38 Weeks of Sobriety- New Year, Real Me

All I wanted was sobriety, what I got was a whole lot more...

Jan 10, 2023

Today I have been sober for 38 weeks. 266 Days.

Internal Conflict

Have you ever had a wild thought excite you, only for another voice in your head to tell you to pull your head in?

Maybe you were at your job that you don’t love and after a long day thought, “fuck this, I don’t want to do this shit anymore. I want to go and do something I care about”. You start to wonder if your current, well-paid job is worth the sacrifice of doing something that you’re not completely passionate about, you may even get all pissed off and think the money is definitely not worth it and you’re off to a war-torn country to help build hospitals for kids who have lost limbs. You get all fired up and think “Yeah, fuck it, I’m going to make a difference!”

But then what you think is a voice of reason steps in and says “Pull ya head in, mate. You can’t do that. Who’ll look after the dog? What if you don’t like it? What if you rent your house out and it gets destroyed? You can’t build hospitals, you idiot.” More often than not you listen to that voice, let out a sigh of agreement, slump back into your chair and keep chipping away at that shitty task that got you all wound up in the first place.

Ok, so it doesn’t have to be that extreme. The same thing can apply to things like getting fit. You decide you want to run a marathon. After a few runs you sit there with sore legs and no energy and the voice comes back, “you can’t run a marathon, idiot”. Maybe my voice is a little harsher than average, but maybe it’s not. This is the only reference I have.

I’ve been having internal conflicts all my life. It affects my ability to make decisions. Often I’ll end up with a case of analysis paralysis because of it. Part of me will want to do something so badly, but a voice in my head is telling me I can’t do it. It’s not even worth trying. So instead of getting up and taking the first micro-step towards achieving the thing I want to do, I just sit there and let the voices in my head argue, paralysed by indecision. There are so many things I could do in that time to work towards whatever it is I want to do. There are even alternate productive things I could be doing that don’t necessarily align with that dream goal I have. But I just sit there. Wasting time, listening to my thoughts and feelings arguing with themselves. Getting nothing done at all.

I reckon just about everyone had an experience similar to this. Your emotional brain wants to follow its passion, and your logical brain tells it to sit down and shut up. The problem I think I have is that both are right, and both are wrong. There are times when you need to listen to both of them. They protect us from making mistakes. They help us analyse situations and make what we believe is the right decision.

The problem is we develop an unconscious bias towards one of the two. You can be sensible all of your life. Work hard, live comfortably, and retire at a good age with plenty of money in the bank. You’re comfortable and secure. But in doing so you run the risk of leading a secure, sensible, yet wholly unfulfilling life. Potentially squabbling with your regrets as you sit there in your castle.

The same applies to the inverse too. You can be a free spirit. Live in a fuckin’ van. Grow dreadlocks. Stink. Maybe that’s extreme, but it‘s often the jobs that provide a low-stress or relaxed lifestyle that don’t pay enough to be able to pay a mortgage and save at the same time, or invest in property or super to set yourself up for retirement.

So what the fuck do we do? Well, if you do what I’ve done until recently, you do what you’ve always done. It’s safe and familiar. It’s easier to stay where you are than it is to make a big change, especially when there is no guarantee that it will be worth the risk.

If you were given the chance to leave your job for 12 months, have your house, pets, job, whatever, all taken care of with the benefit of maintaining your salary, what would you do? If all that risk was eliminated and you could just waltz back into your life as it were, how would you spend that 12 months?

My first thought is to have a break. Maybe go get a nice tan. Come back looking like a leather handbag. On second thought though, I think about what an opportunity it would be to spend 12 months building towards a different, more sought-after life, without significant consequence. It would rid you of that voice in your head that tells you that you can’t do the thing that you’ve always wanted to have a crack at. There would be no more internal conflict because the voice that tells you you can not do something has lost all of its relevance. It no longer has any power.

It’s just a voice. They’re just thoughts. We convince ourselves that we can’t pursue our passions because we’re scared of what might happen if we fail, but it’s just a voice in our head or a thought. It’s not that we can’t do these things, it’s that we don’t think we are good enough to do them. Our internal conflict is the thing stopping us from pursuing our dreams or passions. Not our inability to do them.

Whole Person Change

My internal conflict has acted like a handbrake in my life since I was a child. I can’t seem to remember a time when I felt equal to everyone else. I have always felt less than others. More often than not, it was unfounded. The feeling almost never came from external sources. I always just convinced myself of it. There’s probably a myriad of reasons for it but that’s not what we’re here to talk about.

I always just did what everyone else did. I enjoyed it too, for the most part. Typical shit, football, cricket, skateboarding, music, all that kid shit. But I never got right into anything, not as much as some other kids did anyway. Maybe it was the ADHD that made me get over stuff quicker than others. I never really stuck to anything for too long. I never felt truly passionate about anything.

If there was something that wasn’t popular among peers that I thought I might like to try, that internal conflict would kick in the gear. The self-doubt, negative talk, and lack of confidence would convince me that I couldn’t do it. Maybe it was my fear of failure, but I don’t think so. I think it was more the fear of other people knowing that I had failed and my stupid brain placing such significant emphasis on their opinions of me. So of course, it was easier to not even try, because having people know you went out on a limb to try something and couldn’t do it, well, nothing could be worse than that!

I jest, but I think this is pretty accurate and I think it’s something I have carried into my adult life. I think a lot of others would have too. So many of us leave school and get a job or degree we’re not interested in because someone told us we should. School doesn’t teach us enough about different industries for us to genuinely know what we want to do at 18. I think it’s unfair to expect people at such a young age to make decisions that will have such a significant impact on their lives when they haven’t experienced enough of the world to know what their chosen path will truly be like.

As I got older, my internal conflict got worse. I gained and lost over 25 kg three separate times between 18 and 27. I remember the last time I lost it, convincing myself that I couldn’t, even though I had done it twice before. I remember saying to myself, “what’s the point, you’ll only put it back on”.

I would go through periods at work where I would be pissed off because I thought I was capable of greater responsibility or more qualified than someone who had recently been promoted. On other days I would have a bad day and get impostor syndrome so bad that I thought I was incapable of doing the same job I’d been doing for years. I would be fully convinced that I’d fluked it all this time.

When impostor syndrome flares up, I get the most horrible anxiety. Convincing yourself that you can’t do what you’re paid to do and have been proven competent to do in the past, is fucking terrifying. Some days you turn up to work and genuinely think you can’t do your job. You are terrified that you are going to get caught out being incompetent at any moment. Walking around your workplace an anxious mess. All unnecessarily fabricated inside your head.

When I first got sober back in April, I never thought it would have any real impact on the way that I viewed myself. Naively, I thought getting sober would be all I needed to do for my head to just kind of, sort itself out. I thought that if I simply stopped drinking, all of this stuff would just kind of dissipate. Fade away into the abyss and never trouble me again. If I did my bit by staying sober, the rest should look after itself, right?

Little did I know that it doesn’t work like that. Not even close. I’ve spoken about it at length, but alcohol was a coping mechanism, when I took it away, I was forced to face all the negative emotions and feelings I had been suppressing for such a long time.

Now, after (almost) nine months of sobriety, I feel like I have done a lot of the psychological heavy lifting and these days most of the progress I’m making is pretty easy in comparison to the stuff I had to deal with early on.

Not drinking wasn’t nearly the hardest part. The hardest part was finding ways to cope with the thoughts and feelings that I could no longer drown out. I feel like I am starting to make my way out the other side of this shitstorm though. Like I am a road train with 5 trailers hooked up and I’ve spent the last (almost) nine months doing a u-turn and I am finally heading back in the other direction, working my way up the gears (yes boys, it’s a crash box, 18 speed). It’s slow as fuck, but I’ve finally turned it all around and I’m heading in the right direction.

In the past, when I was drinking, I would use anger as my motivation for anything. I even used it when I first got sober. I was so pissed off at myself for letting myself get into that position, that for a while I flatly refused to consider drinking. I would get fat enough to hate myself and use that hate to motivate myself to get back into shape. It’s very effective but very fucking unhealthy. When on long runs and I would start to hurt, I thought gritting my teeth and calling myself names was the best way to get through it. Maybe that’s why finishing these long runs has never filled me with anything close to the amount of joy I had anticipated.

Negative self-talk is so fucking bad for you. We feel the way that we feel because of the conversations we have with ourselves. Nothing else. When someone does something to us that upsets us, it’s not the act that upsets us, it’s how we react to it that causes the emotional release. We either care or we don’t.

It’s only recently that I’ve started to learn that being gentle and kind with yourself is the most effective way of effecting true, sustainable, psychological change in your life. If you are depressed, being hard on yourself is not going to make you happier and it’s fuckin’ ridiculous to think for even a moment that it could.

The patient and incremental one-day-at-a-time approach I have adopted to maintain sobriety has taught me to take very small, comfortable steps. I’ve learned to go easy on myself. To not bash myself up for the mistakes that I have made. I’ve learned to forgive myself for all the dumb shit I have done. They say if you don’t cringe at some of the things you’ve done in the past, then you haven’t grown.

For someone who grew up thinking they weren’t good enough or not as good as others, it’s been fucking hard to change my attitude towards myself, and I still have a long fucking way to go. To a large degree, I feel like I am only at the start in regard to this. But the thing is, it fucking works. Like, really works.

At first, it feels dumb. Especially when it’s so foreign. Trying to be conscious enough to catch yourself every time you think something negative about yourself, then tell yourself you are wrong and that you aren’t so bad, it’s not easy and often feels fucking stupid. But like all things, it gets easier with practice.

I’ve learned recently that the angry, negative voice that would constantly tell me I couldn’t or shouldn’t try or do something I was considering is the same voice that led me to drink and use drugs to a damaging extent. It’s the voice that told me I was an idiot for wanting to try something different. The voice that told me I could never have the same nice things as others because I wasn’t worthy. It is negative. Whilst at times this voice was trying to protect me from the sadness of disappointment, I gave it too much power of me. I obeyed the voice, without question. Rarely would I second guess it. It was just my default.

It’s this same voice that told me I could move cities, pack our house up, rent it out, buy a second house all with a pregnant partner doing her best, start a new job, and become a dad for the first time, all within a short period of time. But it wasn’t supportive or comforting. It was its typical self, the same way it has been all my life. “Not only can you do this, but I expect you to do this, easily and I will give you not a single ounce of reward for pulling it off. the fluffy, flowery shit is not my department”.

It’s not all bad though. The high standards it has set for me have helped me to achieve just about everything and anything I have ever achieved in my life. I’m grateful for that. But it’s also the same thing that has prevented me from ever taking a moment to recognise and take pride in anything that I have achieved. It refuses to let me see that anything I have done is good because it perceives that as weakness or vulnerability. I now know how essential vulnerability is to grow, but for so long, I never knew.

I never really considered that there was another voice. A compassionate, caring, understanding, motivating and inspirational voice. Since I was a child I never thought this other voice was me just being silly. Just daydreaming of something better. I never understood that this voice was equally as if not more important than the above-mentioned negative voice. I didn’t even consider it to be similar. I thought that the negative voice was just who I was and that the rare instance of positive thought was just me being a bit of a dreamer. It was unfamiliar, seemed a little too risky and was subsequently shut down fairly quickly.

I’ve shared this before but it’s that fuckin’ good I’m sharing it again.

I’m fuckin’ big on the wolf analogy. Hence the logo. I think you need both, but you need to know when to feed which one. Over time, I had all but forgotten to feed the wolf that drove my passion and interests. Meanwhile, I was feeding the shit out of the wolf who drove me to do whatever I thought society expected me to do. I did this to the point where the wolf that supported me in following my passions or interests was so starved it didn’t even have the strength to let me know it was even there, let alone starving. I’ve been starving it forever.

I know that this is what led to my alcohol and substance abuse issues. I know that this is why I’ve spent so many years of my life unhappy and not knowing how to change it. I never developed a mechanism to feed that part of me. The voice I was feeding was a negative cunt. Constantly telling me I wasn’t good enough. The other voice wasn’t strong enough for me to hear what it had to say. I only had a negative voice. I think over time I just got so tired of it, I knew I could drown it out with alcohol and substances, so that’s what I did. Why wouldn’t I? It was the quickest, most effective way, but it only starved the other voice further. Drugs and alcohol make the negative voice stronger. It fuels it. It’s like steroids for that voice.

Sobriety has forced me to consider the other voice. It’s forced me to realise that it is there and needs nurturing. It needs as much or more food as the negative voice. The only problem is, it eats a different diet. It thrives on positivity, positive self-talk, exploring things that are outside of your comfort zone, following your passions, and being comfortable being yourself. The problem was, I didn’t know where to find all that shit. They don’t sell it at woollies and when you haven’t tried it before, it’s fucking scary to give it a go.

Once you overcome this fear and bravely step outside of your comfort zone to nurture this positive voice a little, over time, it gains strength. Eventually, getting stronger than that negative voice. You gradually become more and more comfortable listening to and acting on the advice of that voice. This is where the gold is. This is where good shit happens. Incrementally it takes you outside of your comfort zone, but it does it gently. It’s kind. It doesn’t shove you way out there all on your own. it stands beside you as you take one small step out into somewhere you’ve never been before. It’s the nicest friend you’ve ever had. For such a long time you think you couldn’t trust it, but the negative voice told you that you can’t, and you obeyed the negative voice.

The more and more I listen to the positive voice, the better I feel, the stronger it gets, and the less power the negative voice has. After (almost) nine months of sobriety, the wolves have traded places and I feel like a new or different man. I’m starting to feel like I’m not all that bad after all. I have plenty of good qualities, and whilst I still have a lifetime of improvement in me, it’s comforting to feel some slight positive feelings about myself. I still fear failure, but it’s a healthier fear and it’s nowhere near as powerful as it used to be.

I know that if I keep listening to this positive voice the people around me will benefit more from my presence too. I will keep presenting a regularly improved version of myself in all situations. I know that my sense of presence will keep improving too. I know that I will keep growing in confidence and keep testing the waters so I can become more comfortable in trying to find ways to help more people.

I used to think that the positive voice, the emotionally driven, passionate voice, wasn’t me. I used to think that voice was fuckin’ delirious. I thought it was out of its fucking mind and the things that it suggested were simply unattainable. At times I would be pissed off at it because I thought, “why the fuck are you lying to me, telling me I can have these great things when I know that I can’t?”

What I know now is, the positive voice is who I truly am. It’s who I am at my core. I’m a long fuckin’ way from getting all the way there and due to a fear of complacency can’t accept that I’ll ever truly get there, but every day that I give that positive voice a little more food than the negative voice is another day where I get another step closer to who I truly am and who I truly want to be.

I want to be more compassionate, empathetic, considerate, humble, generous and inviting. As I said, I’m nowhere near where I want to be. But through the process of sobriety, I have found the vehicle I need to get to these places and the paths are starting to present themselves. All I have to do is keep feeding the positive voice. Keep feeding the right wolf, the right shit.

New year, real me.

38 Weeks of Sobriety- New Year, Real Me

All I wanted was sobriety, what I got was a whole lot more...

Internal Conflict

Whole Person Change

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