36 Weeks of Sobriety- My Year in Sobriety, in Review
The 10 pieces of advice I wish I was told when I first got sober.
Today I have been sober for 36 weeks. 252 days.
Sobriety
Well, I survived Christmas. For a lot of Australians, Christmas day is a day that starts with alcohol. It’s not uncommon for people to be drinking at 7 am on Christmas day in Australia. Fortunately, I had a small, low-key celebration with close family, so there weren’t a lot of risks there.
I am struggling with a little bit of anxiety around being on holiday and not having that traditional daily structure. I’ve challenged myself to burn 1000 active calories per day during the holidays just to keep me on track. Can’t drink if I have to train tomorrow!
With the formalities now over and the last of our visitors leaving tomorrow morning, I think I’ll be able to add a little more structure around the above-mentioned exercise to help me keep busy enough to keep the demons at bay. I just need to be mindful to allow myself some time to properly relax. It’s been the craziest year of my life and I don’t want to return to work feeling like I haven’t had a break.
I reckon I’ll be sweet.
The 10 pieces of advice I wish I was told when I first got sober.
This will be the last Sobering Thoughts blog of 2022. The wildest year of my life. I’ll be recapping the year that was later in the week, so I’ll save that for then. But I thought it would be a good opportunity to reflect on some key points I have learned about sobriety in the eight and a bit months I have been sober.
I have touched on most of these topics in previous blogs. If I have written about one of the topics previously, I will make the heading a link for anyone who wants to read further about it.
A lot of good digital writers say that you should write about something you wish you knew two years ago. Almost like a letter to yourself. That’s what will benefit people most. I won’t lie, when I started this blog, it wasn’t about helping others. It was about keeping myself accountable. Over time I have learned that others have benefited from them too which is an amazing feeling for me and one that I still struggle to accept at times.
So, I thought it might be helpful to people who are where I was two years, one year, and eight months ago. As with all my blogs, hopefully, someone gets something out of it.
1. It’s cliche, but you truly only have to worry about today.
Anyone who has had any exposure to the world of addiction or recovery would have heard the saying “I just want to be sober for today”. It sounds super cliche, but ultimately it’s true.
When I first got sober I didn’t have a plan. All I knew was that I had to stop drinking for now. I was in a pretty bad way and the idea of thinking that far ahead frightened me. I think that mindset helped me a lot. I was worried I couldn’t go a week without drinking, let alone a month or a year.
So, my focus was to just be sober today. I wasn’t a daily drinker, I was a binge-drinking champion. The type that couldn’t stop once he started. Weekends were my downfall. The only problem was, weekends now went from Thursday to Sunday. The brain is a funny thing. I would never consider drinking on a Monday. The thought wouldn’t even cross my mind. But on a Thursday, I’d be thinking about it all day until I finished work. Essentially I’d convinced myself that Thursday was close enough to the weekend to count as the weekend. It’s amazing what you will let yourself believe when it suits your narrative.
I psyched myself up for the first weekend. It was hard, it was boring and filled with anxiety, but I was motivated enough to get myself through. Purely by telling myself to just get through today. After I got a couple of weekends under my belt, I started to build a little bit of momentum and it slowly started to get a tiny bit easier each week.
Later I learned that most cravings only last 15 minutes. I chose to believe that each time I got through a 15-minute craving, I got stronger and the next craving will be easier, and so on. I have no idea if this is even true. But I chose to believe it was, and I think that’s the key. I told myself I was getting stronger, and better at handling it.
I don’t think it’s particularly healthy to get in the habit of lying to yourself and I’m not even sure I was lying to myself, I just think that you should tell yourself whatever you need to to help yourself stay sober. If the goal is to stay sober by any means necessary, then stay sober by any means necessary.
Now at a little over eight months of sobriety, it feels like only yesterday I got sober. Time goes quickly. Focus on the little things you need to get right every day and the time will fly by. If the goal is to be sober for today and you achieve that goal every day, you’ll be sober forever. So what’s the point in having a goal to be six months or twelve months sober? Wind it back, and just be sober for today.
2 Who you surround yourself with matters.
On December 8 I wrote a blog about how we are the average of the five people we spend the most time with. I believe that, for better or worse. There are some instances where we can’t choose all five people we spend the most time with. So I chose to look at it as the five people I spend most of my free time with.
I love my mates, dearly. I am a boys boy. I am fortunate to have a great group of friends that I have known since childhood. Something pretty rare these days. But when I am with some of them, I make poor decisions. It’s not their fault, it’s mine. They never forced me to do anything I didn’t want to do. I was often the one talking them into doing the wrong thing. But I have certain mates that are easier to convince to misbehave. Misbehaving with someone else makes you feel better because at least when you feel bad about what you are doing, you’re in it together.
When I got sober I had to make the conscious choice to separate myself from some people. Only physically. I maintained the relationships via phone calls, text and social media, but I knew that I couldn’t trust myself around them. They were capable of going to the pub for the night and going home at midnight and going to bed. I wasn’t.
I started spending the spare time that I would usually spend with these people with other friends whose lifestyles aligned more with who I was trying to be. People who get up early, exercise regularly, write blogs etc. This has had a massive influence on me and made my journey so much easier than it could have been.
No one group of mates is superior to the other. It’s not like that. They’re just different. It’s not even about the others. It’s about who I am when I am around these different groups of people.
The beautiful thing is, even the mates who I used to muck up with are just as supportive of my sobriety as any of my other mates. They are real friends. They want what’s best for me, even if that means I can’t do lines of coke in the pub toilet with them anymore. I’m fucking grateful for that.
The takeaway from this one is, to identify people who do the things you want to do, people who you want to be like, and try to spend as much time with them, talking to them or learning from them as possible.
3. Community makes it easier.
Everything is easier in a community. A lot of addicts belong to groups like Alcoholics Anonymous which they attend meetings regularly. There are similar groups for all different types of addictions, all over the world. It’s pretty simple. A group of like-minded people get together, talk about their struggles and walk away believing that if everyone else can do it, so can they. AA isn’t for me. I went years ago, and whilst I don’t think I would go back, I remember leaving feeling motivated, inspired and empowered. Many people encouraged me to contact them outside of meeting times if I ever felt I needed them. A genuine community.
Although I don't go to AA, I was fortunate enough to get to talk to
one night at that just so happened to be the day after my thread on 10 weeks of sobriety. Until this point, my weekly blog was just a thread of tweets on Twitter. Benny saw some of my threads and convinced me to start a blog on substack.This was one of the best things I have done. Not because of the substack, but because it opened the door for me to meet a bunch of like-minded people that Benny was kind enough to introduce me to. Benny started
, an offshoot of running for resilience. People who were R4R regulars but also enjoyed or benefited from writing about how they were feeling.The ongoing WhatsApp chat and monthly catch-ups with these guys have been massive for me and my sobriety. Providing me with a safe space to talk to people about my struggles in real time has been incredible.
You don’t need to find a group of people who like to run and also write. You don’t need to find a group of people that do either of those things exclusively. You just need to find a community of people that make you feel comfortable in who you are. A community of people who will support you in your endeavour to improve yourself. A community that rather than judge you for your past, supports you in creating a brighter future.
Shout out to
. I appreciate you guys heaps. Check them all out if you haven't already.4. Talking/writing about how you feel is imperative.
This is a big one for me. My blog is essentially a journal. It’s me trying to figure out what I think and how I feel. I just happen to share it with people. I find once I hit publish, a lot of the concerns I have written about just float away. It’s a way for me to take my thoughts, arrange them into where they need to be, understand them and then let them go.
I know for certain that there is no way I would still be sober if not for writing these weekly journals. There are so many proven benefits of journaling. I wish I had stumbled across it sooner. There is something special about taking what is in your head and getting it onto a piece of paper or a computer screen. The same can be said about a good honest conversation.
After each blog I feel fucking exhausted, it’s the same way I feel after a heavy psychology session. Mentally though I feel amazing. It’s similar to how I feel after a long run. I feel light. I feel like everything is ok. Like most or all of my stress has gone, even if it’s only temporary.
I would recommend journaling to anyone. Even people without mental health struggle. It is such a simple, yet effective way of clearing your head and removing stress from your life.
If you don’t have time, make time. You’ll be glad you did.
5. Sobriety is as hard as you make it.
Don’t get me wrong, getting sober is fucking hard. Especially when you use substances as a coping mechanism for underlying mental health issues. But for years and years, I literally thought I couldn’t get sober.
The thing is, we don’t bother to try things out of fear of failure. We have conditioned ourselves to believe that failure is a bad thing, rather than an opportunity to learn and grow. It’s an inbuilt emotional defence mechanism to not attempt hard things because we struggle to accept when we fail. If we choose not to attempt them, we are in control of the outcome. If we never tell anyone of our desire to achieve something, then never attempt to do it, no one will know that we failed at something we wanted to do.
Failure is imperative to our existence. Imagine if all the great scientists and inventors gave up after one failure. Chances are I wouldn’t have a computer to type this blog on. Even with sobriety, if you relapse, you still went a long period in sobriety than you thought you could. Take the lessons you learned from the experience, regroup and tackle it again with the new tools you have acquired through your failure.
I didn’t think I could get sober. I just got to a point where I felt I had no other option but to try. What I discovered is that I could get sober. And for the most part, it’s been easier than I anticipated. Some days and some moments are very difficult, but as you learn to identify your triggers, put measures in place to control them as best you can, and practice gratitude for your sobriety, I promise you it’s not as hard as you think it is right now.
6. You HAVE to be selfish.
I wrote about this fairly extensively recently so I’ll keep this short. Getting sober takes a lot of willpower. Willpower comes from within your mind. You need to do whatever you can to preserve as much mental energy as you can so you have enough energy left to work on your sobriety.
From the outside looking in, sobriety looks like not doing something. I get it. You used to do this thing, but now you don’t. That’s not the case. Sobriety is constant hard work. It’s something you have to practice every day. I know what you’re thinking, why bother with all the work? It’s simple, it’s worth it.
Identify whatever helps you stay sober. Identify whatever puts you in the best possible headspace to navigate difficult times. Take the time to look deep within yourself to find the things that will help you the most to stay sober, then do the fucking shit out of them.
It’s commonplace for people in sobriety to practice gratitude daily. All of them will start by being grateful for their sobriety above anything else. Above their kids, partners, parents, siblings, friends, whoever. That sounds fucked up, but it’s not.
Because if sobriety isn’t the most important thing in your life, and you don’t prioritise it every day, are you being the person that the people you care about deserve? I don’t want my son to grow up in a house where drinking every night is normal. If I don’t prioritise my sobriety, I’m not prioritising what’s best for him. You get the drift.
Do whatever you have to to stay sober, sober you is better for the people around you than a rampaging drunk you.
7. People don’t care that you’re not drinking as much as you think they do.
One thing I have learned through my journey is that people don’t care as much about us as we let ourselves believe. It’s not a bad thing. It’s freeing. People in addiction are often self-conscious. They have low self-worth. They let what others think of them influence their behaviour.
The fucked part is, we let what we think people think about us influence our behaviour. We will assume, and believe, what people think about us, without having a single fucking thing to base it on. How fucked is that?
“We spend money that we do not have, on things we do not need, to impress people who do not care”- Will Smith
Will Smith has done some questionable shit of late, but this quote is bang on.
Humans are inherently self-centred. There is nothing wrong with that. It’s human nature. We are all the same. Use that to your benefit. Don’t be afraid to tell someone you’re not drinking. I promise you they won’t care, and if they do it’s because they are insecure about their drinking. The opinion of someone who isn’t supporting you in trying to improve yourself should hold no weight anyway.
8. The substance or vice is not the problem.
Addiction is a mental health condition. It’s not a criminal condition. It’s not a hopeless fucking loser who can’t get their shit together condition. I was fortunate, I knew for a long time that the reason I have always struggled with drugs and alcohol was due to unresolved mental health issues.
My goal from the start was to get sober for long enough to clear the fog from my mind and finally get back into the unfinished work I started years ago with a psychologist.
I drank and used drugs to escape from my thoughts. Most people in addiction are the same. Sure, some people get stitched up by dodgy doctors who give their patients addictive painkillers etc but for the most part, people in addiction are escaping. They fall into whatever takes the pain away most effectively, especially when they are at their most vulnerable.
Sobriety isn’t about not being drunk or high. Sobriety is about getting to the root cause of why you are susceptible to addiction. Because once you get there, and figure that out, you won’t need to use substances, You won’t want to. You will free yourself from the desire to escape.
It’s fuckin’ hard work, but again, it’s worth it. That baggage you carry around is fuckin’ heavy. You owe it to yourself to start sorting through it and disposing of it. Your life will be so much better.
9. Your trauma or addiction is no one else’s fault.
Ok, this is a little harsh. I understand that traumatising shit happens to people and that is beyond their control. But blaming other people for the position you are in right now will not help you.
It sucks and it’s unfair, but no matter how you came to be in this position, no one but you can dig yourself out of it.
I love Mark Manson, I love this quote. The first time I read it struck a chord with me. You will experience emotional pain in your life, that’s guaranteed, in most instances, you won’t willingly cause yourself that pain. The sooner you accept that it is up to you to do the work to heal yourself, the sooner you can start the process.
You owe it to yourself to give yourself the best opportunity for happiness and contentment you can. It’s cliche as fuck, but you only live once and could die tomorrow, don’t you think you deserve to spend what limited time we have here feeling as good as we possibly can?
I do, and I think you do too. The moment you stop waiting for someone else to make your life better and start trying to your own life better for yourself is the moment things will start to change for the better.
10. The most important relationship in your life is the one you have with yourself.
I left this one to last on purpose. It’s a realisation I’ve only come to recently myself. It was my low self-worth that drove me to my breakdown at Easter time. I had a terrible relationship with myself. When I was under the influence, or flat our busy, I didn’t have to think about that. Naively I thought that sobriety would solve a lot of that on its own. It didn’t. Initially, it made things worse. I didn’t have my favourite coping mechanism anymore. I didn’t have anything to drown out the negative thoughts, I had to do the unheard of, face them!
It’s fucking hard to do the things you need to do to get sober if you don’t think you are worth the effort. It’s hard to believe that you can surround yourself with better people when you think the better people won’t like or accept you. It’s hard to find a community to embrace you when you don’t have the confidence to meet new people. It’s hard to be selfish and prioritise yourself when you’ve spent your life seeking validation from others by doing things for them and neglecting yourself in the process. But you have to do it. You deserve to do it.
You need to think about your core values and work backwards from there. What are your values, then consider what day-to-day actions you need to take to start to live according to those values. Drastic changes won’t work. They’re unsustainable. You need to slow down, take a deep breath, and implement one change at a time. Focus on that until you nail it, then implement another change and repeat.
Slowly, as the brain fog clears, your thoughts will be clearer, and you’ll be able to implement these minor changes as needed. Think of it as walking up a hill into a strong wind. Each day is a step. There’s no race to the top. The most important step is the next one, if you focus on that, eventually the next step will be the step that takes you to the summit.
Allow yourself some space, kindness and time to care for yourself and what you’re trying to achieve. It’s not easy, so you need to be as gentle as you can with yourself to reduce the friction that stands between you and the goal.
Summary
The last piece of advice I would give is to do things slowly. New years resolutions don’t often work because people try to make too many changes all at once. I focused solely on not drinking one day at a time for months before linking back up with my psychologist. Every time I implement something new I make sure I have the last thing I implemented down pat so I don’t overwhelm myself.
I have ADHD, and I try to do everything at once and want it done yesterday. This journey has been the ultimate test of my patience, but I truly believe that if I can do it, you can do it.
You just need to be patient. Be smart. Surround yourself with the people, help, reassurance and comfort that will make this challenge less challenging. If anyone wants any help, advice or just a chat, please reach out. I want to help.
Cheers Wankers.
X.
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So much there thats me. I didn't do drugs but drank to excess to escape reality and pain. My drinking was Monday to Sunday and I would panic if I didn't know there was beer in the fridge when I got home.
I had to get sober an out of work incident almost cost me my job. Once sober I thought about all the stupid things I could remember doing when drunk. Some I just can't total blackout.
I was always told don't trust someone that doesn't drink. Well I trust sober me and anyone over a pisshead.
Take care Sam and Happy New year mate.
"You just need to find a community of people that make you feel comfortable in who you are."
Loved this little tidbit in particular. Proud of you mate, and proud to call you a good mate!