No one has ever intentionally made me feel like I don’t matter. All this time I have been trying to figure out who it was, or what happened, what was the significant moment in my childhood that has caused me to feel the way I do about myself. But there isn’t one thing anyone has intentionally done to me to cause this.

This all stems from my own interpretation of many events throughout my life. I’ve done this to myself. I have conditioned myself to believe that I am not worthy of good or nice things. I’m the one who is responsible for feeling as though I’m not as good as other people. I sit here and think about all the awkward moments I’ve had in social settings where I just so badly wanted to fit in. Then I would walk away and think about it for the next 800 fucking years and cringe. Meanwhile, everyone else involved forgot about it minutes later.

I am the fucking king of understanding these things theoretically. I couldn’t tell you how many times I have been the one saying those standard lines. “Oh you know you can’t help anyone else until you look after yourself”. “You should try meditation”, “Drugs and alcohol only are making this worse for you, man” *snorts line*. Time to take some of your own advice, Sambo.

You can’t really understand any of this shit truly until you FEEL it. You can get a grasp of how or why it makes sense, but until you are ready to feel it you just won’t get it. You can’t. And because we only control how react to our thoughts and feelings and not the thoughts and feelings themselves, we have no control over when we are presented with the opportunity to learn and grow from these things.

That’s what’s been frustrating about this journey so far. I am a stress head, a control freak. ‘Righto, if we’re doing this fuckin’ shit, let’s just do it”. But you have to relinquish that desire for control. Just be. Understand that the lessons will come to you when you are ready for them.

And this is where I’m at. On Sunday, I felt it. I’m not suggesting I’m fixed. In fact, I may have even opened up a whole other can of really fuckin’ tricky worms to sort through, but I feel like in all the pain I felt, I made significant progress. I have to have it, otherwise, what was it all for? I came, to the realisation that no one else can do this for me. I can’t keep whinging about this shit and not be doing more about it. I’ve shared this before but the fucking GOAT said it best.

It’s time for me to let go of all the bullshit that I told myself that made me feel so horribly toward myself. People don’t actually think of me the way I believe they do. And if they do, fuck those guys. I don’t need ‘em, and neither do you.

Everything in life hinges on your relationship with yourself. Everything. If you don’t like yourself, you’re not going to be able to like anything else. You might find temporary happiness or contentment in other things or people, but that’s all it will ever be. You know when you hang around with a miserable, self-loathing person, and it brings your mood down? That is what you are doing to yourself when you don’t love yourself. You are the creator of your own misery.

The people who occupy your mind and drain your mental energy when you’re mad, the ones we sit there begrudging for the way that WE feel, they don’t give a fuck. They’re probably at the beach eating ice cream in the sun. They’ve forgotten about that thing that happened that one time that you’re still hung up on.

People don’t care enough about us to actually think too deeply about us. And that’s a good thing. It’s freeing. Most people you come across in life don’t actually give a fuck about you. So why do we give a fuck about what they think? Think about the people who have made you feel inadequate, or not enough, who are they? More often than not, they’re someone who doesn’t really matter. Why do we let it impact how we feel about ourselves? There’s nothing wrong with people being this way, it’s human fucking nature.

Figure out your values. If you’re struggling, use ChatGTP to help you. Once you establish what your values are. Ask it again, “what daily, weekly, or monthly actions do I need to take to ensure I am living by these values? Give me five, one sentence dot points for each”. Then just start doing that shit.

It’s time for me to start caring about myself. Behaviors are contagious, good and bad. Be gentle and kind to yourself, you’ll be gentle and kind to others, and life will get better. For the most part, we attract what we put out into the world. Give yourself space, figure out what you actually give a shit about, and prioritise the fuck out of that.

I’m going to. Because after 34 fucking years, I don’t give a fuck anymore either. I don’t care what you do, what you’re good at, what you’re bad at, how much you weigh, or what your park run PB is. None of it fucking matters. And this is a good thing for you too. Because if you have ever worried about what I think of you, you don’t have to anymore. You are free from the shackles of what this manic thinks of you. You’re welcome. Run along now.

Free yourself of that bullshit. Leave work early, hang out with your kids, and do whatever the fuck wholesome shit you need to do for yourself. Reduce the size of your circle. You want a small, tight circle. Understand people will come and go and you’re not a bad person for drifting apart from someone or not wanting to spend time with someone anymore because whenever you spend time together you walk away feeling worse than how you felt when you arrived. It doesn’t matter if you’ve known them forever. People change. You may feel like you owe it to them due to loyalty or longevity. You don’t. You owe it to yourself, to do what’s best for you.

Life is way too short to be wasting time willingly doing things that we know make us unhappy. I could die today. I probably won’t. But I could. If I did, I would be pissed off that I wasted so much time worrying about what others thought, and wasted so much energy doing shit I didn’t like or want to do all in an attempt to seek acceptance from others.

In the last eight months, I have learned that you will only find the people who will appreciate and support you for who you are when you be true to who you truly are and live the way you want to. You’re not going to find your community if you don’t wander out there and test the waters. How will they know who you are if you don’t present that true version of yourself to the world?

Cut the shit. Start looking after yourself. Properly.

Happy Holidays

Today is the last day of school and work for many of us. I wish everyone a happy and safe festive season.

Please keep in mind that for a lot of us, for the first time in three years, we can enjoy a “normal” end-of-year break. We went from the fastest-moving bushfires ever recorded into two years of COVID lockdown-affected holidays.

So when you’re sitting in long lines of traffic because you left too late, or you’re getting the shits because the line at the grocery store in the sleepy coastal town you’re visiting is long, just fuckin’ relax. Don’t be a prick.

If you’re traveling or holidaying somewhere, be respectful of the locals and mindful that you are interrupting their way of life. If you’re a local in a holiday town, hang in there and remember that without the money these tourists are bringing in, there’s a chance your town doesn’t even exist.

The last three years have been, to use a scientific term, fucked.

Be kind to each other. Be kind to yourself. It’s not worth the stress.

Cheers Wankers.

35 Weeks of Sobriety

Most of the people in your life don't care about you, and it's actually a great thing.

Sobriety

The Name’s Ken, Ken Tantrum

Happy Holidays

Discussion about this post