Cautious Optimism and Accountability

I'm on holidays for the first time since I've been sober. I think I'll be okay, but I need to be careful. Advice welcomed!

Dec 22, 2022

What Worries Me

The last time I was on leave from work, my son was born. That was four months ago. I was four months sober at the time. I had just relocated to a new city and started a new job. It was a very busy time. I was too focused on getting my son home safely to be tempted to drink. Once we got home, I was too focused on just staring at him for hours on end. I took a little over a fortnight off in total. Even though back then I passed this test with flying colours, I think I had a bit of a handicap. Your brain emits OxyContin when you look at your newborn. OxyContin is known as The Love Hormone or The Cuddle Hormone. It’s a very powerful chemical and it makes you feel amazing. I was loaded on the shit. I felt amazing. I didn’t need to drink. Didn’t even need to think about it. All I thought about for that period was my son and my partner.

The second most recent time I have had a decent chunk of time off work was in April this year. My work was good enough to allow us to take the time between Easter and ANZAC Day off. The employee agreement we were on meant we had RDOs with every public holiday. Given the proximity of Easter to ANZAC Day this year, we only had to take three days of annual leave to have eleven days off. I was grateful to my work for recognising the opportunity and allowing us to take advantage of it.

My partner was going to Melbourne for the Easter Long Weekend to visit some family. We had dogs at the time and it was too difficult to get them looked after, especially on short notice, so I stayed home.

Work was mental at the time. We were in the process of packing, looking for a new house to buy at the coast, trying to get our current house rented out, and dealing with brokers, and real estate agents, I was trying to onboard and hand over my role at work. It was a stressful time. In hindsight, we probably bit off a little more than we could chew, but I can’t regret it because now that it’s over, I’m glad it all happened as quickly as it did.

In the week leading up to Easter, my partner confirmed that she would be travelling to Melbourne for the weekend. I didn’t even put my phone down after she called me to tell me she was definitely going. Straight away, I began to text the four or five contacts I had at the time that could either supply me or help me get my hands on cocaine.

It was safe, I would have no one supervising me. I had plenty of run-off days to get the drugs out of my system before returning to work to run the random drug test gauntlet. What could possibly go wrong? It’s not like I had a whole lot of stressful bullshit going on that I hadn’t been coping with properly, right?

I won’t go into too much detail about that weekend. Not because I’m afraid to share, I just don’t really remember a lot from it. Same goes for just about any weekend for 12 to 18 months prior to that weekend. She’s all a bit of a blur.

What I do know is that I spent three of the next four nights drinking and using cocaine. I know that I spent over $3,000 over those four days. We were saving as hard as we could because we knew moving would cost us a lot of money and we knew we would need as much as possible for when the baby arrived and my partner would be on maternity leave for 12 months. But I was that fuckin’ good at getting right on it, that until this point I had been finding a way to save money and blow $500 a weekend on wiping myself out.

On Easter Monday, my partner and her mum were driving back from Melbourne. A mate text me saying he had an RDO tomorrow and did I want to go for a quiet beer. Abso-fucking-lutely, I thought. These are my last moments of being unsupervised, I have to make the most of it! I was pretty hungover from the head-turning performances I had turned in the nights previous. But like the fuckin’ hero I am, I showed up, dug deep, got through the new ball and was able to capitalise after the first hour.

I went from “not drinking tonight” to having a bag of coke dropped off to me in about three hours and three beers. I was fuckin’ hopeless. I knew I’d been able to hide some of the evidence of how much money I had spent that weekend, but I also knew I couldn’t hide any more. I remember taking that cash out and thinking “I’m gonna get in the shit for this” and then thinking, “fuck it” and doing it anyway.

My partner isn’t controlling. She doesn’t care about money. She is very, very patient and tolerant. I had no reason to think the way that I did. This is just what happens in the mind of someone who knows no other way of coping with their stressors. She got home from Melbourne around… I actually have no fucking idea.

She was hassling me to come home. Being the obnoxious prick that I was, I couldn’t understand all the fuss. She was only pregnant, hadn’t seen me for four days, and had no idea where I was if I was alive, who I was with or what I was doing.

I got home around 3 am, on a fucking Tuesday morning. What even happens on a Monday night? I was sat in a dingy Irish pub and then at my mates' place, doing fuck all, having another unmemorable, yet expensive night, drowning out my feelings.

When I got home I fielded a barrage of very fair and reasonable questions that at the time I thought were inappropriate. I’d been wasted for 80% of the last four days and had very little sleep. I wasn’t capable of computing… anything really.

I got the shits. how dare she ask me very reasonable questions like “what the fuck did you spend 3k on?”, and we argued. A mate of mine was staying with us at the time. A mate who was seven years sober at the time. He’s now eight years sober. He’s also a drug and alcohol counsellor and a secretary of one or two NA meetings in Canberra. Anyway, we argued loud enough for him to question me about it in the morning.

My brain couldn’t handle having to think about my answers to the very reasonable questions. So I went and sat on the lounge with my head in my hands.

I don’t believe in god (sorry). But something told me that night when I was sitting on the lounge that it was time to be real and honest with myself. I have an extensive history of anxiety and depression. I couldn’t remember the last time I went a weekend without using drugs, let alone drinking. I was about to become a dad, change jobs, move cities etc. I had just blown three grand on absolutely fuck all. I literally wasted it. Everything hit me all at the one time. What the fuck have I done? What the fuck have I been doing? I had always told myself I would never let myself get to this point. I could stop myself eeeeaaaassssyyyy, I’d always thought. The thing is though, you NEVER have as much control as you think you do.

I’d been telling myself every Sunday morning for 12 months that I didn’t want to do this shit anymore. I meant it every single time. I promise I meant it.

I walked back into our room and said I was sorry. I tried to start explaining how I was feeling. I couldn’t. Probably for a couple of reasons. The first being that I was too upset with myself and too fucked up from the weekend that had been to say anything comprehensible. Secondly, though, I had conditioned myself to not talk about how I felt. Fuck, I had conditioned myself to not even think about how I felt. I’d just been doing drugs and drinking about how I felt. It was the quickest, most effective, yet most temporary method available. It was perfect for me, but it was making me fucking miserable. I broke down right there in my bedroom, crying like a fuckin’ baby. The cool tough guy taking the cash out at the atm hours earlier was now laying on the ground crying inconsolably. That’s when “The Tweet” that started this blog happened.

And that’s when my life changed… click here to read what happened from here…

Why It Won’t Happen Again

When I think about who I am now compared to the person I was back then, It’s hard to believe I am the same person. I’m not, really. Like I live in the same body as that dickhead did. But The new me has taken over the lease and jazzed the place up a bit. Nothing too flashy, just a lick of paint, some downlights, and maybe a stone bench top.

When you take to remove your favourite coping mechanism of 17 years without warning, shit gets fucking hard. But it’s been eight months now. I’m managing my sobriety well. I’m not getting complacent, I’m aware I’ll never be fully in the clear, and I am grateful for my sobriety each and every day. that’s the way it has to be, you have to prioritise it. you have to do whatever you need to to stay sober. It has to come first. Yep, even before my son. Because the most important thing to me is that he never meets that version of me. He deserves this version of me and better. The same goes for all the people I care about. You know what though, I deserve the best version of myself too. I deserve to be someone I can hopefully be proud of one day. I deserve to be someone who doesn’t constantly think about all the things he has fucked up along the way.

That’s what I am working towards. That’s what I have been working towards every single day for the last eight months. It’s been super fucking hard. My thoughts and feeling were the bulls in the below video. Drugs and alcohol were the doors separating the bulls from the people. The people are all the different parts of my brain.

It’s like all the feelings and thoughts were held up in one spot and as the last traces of drugs and alcohol slowly drained from my body, the door got kicked down and all the thoughts and feelings they’d been holding at bay flooded my brain.

I’ve had to slowly navigate my way through these thoughts each and every day, I’ll have to finish this blog up shortly because I still have a stack of them waiting there for me to sort through. It’s ongoing and I’ve made peace with the idea that it could well be never-ending. I’m hoping it just continues to get easier like it already has.

I’ve come a long way. I really feel like I’ve made a lot of progress. But I just can’t waltz on into this holiday season without noticing and being aware of what happened last time I had time off like this. In fact, each time I have had a decent chunk of time off work over the last few years, I have done the same old shit. I thought I was partying, thought I was shaving fun, but in reality, I was scared and I was running away from my own thoughts and feelings.

The best predictor of the future is the past. that’s why I am scared. no matter how hard I work, how much progress I make, or how well I think I am going, I need to maintain a healthy respect for the fact that sobriety is earned and not given. I also need to remember that it’s the key to my life continuing to get better along with anyone who has anything to do with me. So yeah, I think I'll be fine, but I’ll be looking over my shoulder here and there to make sure the evil bastard isn’t sneaking up on me.

Accountability

One thing I have done since getting sober is exercise. I was exercising before I was sober too, but I’ve really leaned into it to help me get through some of the challenges sobriety presents. particularly early on.

So, I’m going to do the same for these holidays, but I want some help. I’m going to try to burn 1000 active calories a day, every day for the entirety of my holidays. I have already done it this morning.

Who’s keen to join me in a holiday challenge? You don’t have to do 1000 calories, you don’t have to train every day. But I think setting ourselves a holiday health target to keep ourselves from blowing out and entering the new year with a whole bunch of shitty habits is a good idea.

Maybe you want to walk one kilometre every third day over the holidays. Maybe you want to run a marathon every day and do a 100k run on the last day of your holidays. It doesn’t matter. Let’s set ourselves some realistic goals relevant to our own circumstances and help each other be held to account. Not by bagging people for not doing what they said they wanted to, but by supporting and encouraging each other when someone is struggling for a little motivation or self-belief.

In a lot of ways, our health is all we have and one of the few things we have a reasonable amount of control over.

If you’re keen, reach out! I could use the help and I’d be more than willing to return the favour.

Let’s, fuckin’, go.

Cheers Wankers.

Cautious Optimism and Accountability

I'm on holidays for the first time since I've been sober. I think I'll be okay, but I need to be careful. Advice welcomed!

What Worries Me

Why It Won’t Happen Again

Accountability

Discussion about this post