50 Weeks of Sobriety- I am Struggling.

Mightn't be my fault, but it's my responsibility.

Today I have been sober for 50 weeks. 350 days.

Sobriety

Would ya look at that? A double fuckin’ milestone all in the same day. What a ripper. I wish I could shed more of a positive outlook on that, but as it is, I’m just not capable of it right now.

My sobriety is fine, and as I inch closer to that magical 12-month mark, I should be excited about what lies ahead, but I can’t seem to get myself up. I have too much mental shit to wade through before I can get excited about hitting a milestone that will make me feel no different than the day before.

Although my sobriety is going well, I know many things are going on right now that would usually make me susceptible to cravings and negative thoughts. So I need to get on top of that shit now. Otherwise, I might celebrate my 12 months of sobriety with a three-day binge.

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Causes

About a week ago, I started learning this classic by the Pixies on guitar.

Ironically, in the week since I started learning it, I sometimes feel like the song was somehow written about how I’m feeling. There’s a tiny bit of comfort in that. It tells me I’m not the only one who goes through periods like this where I just can’t seem to get on top of my shit. In my current mindset, the intro resonates with me in particular.

With your feet on the air and your head on the ground
Try this trick and spin it, yeah
Your head will collapse
But there's nothing in it
And you'll ask yourself

Where is my mind?

I remember probably 13 years ago when I started reaching out to professionals for help with my mental health, I always struggled to explain how I felt to doctors. I struggled the most because I felt like I was just watching pass me by through the lens of a camera, and things were just happening in front of me, but I wasn’t truly part of the environment.

I remember one GP sent me for an ECG scan and told me a horror story of a lady he knew once who was complaining of the same symptoms and ended up having a massive, terminal brain tumour. So I left that appointment feeling on top of the world.

I now know I was experiencing an extreme lack of presence. I was consistently anxious. I had well and truly moved in, unpacked all my shit, plugged in the TV, and set up a recliner and a footrest in the apartment of fight or flight. I lived there for a long time. The recliner was old and tattered. Probably a bit smelly too. In hindsight, it was uncomfortable, but it was all I knew, and we find comfort in the uncomfortable when it is familiar.

Overall I’m in a much better place now than I was all those years ago, but when you spend years developing these neural pathways, sometimes they die hard, and we can still be susceptible to falling back into old habits.

I feel similar to how I did all those years ago, just a far less extreme case. Everything is happening in front of me, and I’m just kind of getting dragged around from end to end, holding on as tight as I can.

I even thought I was only a week off of 12 months sober when it’s a fortnight away. My blog last week was probably the worst one I’ve written. I haven’t been game enough to go back and read it again. Whilst I believe each blog is as important as the last because each one is all a part of this journey and is what I need to write about at that given time, I’m disappointed in the lack of thought and effort I put into it because I don’t I gained a lot from writing it.

Yesterday morning I was in a bad mood. I got halfway through my morning breathwork routine and needed to go to the toilet. Apparently, this is ok because you’re being mindful that you need to go to the toilet. I told myself I wouldn’t go back and finish it and that I wouldn’t do my morning stretches either, which are imperative to my being able to exercise. I ended up fucking about the house doing some other shit that needed to be done and went back to my breathwork and stretching before I left for work. A good result but frustrating all the same.

Last Friday, I had my son by myself for six hours. Usually, I would be super excited by an opportunity like this. When I got home, he was extremely tired and hadn’t slept all day. I was the same. I’d spent 11.5 hours in the car the day before. I’d had a big week and just wanted to unwind a little. All I wanted to do was get him to sleep. They say a baby can tell when you just want them to sleep, making them uneasy. I believe this to be true. I spent two hours trying to get him to sleep, and nothing worked. It only lasted 30 minutes when I finally got him to sleep. When he woke up, he was grumpier than before his sleep. This was an amazing opportunity for me to spend one-on-one time with my son; selfishly, I just wanted him to sleep so I could plunge into the lounge and do nothing.

The two above scenarios don’t align with my values, and I’m annoyed at myself for allowing my mindset to be corrupted like this. I know I might be being hard on myself, but this shit matters to me, and if I don’t acknowledge them, then I can’t work towards fixing them.

Anyway, the first step to resolving these issues is to identify their causes. So here goes…

Work

I have a good job. I enjoy it. I believe I’m pretty good at it. But anyone in the construction industry would understand some of the difficulties we are currently facing.

What I do for work is seasonal. We work flat out from September through to May. We have now entered what is our silly season. There’s a mild sense of panic in the air as people start to stress about getting their work done before we run out of suitable weather. Every year we say, “we’re going to be better organised next year. We’re not going to let this shit happen to us again”. Every year, it happens again.

It’s not as simple as putting it down to poor management or a few months of bad weather. It’s complex, and there is a myriad of factors that all need to be taken into account. If it’s not the weather, it’s lack of access to resources, long-term machinery breakdowns, or whatever else at the time. I’m coming to learn that every year, you’re going to be served a shit sandwich or two, and you’re just going to have to learn to eat them. Shit sandwich’s are hard to prepare for, especially when you don’t know when they’re coming and what form they’re going to take. So you just have to kind of roll with them and figure them out as you go.

Due to the massive skills shortage, there are more opportunities than ever for skilled workers. We recently lost our workshop supervisor/manager. I’m not for a moment suggesting that I am doing his role as well as my own, but I have had to take on some of the admin/organisational tasks he was looking after. Something that, until now, I didn’t know how to do. It’s great to get the opportunity to learn something new, and I’m sure I’ll be better for it moving forward, but I’m still chewing the last shit sandwich I was served up, and now there’s another one sitting in front of me.

I’ve also had to do a bit of away work recently. I’m fine with away work. It’s part of my role, and I get compensated well for it. I’m in a fortunate position where my partner being on maternity leave means I can sometimes take my family with me. But I’m still away from home. I’m away from all of my things. I’m the kind of person that prefers to work at work, not from home. The kind who buys gym equipment to use at home then heads off to the gym while the equipment at home slowly gathers dust or gets spread around the house to be used as door stops.

Working away fucks with my routine. No matter how hard I try, I can't replicate my routine from home while I’m away. A disturbed routine for someone with ADHD and a history of addiction problems is a fucking nightmare. I do my best and have avoided catastrophe to date, but it all contributed to how I have been feeling lately.

Financial Strain

I’m not ungrateful. I have more than most. I’m well aware of that. But gratitude doesn’t help much when you go through a period where there’s more money going out than what’s coming in.

My partner went on maternity leave, which is half pay, last August, the first of eight monthly interest rate rises. Perfect fucking timing. Obviously, my son is the greatest thing that has ever happened to me and is easily the greatest motivator behind my sobriety. That same maternity leave has allowed my family to occasionally join me whilst working away, so I can’t be too upset about it. I’m no economist, but the RBA can go fly a kite.

We had a bumper summer with the apartment downstairs, which is to be expected when you live in paradise, another thing I’m grateful for. As expected, though, the books look pretty lean as we head into winter, and while it’ll be nice to wash and change fewer bedsheets and towels, not having that security of bookings is a little bit unnerving.

Like many others in the same position, we’ve had to trim the fat off some of our expenses. When I hurt my back in February, I started seeing a chiropractor. He told me that I should come twice a week for a few months to have my issues resolved. I told him that at $80 a (5-minute) visit, that could be difficult, but I’ll see what I could do.

I ended up going twice a week for eight weeks. Last Friday, I said asked him how he would analyse my progress. He told me that only after 12 weeks would we do more photos and x-rays to compare them to the initial copies. He told me that if I wanted to make more progress, I would have to come thrice a week. for three months and then at least once a week for the next 9-12 months. This is when my spidey senses started tingling, and I felt I was being taken for a ride.

I told him that my GP had recently sent me for a CT scan and had the report sent to him just in case he wanted to take a look. He got defensive and asked why I would have a CT scan. I told him my GP wanted me to get a steroid injection into the disc with which I had issues to help alleviate the pain. He got more defensive again. Claiming the injection wouldn’t help and wouldn’t do anything for me.

I think he was being defensive because he could tell I was starting to see that he was full of shit and didn’t like that I was considering a more effective alternative. I won’t give you $240 of my after-tax money every week for the next three months, especially when you won’t support me in alleviating my pain and improving my quality of life.

I do believe in chiro, though. I felt great after each adjustment. This bloke was good at it too. I enjoyed the experience each and every time. One thing I did notice while there was most of the clients were elderly. Perhaps vulnerable people who had been convinced that their aches and pains could be alleviated with a back cracking twice a week.

Whatever the case, I felt I’d been taken for a bit of a ride, and given the other financial stressors we are under, I was annoyed at myself for being foolish enough to listen to this bloke. I guess I wanted to believe in his magical healing hands more than I normally would have because I just wanted my fucking back fixed.

I know we have put ourselves in this position and are responsible for navigating it. I know others are battling harder than we are. I know that everything will be ok, but that doesn’t mean the feelings of stress or anxiety that the circumstance is giving me are invalid.

Metrics

I’ve spoken at length about the benefits of metrics and tracking your health data. I still believe wholeheartedly that they are important and worth watching. I became obsessed with them and let the number pumped out from my watch to my phone screen dictate how I went about my daily life.

If I didn’t get as good a night of quality sleep as I wanted, my body battery, HRV, resting HR and the like were lower than I had hoped for, I would get upset about it and let it impact me more than it should have. Essentially, I was obsessed with the data and annoyed that I couldn’t seem to get it right.

As a result, I’ve been exercising less. Something I have always used to manage my mental health. I realised that when I was performing my best and feeling my best, I was tracking these things, but I wasn’t letting them dictate how I went about my day. In fact, when I was at my absolute running peak, I didn’t consider any of this data at all.

My psychologist suggested that I track this data once a week instead of every day and base what I do solely on how I feel. Something that I think I’m going to try because, ultimately, I’m not training for the fucking Olympics. I’m just a former fat, still a bit fat dad who wants to have a healthy body and mind, and my obsession with these metrics was working against me.

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Solutions

I get overwhelmed when I feel like I’m not on top of my shit. I struggle to differentiate between what is and isn’t a priority. What can wait until tomorrow, and what can’t? It’s something that when I’m going well, I seem to be able to manage a lot easier. But when I get into this state, I keep pushing deeper and deeper into it. I try to do everything simultaneously, finishing nothing and ultimately being less productive, repeat.

The problem is, because of the overwhelm and anxiety, I’m not conscious that I’m doing it until I find myself in the middle of a great big panic fuelled mess.

One of the reasons I have found myself in this predicament is that I haven’t prioritised myself and what I know is good for me. Something that goes against what I have preached over the last 50 weeks. I haven’t been prioritising my writing which was evident in the shit I put out last week and why I didn’t get a second blog out for my paid subscribers last week, which I feel horrible for. It’s also probably why this one is a little long-winded, but I had to get all of this junk out of my brain.

I haven’t been playing the guitar as much as I want to, either. It has surprised me how much it calms me down and slows down my brain. I’m still terrible at it, but I enjoy it.

Ultimately I think the solution is far less complex than the problems. It’s time to refocus on controlling only what I can control. It’s time to get back to basics.

Since introducing more stretching into my morning routine, it has become overloaded. Now that we are heading into the cooler months, I will exercise after work. This way, I can give my morning routine the time and attention it needs to do them properly without rushing through it because my mind is fixated on getting to work on time.

Running in that afternoon means running in daylight. This means I can take advantage of the thousands of kilometres of trails we are lucky enough to have here in the Eurobodalla. It’s proven that walking/running in nature provides enhanced mental health benefits.

I think running trails will greatly help me overcome my obsession with metrics. You simply cannot run as fast on trails as you can on paths or roads. Every trail is different. You’re kind of forced to throw the metrics out the window and just enjoy the run for what it is. You don’t feel guilty for walking up a hill or stopping to take a nice photo.

I will make the most of the quiet holiday season and use the extra time to make sure I allocate time every weekend to prepare myself for the week ahead. I already do this, but it falls by the wayside as soon as things get a little hectic.

The best thing I can do, though, is to spend time with my son and family. Phone on Do Not Disturb with a focus on being completely present. Nothing I wrote about the above matters when I am doing this. They’re still there. They still need to be addressed at some point, but they’re not his problem. It’s this time that reminds me how insignificant those problems really are. Not only is it what he deserves, but it’s real fuckin’ good for my own head space.

I feel like I’m not the only one out there struggling with this fatigue a quarter of the way through the year. In fact, it seems like a bit of a theme at the moment. I’d love to hear if others are struggling with the same stuff, what they think is the cause and how they plan to fix it.

Anyway, sorry for the novel, but I needed that.

Cheers Wankers.

X.

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Bogues Tonnes Up

Each week I will chuck a bit about my journey to my first 100k run at the Sri Chinmoy Canberra Trail 100k for anyone who gives a shit.

My running has been horseshit this year. Insomnia, injuries, and general fucking life stuff have prevented me from training the way that I have wanted to.

Running has been ok this week. I managed 50k last week with a good 20k trail run with over 600m of elevation. Something I haven’t spent enough time on lately and will need to dedicate plenty of time on between now and September.

Next up is The Canberra Marathon in 1.5 weeks, where I will most likely use it as a Zone 2 training run and pace my mate to his first-ever marathon finish. It’s perfect, it means there is no pressure on me to run fast, and I can use my mate’s desire just to finish in whatever time it takes as a perfect excuse to not pressure myself into targeting a certain time.

I am running the 100k for a few reasons. Mostly because I always wanted to. Mostly though, I want to raise as much money as I can for Beyond Blue. An amazing charity that does brilliant work in the mental health space.

If you want to help out and help keep me accountable for this fucking ridiculous goal, CLICK HERE to make a 100% tax-deductible donation.

Every cent counts, and you’ll be comfortable knowing it’s going to a reputable organisation who do amazing work.

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