It Never Dies, It Only Sleeps- The Rebuild Week 17

How A Sunny Afternoon in Phuket almost Ended 16 Months of Sobriety

Aug 17, 2023

I’m Back!

Did ya’s miss me? Didn’t think so. You probably needed the break from me as much as I needed my holiday.

But fear not, my friends, I am back, recharged, and ready than ever to talk my shit more than ever before. I’ve missed you, legends.

Let’s, fuckin’, goooo.

It Almost Got Me, Almost…

I’ve just returned from my first-ever overseas holiday as a father and as a sober person. I’m not sure that I’ve ever had stronger mixed emotions leading up to something than I experienced before heading to Thailand a little over a fortnight ago.

As most of you know, it’s been a wild year and a bit for me and my family. We were long overdue for a holiday, so it made perfect sense when my best mate told me he was going to get married in Thailand and we should come if we could/wanted to.

I was so fucking excited for so many aspects of the trip. Taking my son to a different part of the world, being able to spend quality time as a family, swapping out the Australian winter for a climate that only ever moves between 26 and 29 degrees Celsius and humidity levels no lower than 85%, not having to think about work, our Airbnb, or just about anything really. Mostly though, and I can’t stress how serious I am about this; I was just so fucking pumped not to have to do any fucking housework for a fortnight. No washing clothes, dishes, cooking, making beds, mopping and vacuuming floors. None of that shit.

I suppose when you take a step back and look at a snapshot of your every day when you go on a holiday, you remove many of these small, menial, monotonous stress-inducing tasks from your day-to-day life, and I think the beauty lies in it. If you think of your day as a bunch of tiny little stressors, at its core, a holiday is a period of time where you intentionally remove a whole bunch of them to give your operating system a bit of time to restore itself. You can go just about anywhere in the world to do this. The only thing that changes is the weather and the type of shit you see and eat.

The downside of this is that, in some ways, people who struggle with addiction like their day full, even if it’s partially filled with these stressors, because it keeps their minds busy. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve spent Saturday afternoons folding washing whilst watching football because, for so long, I had associated watching football on Saturday afternoons with drinking shitloads of beer.

This, of course, is avoidance, and whilst replacing a bad habit with a healthier habit is not a long-term solution to solving any of our core issues, it is a brilliant way to stay sober in desperate times or in the early stages of sobriety. After all, folding 30 items of clothing and two sets of linen isn’t nearly as harmful as drinking thirty beers and snorting two bags of coke.

At times in my sobriety, particularly early on, I have filled a lot of gaps in my day to keep my mind busy because idle thoughts can be an addict’s worst nightmare. Some of these gap fillers were very intentional. Running, writing, breathwork and the like. Others have been a little more organic or subconscious, such as housework or pacing around every single time I get a phone call.

On the surface, a trip away where you have limited access to devices, emails, phone calls, text messages and social media looks like paradise. Throw in the nice weather, the fancy resort with a swimming pool, room service, and daily cleaning and washing services, and it’s easy for me to understand why some would think I would be out of my fucking mind to be fearful of such a situation.

Obviously, the goal is to get to a point where we can be at peace with our thoughts and don’t need to fill every waking minute with some menial task that can almost certainly wait until later. But for me, I think filling these gaps in the day is imperative in early recovery. I think the best thing we can do is fill ‘em all right up with alternate, healthier habits and hold on for a little while, just long enough until the cravings and thoughts start to subside a little bit. It’s a shockingly bumpy ride at first. In those early stages, we should be doing whatever we have to maintain that sobriety and try to get ourselves to a place of relative stability.

It took me six months to get to a point where I felt comfortable enough to slowly open up some of these gaps and start exploring how I was feeling and why I was feeling that way. In my opinion, this is where we start the transition from pure abstinence into genuine sobriety. Until that point, we have managed to abstain from a vice through avoidance, which is no small feat in itself and something we should all be proud of.

In my sobriety, I have been fortunate enough to have pretty good control over the environments I found myself in. So I have been able to remove those gap fillers at my own pace. Slow, steady and only when I felt I was ready to confront more of my thoughts and feelings. Now I was facing the prospect of putting myself in an unfamiliar and potentially uncomfortable environment without the safety of those gap fillers. Of course, this is the purpose of giving yourself some time off and enjoying a break, but it’s a frightening prospect nonetheless.

Usually, I hate worrying about things that are out of my control. They say 85% of the things we worry about never eventuate, and I try to remain conscious of that. But my sobriety is important to me. It has to be, and on this occasion, I was glad I was worried because I came closer to drinking than I have in a very long time.

My friend got married on the beach in a beautiful resort in Patong. It was sunny, hot, but with a light breeze doing just enough to keep everyone comfortable. It was the perfect weather, really. It was a small, intimate wedding with very little bullshit—my favourite type.

Sidenote, the celebrant was an Australian man who lived in Thailand. He was from fucking Ulladulla. Forty-five kilometres from where me and my mate live. You travel 9,000 fucking kilometres and bump into a bloke from just up the fucking road. Wild.

Anyway, I was fine in the days leading up to the wedding. We went out the night before to celebrate my mate’s birthday, no dramas. I’ve done things like that plenty of times now.

In that awkward period immediately after the wedding, where people are just happily milling about, I started to struggle. We were sitting by the pool in an amazing resort. The combination of sun and wind was about as perfect as you could get for a tropical island, especially in the wet season.

We were sitting by the pool, having a bite to eat, while our friends were off getting photos, and that’s when these thoughts started to infiltrate my mind. It was like the stampede in The Lion King. The first buffalo was a fleeting thought “How good would a beer be right now?”. Then a few more quick-fire thoughts/buffalos came storming past. Then before I knew it, there was this fucking stampede of negative thoughts and voices saying all sorts of stupid shit.

It’s amazing the different angles the brain of an addict will use in an effort to get you to succumb to its desires. My brain was playing good cop, bad cop with me. Usually, my internal conflict is a fair, one-on-one battle. But this time, it was like there were two of them ganging up on me. Like the angel and the devil, only the angel was a second devil in disguise.

From “Go on, it’s been ages. You’re in the clear now. It’s your best mate’s wedding! You deserve to have a beer” to, “Look at you, you’re fuckin’ weak as piss, you’re at your best mates wedding, everyone is having a great time and having a drink, and you can’t even have a drink with him because you’re fuckin’ hopeless. People are looking at you, wondering why you’re not drinking. They’re all going think bad things about you to themselves, and they'll think you have some uncontrollable drinking problem, and they’ll tell everyone they know, and they’ll care heaps, but none of this will happen if you enjoy oooooooone little drink with your mate. Go on… just one” among others.

It became so overwhelming that I almost listened. I was so close. But it’s for the reasons you may be thinking. I only wanted to drink because I just wanted all that head noise to stop. I wanted to cave into the thoughts because once they get what they want, they shut the fuck up. This is the reality of what people with addiction issues go through. They don’t want to relapse. They want this uncomfortable feeling to go away and haven’t developed the tools to make it happen yet.

So please, next time someone you care about relapses or their actions aren’t quite aligning with their goals, try to have a little bit of compassion because these are horrible, relentless taunts from within their mind working tirelessly to bring them undone.

This was by far the strongest and most uncomfortable craving I’ve had in months, maybe a year. The only thing that stopped me was that I knew a few people there would have made a big deal about me drinking, and I’m grateful for that. The craziest thing is, I thought people would think I had a drinking problem (which I do) because I WASN’T drinking. Isn’t that just the dumbest shit?

I just tried my best to let those thoughts be, trust that they would go away in their own time (15 minutes according to science), and in the meantime, ordered a can of coke—something I don’t usually do. I only drink water and occasionally blue Powerade and chocolate almond milk. But if a can of coke is what it takes to get me through that tough little period, then feed me a fuckin’ shitload of ‘em.

On reflection, I think this means that there was something on my mind that I wasn’t allowing space for or verbalising. I’m not sure what it was. But I believe it happens when I avoid a certain thought or feeling or haven’t been open enough in recent conversations with others. Exactly what that was, I don’t know.

As horrible as it was at the time, with the benefit of hindsight, I can start to pull a few positives from this experience. The biggest and most obvious, I didn’t drink. It serves as a reminder never to get complacent and to ensure I am always aware that this thing never dies; it only sleeps. Another is that it reminded me to stay on top of the small daily habits that help me maintain my sobriety.

There was a second time while I was away when I had some pretty strong cravings to drink. I watched the Nate Diaz vs. Jake Paul boxing match at the “Aussie Pub” in Patong. Given the time difference, the fight card started at something like 9 am, so the place was going off when the last fight finished around midday.

This one wasn’t nearly as bad, and it is easier to identify why it happened. I was anxious when I got there. It’s lovely how people try to give you such amazing service in Thailand, but it’s a bit much for me and makes me anxious. I walk around, trying to make it obvious that I don’t want them to come and ask me if I want something. If you’ve been there, you know what it’s like. I also know what a pub full of drunk Aussies watching a bit of biffo can turn into, and I had no interest in being involved in any of that, so I was a little on edge for that reason too.

I know that this one was just about me being anxious due to my environment and that I only thought I wanted to drink because it would have calmed my nerves enough to relax enough to feel comfortable and potentially enjoy myself. Imagine that! Luckily though, I only started to feel like drinking towards the end of the last fight, and I was able to duck out with my mate and head off.

The rest of the trip was largely uneventful in terms of cravings, much like my day-to-day life here at home. I had the greatest holiday I have ever had, bar none, completely sober and present.

Refer a friend

The Lesson

Experiences like this are vital to us as humans because we lose the opportunity to grow and get better without them. The scary thing about this more significant near-miss I had is that I still can’t figure out why it happened. When we know why something happens, we can find more peace in it. The practical brain helps the emotional brain to understand why it felt that way.

Maybe this lesson is about letting go of the need to know why all the time because, ultimately, it doesn’t fucking matter. What matters is that I didn’t drink. I could be scared that the strongest craving I have had in probably 12 months only just happened, or I can choose to believe that it just is what it is. It’s been and gone now, and I can’t dwell on it because I have better shit to do with my time and energy anyway.

The rest of the trip was a breeze, and I put that down to instilling some simple habits early in the trip. On the first day, we didn’t do much. After catching up on some sleep from the previous day’s travel and late-night check-in, we familiarised ourselves with the area, found our local shops, and all that bullshit.

Knowing that I could be susceptible to cravings in that environment, I knew I had to maintain some healthy habits while still allowing myself the ability to do less, relax and enjoy a holiday for its intended purpose. So I just told myself, 30 minutes of outdoor exercise every day. This came in the form of a run. Some hot, some hotter, some really fucking hot, some really hot and wet, some hot and really fucking wet. But I did it every day.

I maintained my daily breathwork and even started adding a few variations to it when I discovered I could record it on my Garmin, and it gave me data! I’m more addicted to data than anything else I have ever been addicted to in my life, so feed me that shit.

I only had phone service in the motel room but kept my phone on Do Not Disturb for two weeks and only checked my emails on my computer once or twice a day.

I maintained my daily stretching routine and even implemented a new habit. Doing the warm-down from my run in the resort pool, some mornings at 5 am.

I firmly believe that these simple habits kept me out of trouble while I was there. Although at certain times my defence against this fucking ugly monster was paper thin, it was still enough, and I truly believe that it was these simple daily habits that look after my body and mind that saw me through.

Anyway, great holiday, a minor near-miss, life’s good.

Cheers Wankers.

It Never Dies, It Only Sleeps- The Rebuild Week 17

How A Sunny Afternoon in Phuket almost Ended 16 Months of Sobriety

I’m Back!

It Almost Got Me, Almost…

The Lesson

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