51 Weeks of Sobriety- From Cooked Idiot to Uncooked... Idiot
It was my first sober Easter weekend in 18 years, and it was pretty wild…
Today I have been sober for 51 weeks. 357 days.
Sobriety
I wasn’t impacted by any major cravings, urges, or negative thoughts over the long weekend. I did, however, experience a fair bit of unintentional reflection. For those that are new here, Easter 2022 marks the last bender I ever had. So it was difficult to avoid thinking about what I was up to this time last year. (note- Easter was a week later last year, so I’m not quite at 12 months of sobriety)
I still feel guilt and shame for what I did that weekend. But I believe that each day spent sober and trying to do what I believe is right is another day closer to making amends for the shitty things I did both that weekend and all the other and all the other times I did shitty things, particularly whilst under the influence.
I do not accept that being drunk or high is an acceptable excuse for any of the dumb shit I have done over the years, which is a good thing. It means I must keep trying to do what’s right every day, a nice little chunk of motivation.
Sober Bunnies
I was just as excited for this easter break as I was for last year, but for the most contrasting of reasons. Last year I was pumped for four days of “batching” while my partner visited Melbourne with her mum to visit family. I’d squirrelled away some money, had a week and a half off work and was primed to make a “cunnameself”.
This year I was just as fucking pumped, but this time it was to get the house tidied up. Things have been pretty full-on since we moved into the house in mid-July. A month later, our son joined us, then the focus was on sorting downstairs so we could rent it out and start generating some income from the space. As it does, life just kind of gets in the way.
Long story short, we still had one of “those” rooms. You know, the one, the room where whenever you find something, you’re not entirely sure what to do with, you just chuck it in this room, close the door and forget about the shit. It will be our office and where my partner works from when she returns to work in September, so even though we still have time to get it sorted, it just started to annoy the shit out of me.
So, knowing that between this room and some other bits and pieces around the house, there was nowhere near four days’ worth of work to do and living in a holiday town that gets absolutely fingered by tourists every easter as holidaymakers make their last-ditch effort to get a beachside holiday knocked over before winter well and truly sets in, I thought, what a fucking brilliant opportunity to stay home all weekend, slowly poking around, getting one thing done at a time with no time pressures and just chipping away getting everything sorted. Something of a domestic reset.
How fucking stupid of me to assume that would ever happen, particularly in how I envisioned it. On Thursday, I learned on very short notice that some family will bless us with a visit. I love when people visit. I really do. It’s great for my son to see his family; they help out here and there, which is nice. But as someone with ADHD, OCD and possibly mild autism, I fucking hate surprises. I hate having something methodically planned, and something outside of my control jeopardises my plans.
It’s something I am working on, but obviously something I still struggle with and will possibly battle for the rest of my life. I couldn’t just put our guests to work, so it meant that I would lose the assistance of my partner for a good chunk of the weekend, halving our workforce.
With family arriving on Saturday afternoon, it meant we still had all day Friday and most of Saturday to get done what we had wanted to get done. Not how we wanted to approach it, but still enough time to get what we wanted to get done. So not all was lost.
After working up an appetite, my partner decided to have a smoothie on Friday afternoon. She threw a date in that had been in the fridge for… a while. Afterwards, she complained that it didn’t go down really well but didn’t feel too bad and, to her credit, kept on truckin’.
I was awakened at 3 am by some ungodly noises from the ensuite. She had food poisoning, a violent case of. With family arriving on Saturday arvo and her being as sick as she was, the team was cut in half, still with much work to do.
I spent Saturday juggling between chipping away at the chores, looking after our son and making sure she had enough hydralyte, water and whatever else. I didn’t get as much done as I had planned, but it was ok. This is why I planned this for the long weekend. So I wasn’t pressed for time.
By Saturday afternoon, she had come good and was well enough to entertain the family who had come to visit and help out a little with our son and the jobs we were trying to get done.
Sunday morning, we celebrated our first easter as parents and my first Easter sober since… a long time ago. We thought, what better way to celebrate than with a nice cooked breakfast! The young fella had choccy for breakfast for the first time!
So we cooked up a big breakfast, avo toast, garlic mushrooms, and hashbrowns, she had eggs, and I had a couple of vegan sausages that I found in the freezer. They’d been in the freezer a long time, but they were frozen. That fixes everything! I didn’t have the foresight to get them out early enough to defrost fully.
I didn’t have the patience to cook them at a low temperature to help them thaw out a bit more as I was cooking them, They started to get a little bit burnt, and I thought they may be a little uncooked in the middle, but what could possibly go wrong? They were only made of mashed-up veggies, after all!
Easter morning was a roaring success. My partner continued her day, entertaining the family as I stayed home and continued poking around doing my thing. Our friends came over for a few hours on Sunday afternoon and had a great time.
Almost as soon as they left, I started to feel really tired and a bit sick in the guts. Initially, I thought I had caught whatever it was that she had. But then I thought I couldn’t have because everyone else was ok, and I didn’t eat the same thing that made her sick. That’s when I remembered the uncooked saus’.
I was so fucking tired but too sick to sleep. I wanted to be sick, but I couldn’t. I went to bed early, sleeping like shit on and off. I remember waking up at 1 am and trying to be sick, but no such luck. You know you feel like dog shit when you want to be sick because being sick will make you feel better!
Finally, at 3 am, I was able to be sick. I felt some relief, enough to get back to sleep for a while.
When I woke up later that morning, I felt like utter dog shit. Tired. Cold. Sick. I was craving lemonade, icy poles and blue Powerade. Full of sympathy and no doubt feeling a little indebted after her recent, similar experience, my partner ensured I had everything I needed. I felt so fucking horrible, and it made me think, is food poisoning the absolute fucking worst non-life-threatening illness we can experience?
I had two baths. I had a blanket on the lounge. My trackies were tucked into my socks. I was a precious fuckin’ baby, and I knew there was absolutely nothing I could do except wait it out until the rubbish had passed through me.
I wondered when was the last time I had felt so fucking shitty. That’s when I realised I’d come full fucking circle…
The last time I felt like this was the last easter. Here I was nearly 12 months later, doing the exact same shit I was the last easter. The point is to drink and do drugs because food poisoning will get you anyway… I’m kidding.
I came good around 24 hours after I initially got sick. Last night, I slept like a fuckin’ log and woke up feeling great. My energy drained quicker than normal today. I did some work in the morning, then travelled six hours to Leeton for work. I’d planned on running when I got here, but I just don’t have the energy.
Hopefully, I’ll wrap this shit up pretty quickly and get to bed soon so I can get up early and run before work.
The Lesson
I have a couple of lessons to take away from this whole experience.
The first one ties in a little with some stuff I have been speaking about recently. I think it’s important not to set our hearts on achieving everything we want over time. It’s great to have goals and targets, but sometimes shit fuckin’ happens.
In the past, I have been guilty of letting things like this upset me too much. Yeah, we couldn’t get everything done that e wanted to. Yeah, we don’t get another long weekend for… two weeks! (haha) But even if we didn’t have that opportunity, it’s not the end of the fucking world. We still got a lot done despite facing a bit of adversity, and I’m grateful for that.
I think it’s important to learn the ability to be malleable. It’s not about making excuses for coming up short or settling for less. It’s about being reasonable for your own sake. Because, after all, no one other than me gives a shit about how much I did or didn’t get done at home on the weekend. So if I have the shits about coming up short, who exactly, other than myself, am I taking that out on? Who will be impacted the most by the negative way I allowed this event to affect me? Exactly… Having the shits about it will only make my day worse, and why do that to myself?
The second lesson is something that I always feared. When I was sick yesterday and incapable of doing anything other than hobbling from the bath to the longe and back again, I felt fucking hopeless. My partner was downstairs doing an Airbnb changeover on her own. I had my son upstairs.
I know I was sick, and I know that he was fine. But I felt as though I had let him down. I felt like I let a valuable opportunity for him and me to spend quality time together slip. It sounds like I’m being hard on myself, and perhaps I am, but yesterday reminded me of the feeling I would get when I would go out on the piss and coke until all hours. The physical pain I was in was exactly the same. I was absolutely useless.
At times I was hoping so badly that he would just go to sleep or that somehow, magically, my partner would be finished downstairs sooner than usual and would be able to relieve me of my parenting duties because I just didn’t have the energy.
The lesson was I never want to be that dad so long as I can avoid it. I don’t say this often, which is odd for a blog about sobriety, but this weekend has taught me that I truly don’t want to drink again. Not if it means being a miserable, grumpy, tired, shitty dad.
Anyway, I’m going to bed so I can knock this work over out here, get home and make it up to the big fella.
Cheers Wankers.
X.
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.
I’m running The Canberra Marathon THIS SUNDAY. I will 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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If anyone is struggling in any way, make someone aware of it. Speak to a friend, family, loved one, stranger, postman, uber eats driver, or me; talk to someone.
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Why are you choosing to not cut yourself some slack? How is it your fault you got sick?!