Confronting Loneliness: 18 Months Sober
When sobriety began, so did the stark realization of my deep-seated loneliness.
I woke up this morning 18 months sober. It’s something I have been thinking about over there last week. I wanted to write some bullshit about sobriety and its impacts on my life and, more importantly, those I care about the most. However, something more pressing arose, and I need to discuss it.
I also woke up alone this morning for the second consecutive day. Everything is fine. My partner and son have visited Sydney to visit some family and will be home later today. But since I have been sober, I’ve struggled with being alone much more.
I feel like this blog will ask more questions than it does provide answers, but I’ve been thinking about being alone, Loneliness and why it might impact me the way it does for over a week now, and it’s something I need to write about in an attempt to make sense of it all.
Some Background
Loneliness is a bit of a buzzword at the moment. A recent study claimed that prolonged social isolation and Loneliness could have the same impact on your health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day, and I feel like since then, there has been a bit of a spotlight shone on Loneliness, and deservedly so.
Australian health insurance provider Medibank recently started a podcast called We Are Lonely. The website says the below about the podcast.
Brought to you by Medibank, the We Are Lonely podcast follows the journey of four diverse twenty-somethings on their search for connection. The podcast seeks to demystify loneliness while presenting practical strategies to reconnect.
Australian TV network SBS has released a new series on their streaming service SBS on Demand, The Great Separation, which follows the journey of a young man who, after a suicide attempt and losing his leg in the most bizarre way possible in that suicide attempt, realises that it was Loneliness that he was struggling with all along.
COVID-19 sucked ass. There’s not two ways about it. But a phoenix can’t rise from a fire without getting burnt. I believe social media sent us spiralling towards a world of reduced social interaction and community long before the pandemic hit. The pandemic just helped to accelerate the issue. The good thing is that it brought the matter to our attention, and now that it has our attention, we’re in a position to do something about it.
Too many things started to align for me to ignore my Loneliness any longer. I heard about the podcast when it was advertised on a different podcast only a few weeks ago. A week before my family left for Sydney, I started to get anxious about them being away, which got incrementally worse every day until they left. Yesterday, my partner shared a link to the abovementioned TV series with me.
The universe, or more likely something inside of me, is trying to send me a message that it’s time to start navigating my Loneliness and feelings around it. Sometimes, we think we can ignore problems until they go away, and sometimes it works, but they don’t go away forever. They go away to BootCamp and come back stronger than ever and ready to kick your ass.
My Experience
Over the last 18 months, I have been able to incrementally shift my perspective on all things from a point of panic to a point of genuine curiosity. That’s not to say that I’m immune to panic or anxiety. They’re still there. It’s more that I’m improving at turning and facing them instead of running from them. Often I have no fucking clue how to navigate these things, but I’m slowly learning that it’s the only way to resolve things.
The best predictor of the future is the past. I know myself. I know what I’m like. Before getting sober, whenever I was away from work or home alone, I would drink myself to sleep, subscribing to the myth that alcohol would send me off into a deep, restorative sleep. So long as I didn’t go too silly, I would wake up feeling fresh and ready to go.
I thought about this on Tuesday as my family took off. It was a nice moment, and I could laugh a little bit when I thought, “In this situation 18 months ago, I would probably have gone to the bottle shop the moment they left”.
Typically, the one week they go away for a few days is the week that work is a little quiet, so I couldn’t even throw myself into doing some extra work to distract myself from my thoughts. I found myself in a position where I could be annoyed that their being away coincided with my finally having a little free time, or I could laugh at the irony and realise that this would be an opportunity to test how far I have come.
I wasn’t overly concerned about drinking as that is one thing I feel like, for the moment, I have a pretty good handle on. I was concerned, however, about a couple of my other less healthy coping mechanisms or traits. Anyone who's been around for the last eight weeks knows I am working hard on my broken relationship with food.
Maybe it’s the neurodivergent in me, but whenever things are out of order or routine, I’m far more susceptible to going off the rails. I knew that on my own, I would struggle with food, especially between getting home from work and going to bed.
I also knew I would struggle with screen time, which I have been working hard to reduce, particularly around social media. I noticed that around the recent Australian referendum vote and the conflict in Israel, my screen time had seen a spike. I also noticed it correlated directly with feeling pretty shitty, lazy and unmotivated. I would go on social media and see so much spiteful, hateful and divisive speech but then, out of habit, go back to that social media in search of boosts in dopamine.
It’s like when you go to the fridge to find nothing you feel like eating, and ten minutes later, you find yourself back at the fridge, thinking that maybe there’s something in there you didn’t see before. Perhaps someone has magically delivered some delicious snack without you noticing. It’s fucking stupid, but we all do it.
The thing I was most afraid of, though, was how being alone would affect my sleep. The story of my fucking life. As much as finally having a couple of nights where we don’t share a bed with a fidgety 14-month-old boy (he’s our son, it’s not weird) sounds like an opportunity to catch up on some sleep, I struggle a lot when my sleeping environment changes.
So, I have struggled over the last two afternoons and nights when I have been alone and not so busy. I overate banana bread on Tuesday afternoon and was too full to eat dinner. While I was still in a caloric deficit, I was over my daily target calories. Not sure I regret it because breakfast cake is the fucking best. However, I was a little disappointed that I struggled to have the discipline to ensure my actions aligned with my goals. Again yesterday I overate between when I got home from work and when I went to bed. It’s a difficult time of day to be alone. I’m mentally tired from work, physically exhausted from exercise and whatever else and struggling to find the energy to do much else. That’s why this time is usually reserved for one-on-one time with my son.
My screen time has been well over average through this period, too, even after
and inspired me to use One Sec, which puts friction between you and opening social media apps. (I highly recommend One Sec to anyone looking to reduce screen time, and I look forward to seeing how effective it is after my family gets home).My sleep has been shitty too. I tried hard to stick to my routine, and on both nights, I was asleep around my usual time, but I struggled to stay asleep. Instead of being able to take the opportunity to catch up on sleep, I’ve had two shitty nights of sleep in a row, and I’m feeling pretty fucked instead of revitalised.
But why do I struggle with being lonely? Even when I know a period of Loneliness is coming up, I can prepare for it. I know the easy, obvious answer. It’s easier to eat or doom scroll social media than sit with our thoughts. But When we condition ourselves to distract ourselves constantly, we lose the ability to sit with our thoughts over time, which in time will lead us not to be able to feel things, good and bad. Essentially, it exists and lacks presence rather than living.
I know why I struggle with sleep because that little period before we go to sleep is when we are most vulnerable to Loneliness at any time of the day. There is nothing there, just you, darkness and your thoughts.
Ultimately, my fear of being alone with my thoughts drives me to do things that don’t align with my goals and values and limit my ability to grow and improve. But why the fuck am I so afraid of being lonely or alone when no real risk is present? What is it about me that makes me struggle so much with it?
My Thoughts
This is the part where I theorise some shit to come up with some answers to my own questions. It’s probably a conversation with my psychologist, who I’m seeing again tomorrow, but I feel compelled to at least get some of this shit out of my head.
I grew up with ADHD but wasn’t diagnosed until I was 27 years old. ADHD can make you feel like you’re a constant underachiever. You can be aware of your own ability or intelligence, yet often, you fall short on the last one or two steps of a process. It leaves you feeling like you’re not quite good enough. It’s like putting together an Ikea flat pack; you have all the pieces, but they forgot to include the tool you need to assemble the last couple of pieces.
Even though being diagnosed and medicated was life-changing for me and showed me that all of that “coming up short” of my own and others’ expectations of me wasn’t entirely my fault. Even though I’m now able to manage my ADHD with less medication than ever through simple, healthy daily habits, I can’t help but think being undiagnosed for so long allowed me to ingrain certain neural pathways or coping mechanisms I needed at the time, which have now become limiting to me.
When you’re a kid and constantly fall short of your potential, and it’s met with questions and disappointment rather than compassion and concern, it makes you feel like it’s your fault. It makes you feel like you are or have a problem. Like you are doing something wrong, and you should be able to implement something to change it, but no matter how hard you try, you just can’t. You keep falling agonisingly short, and every time that happens, it reaffirms to you that you are failing. Every time it happens, it knocks you down another peg.
I think that because of this, I started to develop a low self-worth. I began to lack self-belief. I didn’t think I could achieve anything without the help of other people. I began to believe that I, on my own, couldn’t achieve anything of significance, then regularly reaffirmed that to myself as I grew up.
That’s why I had this limiting belief about myself: that I would never step too far outside my comfort zone. There were so many things I wanted to try and see if I could learn, but something inside my brain would tell me that “that’s not for me” or “You’re not that kind of person. You couldn’t do that” because for someone so tired of trying and failing, why would I want to add anything to the list of thing that I couldn't do?
So, what does this have to do with my fear of being alone? Maybe I’m scared of being alone because I don’t have the self-belief to believe I’ll be okay alone, and perhaps I won’t be. I ate half a kilogram of banana bread for dinner two nights ago. I certainly think I would struggle a lot more in sobriety if I lived alone and didn’t have my family.
It gets a little more complex because I love my alone time when it’s intentional. I love running in the bush by myself. I love getting up at 4 a.m. and having a couple of hours to myself to do my stretching and my breathwork, and then get to work before anyone else so that I can get a couple of hours in undistracted.
I have realised that I like my alone time when it’s intentional. I like it when it’s by choice. I like having the ability to turn alone time off whenever I choose and go home to my family.
When I’m forced to have alone time, it scares me. It removes that security blanket, and I feel vulnerable. I feel susceptible to negative self-talk. I worry I won’t have the discipline to stick to the routine that has served me so well over the last 18 months. I think that’s why they say people “find company in the bottom of a bottle” because drinking takes away that anxiety that comes with the uncertainty of being lonely.
Like almost everything in my life, none of the things I fear are ever as bad as I anticipate, and most things I fear never even happen. Logically, this sounds easy, but emotionally, not so much. I think I’m improving with that, but progress is slow and only comes with practice. It’s not something you can dedicate an hour of your day to. In many ways, you have to wait for life to throw shit sandwiches at you first and then react.
I don’t think the solution is to identify periods where I’m susceptible to feeling lonely and trying to jam a bunch of meaningless activities into those periods to avoid feeling lonely. That’s what I’ve been doing all along. That’s what I did in the past when I was drinking and using drugs. I would keep myself busy to distract myself from my thoughts, but I would eventually run out of physical energy. So, I would drink and use drugs to keep my mind busy while my body did nothing. That’s probably why whatever I do, I do a lot of, healthy or otherwise.
I don’t want to contradict what I said at the top. Loneliness is an epidemic. Social media started it, and the pandemic made it worse. Food delivery services, online shopping, working from home, home gyms and most things we use to make our home life more convenient have reduced our time in the community.
I think all of these things have a place, but it means we have to be more intentional about how we spend time in the community. Something I struggle with. I struggle to meet new people. I find it challenging to start conversations and engage with people I don’t know. I feel awkward, then I sense that I’m making them uncomfortable, and then I just want to get the fuck out of there, but I guess it’s just something I’m going to have to work on.
Loneliness is one of those self-perpetuating things. Like depression, Loneliness can make us feel defeated and sap our motivation. It makes us feel like things aren’t worth doing or that we can’t be bothered. The solution is often the thing we want to do the least when in that state.
Maybe we should feel like we can’t achieve things on our own. Perhaps that’s the point. I’ve always believed that two people working together can achieve something three times quicker than someone working alone. Maybe we should overcome these self-serving drivers and strive to achieve things collaboratively. Perhaps that’s what we should have been trying to do all along and not be so self-obsessed.
As for the unintentional Loneliness, I think that’s inevitable. I think that’s just one of those things that will happen to all of us from time to time. Sometimes, my family will go away for a few nights to visit someone because that’s their only opportunity, and I won’t be able to go. That’s just life.
Just like sadness, Loneliness is not entirely avoidable. We will all experience it in varying degrees at times. Again, like sadness or any negative emotion or thought, the goal should not be to eradicate that feeling from our lives. We feel it for a reason. Instead, the goal should be to learn to feel it, process it, and understand it has a purpose. Trust that you’re feeling it because you need to and don’t need to understand precisely why. Leave it be, and it’ll go away on its own in time.
It’s fuckin’ hard, and I’m not good at it, but these negative feelings and emotions are here to stay. We can either do nothing and let them knock us up or try to bash them back, but they are like one of those inflatable clowns with a weight in the bottom. They bounce back up, so fighting them is a waste of energy. We have to get better at managing them when they present themselves.
I think.
Thanks for reading and for the opportunity to get some crap off my chest.
Cheers Wankers.
X.
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“I also knew I would struggle with screen time”
Do you think by telling yourself this that it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy?