Today I have been sober for 23 weeks. 161 days.
Sobriety
This week could well be the first time in the last 23 weeks that I can honestly say I don’t think I have thought about drinking once. Does this mean I am in the clear forever? Of course it fuckin’ doesn’t. Honestly, I think it has a lot to do with how busy I have been. I haven’t really had the chance to think about it. In retrospect, That’s probably been the case for the last 23 weeks in a lot of ways.
I guess there are two ways to look at it, was I trying to do too much by getting sober during such a frantic period of my life? Or did the fact I was so busy and had so much to get done serve as a welcome distraction, particularly early on?
Even though in the past the stress of having so much to do lent its hand towards using alcohol as stress relief, I was often at a point where I literally didn’t have time to drink and/or couldn’t afford to waste any more time flopping about on the lounge as a hungover piece of shit.
Whatever the case, I’m choosing to take this as a win. I’ve kind of learned that with this kind of stuff you have to sort of let life come to you. Be malleable. Take the wins when they come, don’t dwell on the losses. It’s important that whether it’s a win or a loss we just keep on trudging along on the trajectory we are trying for.
Time to Work
I didn’t get sober for the sake of getting sober. It was never about being sober forever, even though that may end up being the case… carton, box, or slab. The motive behind getting sober was mental clarity. Enough mental clarity and a level of mental calm where I would then be capable of doing the work I needed to do to figure out why I drink the way I do. Two is too many, and 22 is not enough. I’ve been that way since my first ever drink. But why?
I knew eventually I had to get back to a psychologist to help break things down and get to the core of why I am the way I am. Honestly, though, I didn’t think it would take over five months until I felt I was ready to engage my old psychologist. Naively I thought if I stopped drinking for long enough my brain would kind of re-calibrate and sort itself out. Being sober, writing these blogs, and trying to clean up my thought processing as best I can have helped a lot, But none of these things are solutions. They are an aid to a solution. It’s kind of like having a flash fishing boat with all the bells and whistles but living in the fuckin’ desert. The life jackets, flares, and fishing rods, you can go over them, clean them, and make sure they’re all working and stored correctly, but until you get to the water, you can’t use them to their full capacity.
I know I have severe anxiety issues. I always have. Mum used to say “you’re the only child I know that’ll die of a stomach ulcer'“. (remember that part, it’ll be relevant later). When I was diagnosed with ADHD I learned that ADHD is essentially a form of anxiety, if not anxiety-inducing. Again, naively I thought medication and gaining a proper understanding of ADHD would solve a lot of my problems for me. Whilst both those things helped me a lot, I learned they are not, and never will be, a solution to my underlying issues. They’re the perfectly neat tackle box and scaling kit on the fishing boat.
I need to get my fucking fishing boat to the coast so I can start to put these acquired tools to use. I’m sick of looking at them.
The Background
I spoke to my psychologist last Thursday for the first time in 18 months. After a quick catch-up of my goings-on over that period, I explained to her that I don’t really care about alcohol at this point. Whether I drink or don’t drink again isn’t really a concern at this current point. I just wanted to get to the core of my issues and try to resolve them so that I can move on with my life and stop feeling weighed down by them. We picked up where we left off. None of you have been privy to the conversations we’ve had so I’ll do my best to summarise.
I have very low self-worth. I don’t know what it feels like to be proud of anything. My logical brain knows that I have achieved a lot of things that I should be proud of. My first marathon, buying my first house, buying my second house, becoming a father, losing weight, and working achievements. I understand why I should be proud of these achievements. I just, don’t really know what it feels like to be proud of myself even when I know I should be. It’s always, “should’ve done it sooner, faster, to a better standard. Nothing I ever do is good enough for myself. It’s not all negative though. I think it’s this attitude that has driven me to achieve some of the things I have achieved. I just think I could always do better. Someone else out there is doing better than I am, so I can do better too. It’s probably an unhealthy approach… it’s definitely an unhealthy approach, but to this point, it’s been effective. Not only do I want to learn to be proud of myself and to stop comparing myself to others but I think I’m getting dangerously close to a point where I NEED to learn. The method I’ve been using is just not sustainable. You can’t live your life thinking that everything you do is not good enough.
So where does this low self-worth come from? Well, this is where things get hard for me. I love my parents. So much. They are amazing people. I have a great relationship with both. Particularly as an adult. There were some slightly difficult times as a teenager, but I don’t think it was anything too different from the average relationship between a teenager and a parent.
My parents both grew up in an era where even the middle class didn’t have a lot. They both lived in large families in small houses. Sharing rooms, bathtub water, hand me down fuckin’ everything, all that standard shit your parents or grandparents would tell you about during one of their long-winded war stories. My dad shared a room with his two brothers, one older, and one younger. His dad wasn’t very present. He was old school. Work all day, bowls club all afternoon, and into the evening. He wouldn’t come home until the kids had been put to bed and his dinner was waiting for him at the table. Dad also had two sisters sharing another room. So poor old Nanna had her hands full every afternoon and evening. Dad and his younger brother would fight a lot with their older brother and without grandpa there to pull any of them into line and Nanna flat out running the household there was nothing anyone could really do about it.
I think as parents all we want to do is provide our kids with whatever we felt we missed out on during our own childhoods. Mum has been a midwife for 47 years. she spent the first 40 of those years working shift work. Dad was a welder. When I was young, he worked all day, taught welding at TAFE a few nights a week, and had his own business doing welding jobs for people on weekends. They were from the generation where you just fuckin’ worked. They worked their arse’s off and it was all driven by a desire to provide us kids with whatever we needed and hopefully most of what we wanted. They didn’t want us sharing bedrooms or having hand-me-down things. They worked so hard to provide us with more than what they had.
Dad was a fit, strong young dad until one day, raking fucking leaves out of a trailer, he ruptured two discs in his lower back. He even ran a marathon in five-minute k’s when I was a toddler. (my PB is better than his by the way, ha!) Dad had surgery to have three vertebrae fused together and went back to his job as a welder. he persevered with it for ten years before finally it became too much. He realised he couldn’t do it forever so decided to reeducate himself in a field where he could use the knowledge gained over the previous 25 years but gain employment that wasn’t so physically demanding. The other motivation was money. He wanted to make himself more valuable to prospective employers so that he could ease some financial burden and in turn provide us with a better life. the problem was, we didn’t have enough money for him to just leave work and study full time. So, he enrolled in night classes and did it the only way he knew how. Worked his arse off. He would be up at 4 am studying, and work his eight hours a day, come home and study where he could at night time if he wasn’t at school that night. It took me a while to realise myself, but I learned from him that if you need more time in a day, sometimes you just have to get up earlier, even if it means sacrificing sleep at times. It’s not a permanent fix, but if shit needs to get done, it needs to get done. You just have to find or make the time.
Mum being a shift worker only made things harder. She had three different shifts. Morning shift 6:30 am to 3:00 pm, 2:30 pm to 11:00 pm, and 10:30 pm to 7:00 am. She worked four days a week. Often she would have a combination of a couple of different shifts during the four-day period. So she might start with two morning shifts from Friday morning and finish with two evening shifts from Sunday afternoon. So even though she only worked four shifts, it took the best part of five days out of her week. Sure, this is the profession mum chose. She loved it. So much so that she still works in a consultancy role three days a week for an ObGyn even though she could easily afford to retire. However, the nature of her work puts strain on a family’s ability to spend time together and the general running of a household. When mum wasn’t working, she was flat out at home, maintaining the house cleanliness of the house to a hospital standard of sanitization. Not to mention groceries, washing, cooking, dishes, yada fuckin’ yada.
Despite all this, the three of us kids all played footy in winter, and cricket in summer. We did swimming lessons, my sister did Tae Kwon Do, and my brother and sister went to places like Kip McGrath for some extra academic help outside of school hours. I didn’t need the extra help apparently, That’s why my brother and sister have university degrees and I’m a road worker, haha! We always had new footy boots, and new cricket gear, we never missed a game or even training. Honestly, I don’t know how they managed it. It fucking remarkable the things they were able to provide us with and the way they were able to make sure we got to every place we needed to get to at the time we had to be there.
I’ll forever be grateful to my parents. I don’t think they achieved the goal of providing us with more than they ever had, they knocked it out of the fuckin’ park. They are fucking legends. My mum is so caring and kind. I think it takes a special person to be a career midwife and I think most parents out there would agree. When I knew I was going to be a father I said to her, “Mum, it’s really important to me that throughout this process, you just be my mum. I don’t need another midwife. I’ll come to you if I need anything”. It must have been so hard for her to respect that and not to probe me with a million questions, but to her credit, she did as I’d asked. She has been so amazing. Every question I had she answered perfectly without turning into full midwife mode. My dad is my best mate in the world. He is the first person I call for anything, bar no one. No matter what I need. He is the handiest man I have ever known. If it involves a tool, he can do it better than you. The way he explains things, I don’t understand, then he has the patience to keep trying to find a way until my ADHD brain finally understands what he means, is remarkable.
The Cause
We only know what we know. Sounds simple and obvious. In the case of my parents, and probably most of the same class and era, they didn’t know how vital connection was when it comes to meeting the emotional needs of children. We are very fortunate to live in the age of the internet where we can find a myriad of information on a topic in a matter of seconds. I have ADHD, so I struggle to read and retain information. That doesn’t matter anymore though, because I can download a book and have some bastard read it to me while I go about my business. I don’t even have to sit or be in the same place for an extended period to ingest that information. My parents weren’t afforded that luxury. All they had to go off was what they experienced as children themselves. I love the idea of learning from others’ mistakes so that you can try to avoid making them yourself. I think when it comes to parenting this is a pretty common idea because we have that personal association with it. I experienced this and it was traumatic, so I will do all I can to prevent my children from experiencing the same. Even mum, as a midwife. was never educated about the psychology of babies. Admittedly she finished her qualification sometime in the late 1800’s, that’s a joke… anyway… they just didn’t know then what we know now.
What we do know now is that what humans need more than anything is emotional connection. The greatest book I've come across on this topic is Lost Connections by Johann Hari which I highly recommend to anyone. No amount of cricket bats or footy boots can make up for time spent with a loved one.
Through working with my psychologist we established that m,y parents weren’t able to meet my emotional needs. To the best of their knowledge, they were doing everything in their power to give me everything I needed. And I did have everything I needed, physically. I couldn’t have asked for more or better. We weren’t well off by any means, sometimes I wanted things that we couldn’t afford, but I saw how hard they were working and it taught me early on about working hard in exchange for the things I wanted. A valuable lesson for anyone.
The problem is though, whenever I went to my parents with an emotional problem my needs were not met. It was in the era of “she’ll be right”, “you just have to tough it out” etc. Mum and Dad were too busy. Too focused on the next deadline they had to meet to get one of us to school, training, work, whatever. Even if they wanted to sit down with me and talk about the way I was feeling, they wouldn’t have had time. They were too busy doing what they knew to be ‘the right thing to do’.
Another contributing factor was that I have had ADHD for my entire life. It’s just that no one knew until six years ago. In hindsight, all the signs were there, but it just kind of never got picked up. So I was a kid with undiagnosed ADHD with a support network that simply didn’t have the time to give me the amount of emotional support I needed. Maybe if I had been diagnosed sooner they may have had the opportunity to educate themselves a little about ADHD and attempt to give me the extra attention I needed but alas, we don’t live in the past.
I was also a middle child. I was always a little different from my siblings. I knew I was. I didn’t get along very well with my brother. He’s a good person, a great dad, and a very inspirational runner. But as kids, we just didn’t get along very well. I think I was a little bit needy. I wanted him to like me. I wanted his mates to like me. I think that made me annoying to have around. Like I was a bit of a pest. My sister and I got along fine for the most part. We’re quite close now as adults. She’s just a bloody unit. The life of any party, loud as shit but with a generous, caring soul. As kids though, if there was ever any drama, she would side with my older brother. It’s pure logic. The youngest sibling is always going to side with the oldest sibling. You’d do the same.
I don’t really recall ever having time set aside with either of my parents to just spend time together one on one. If it happened, it was in the car on the way to the next thing. Not really the environment that encourages you to open up about the way you are feeling. It was just kind of all business. A high-stress environment. Come on, let’s go, hurry up, we’re going to be late!
According to my psychologist, this is where I developed the idea that my problems don’t matter. Whenever I had an issue and wanted to raise it. It fell on deaf ears. So as a child, particularly in those developmental years of my life, I was taught that no one cares (or at least enough) about my problems. So, I began to internalise them. Why would you bother building up the courage to talk about the way you feel if after all that psyching yourself up, it was met with a straight bat? So I just kept internalising, doing the best I could, letting everything build up and build up in my head.
As a teenager, I discovered alcohol and other substances. The reason I struggle with alcohol is that with every sip the years and years of built-up anxiety dissipates. That’s why I can’t just have a few. I remember that feeling of euphoria of the first drink after a hard week so clearly. It is actually physical. Like someone has taken a stack of bricks off your shoulder. You sink back into your chair. It feels amazing. after another sip you feel even better again, and again, and again… So now I had started using alcohol as a coping mechanism without knowing I was using it as a coping mechanism. I was young, and that’s how people socialised. I was just doing what everyone else was doing. Sure, I was a little looser than most but that was celebrated at the time. People wanted me there, as long as I was drinking. On the odd occasion, I wasn’t drinking, people were disappointed in me. So as someone with low self-worth who just wanted people to like me, I figured people like me better when I am drunk. In a lot of cases, the drunker the better. Like I had to put on a show for people to like me.
When I discovered drugs, that took me to another level. On drugs, I finally felt truly comfortable expressing my beliefs and thoughts. I’ve always been self-conscious, particularly around my opinions on whatever was going on in the world. Drugs took that away and I’d be sitting around some stranger’s table at 5:00 am on a Sunday morning telling them my thoughts on European politics, pretending I had half a clue what I was talking about.
As an adult, I know that this is not a productive way of dealing with my thoughts and emotions. The problem is that it had become so ingrained in me, I have no other mechanism. Through repetition, I have taught myself not to voice my thoughts or my feelings. I taught myself that my thoughts and feelings simply don’t matter. I still feel that same way today. It’s ingrained in me that other people’s problems are more important than mine. It’s a noble trait to have in some respects. Being selfless and putting others first is a respected thing to do. I’m the guy that’s always there to give advice to others but doesn’t want to bother those same people when I need someone to talk to. But selfless people never do the right thing by themselves and that’s an important thing to do sometimes.
I think that’s why these blogs have been so cathartic for me. I’ve always maintained that even if no one read them I would continue to write them because finally after all these years I have found a mechanism that allows me to get my thoughts, feelings, worries, and concerns out of my head and onto some kind of platform. I joked with my psychologist about finally having a go at this journaling thing that I've been told to try for the last ten-plus years and that maybe these professionals I have been paying might be onto something.
It’s still pretty early in the process and I’m not naive to the fact that I have a lot of hard work to get through and it could take me some time to get through it. But practice makes progress and progress is progress.
I think I’m heading in the right direction and although its a little bit daunting I am looking forward to taking them on and sharing them with you all.
Homework
My psychologist challenged me to journal about a few circumstances where as a kid I felt my emotional needs were not met by my parents. I was really hesitant at first. But, she is a professional, I’m paying her to help me, I need to trust her. It’s difficult because I don’t want to seem ungrateful or like I’m throwing my parents under a bus. But I have to do what I have to do, and what better time and place to do it than here? Sharing it publicly means it’s done, it’s out there and maybe it will help me move past some of the issues I have. So, here goes.
Ringing Mum at Work
Like a lot of kids, I struggled to go to sleep once my parents had gone to bed. Just hearing the TV still on in the family room gave me a sense of comfort. Nothing could happen to me because someone was still up. It was safe for me to go to sleep. Dad was a tradesman. He had to be up early for work each day. So when mum was on an evening shift the TV got turned off a little earlier than it did when mum was home. I would try to go to sleep but slowly I would start to get worked up. I had this irrational fear of not getting enough sleep and being tired the next day. I used to sit there staring at the clock figuring out how many hours it would be until I would have to get up. It made me good at math but didn’t really help with much else. The more time ticked by, the more panicked I would become. I was always hesitant to ring mum at work because I knew it would annoy her. I knew she was busy. As it got closer and closer to the time she was usually home, I would get to a point where I couldn’t stop myself anymore. I still remember her work phone number by heart. Sometimes I would be in hysterics. I was so scared. I remember waiting for her to answer, she would say hello, hear it was me and she just sounded so annoyed and frustrated. She would repeat the same lines to me. I’ll be home soon, jump back into bed and I will come and see you when I get home. Whatever she could to get me off the phone. At the time I couldn’t understand why a pregnant lady in the middle of childbirth was more important than I was. When you’re a kid who’s worked himself up like that, you don’t think rationally. If I was thinking rationally, I wouldn’t have been so afraid of not sleeping in the first place. Usually, I would still be awake when Mum eventually got home. I would ask her to come into my room and lay or sit with me while I fell asleep. Sometimes she would. Sometimes she wouldn’t. Again, I couldn’t understand why anything was more important than that. I think maybe she was trying to teach me that I can fall asleep without her help. I just wanted her to lay with me until I fell asleep. In her defence she would have been up early that day to get us off to school before spending the morning doing hours and hours of housework before heading off to work for a full shift at work. Essentially pulling a double shift. All she wanted to do was unwind. That was her time. She used to love having one glass of wine and two small packets of plain chips. That was her thing and she was entitled to that. Now as an adult and a parent I do the same, only it’s the gym at 4:30 am. Then get to work by 6:30 am to get half an hour at work by myself too.
Being a Local Legend
I was a pretty handy junior cricketer. Most weeks I would top score for my club and get my name in the local paper. Often Mum or Dad would have to drop me at the game and continue their taxi service to make sure all the other chores of the weekend were completed. Oddly, I would never be upset about them not watching me. Usually, I’d get my 25-30 not out in the allocated 6 overs I shared with my partner, my name would be in the paper, they’d say ‘good job’ and I’d feel nice. For some reason though, I remember this one day dad was actually able to stay and watch. It wasn’t a complete rarity but certainly didn’t happen all the time. This was when Dad was studying and he told me he would watch me bat and use the other time to do some study. This was a pretty common thing when he would watch me play. I always struggled to hit sixes as a kid. I remember being jealous of kids who could. I wanted to hit one so bad. I remember this day I got under one and played an uppish pull shot straight out of the middle of my Kashmir willow kookaburra bubble just behind square and as I saw it going through the air I was thinking that this could be a six. I was watching the parents close to the ball to see if they’d indicate to the umpire if it was a four or six. I don’t even remember which one it was. What I do remember from this day was walking off the field after my allotted overs, taking my pads off, and excitedly walking over to dad sitting in our aqua Toyota Tarago sporting a ‘car-bra’ to ask him if he watched me bat and if he saw my potential six. “Oh sorry mate, I’ve been studying, I didn’t realise you were batting yet”. I was shattered. My dad was doing a good thing. He was killing two birds with one stone. Being efficient. He had to study, I had to get to cricket. Pretty fuckin’ smart really. But, to a young, excited kid who just wanted his dad to be proud of him, it was devastating. I didn’t have the emotional intelligence at the time to say “Dad, I understand that you are doing what you believe is right for our family, I am just a little bit upset that you didn’t watch me bat”. So, I just did what I knew to do, internalise.
I need to stress that I didn’t come here to shit all over my parents. They are beautiful, strong, amazing people who only ever did what they believed was the right thing to do. Sometimes, you have to do things that are uncomfortable in order to move forward and give yourself some peace. I’m not going to spend each week sharing examples of how my parents didn’t meet my emotional needs as a kid. That’s not fair to them. I just felt like this was an important thing to do for myself at this point in time and that I need to trust the professional help I have engaged to help me.
As a new parent, especially since moving to the coast and trying to get the apartment downstairs ready for Air BNB I can see some of these same traits in myself. It’s been a stressful time financially. We’ve gone from two wages to one and a half. Interest rates are going up. My dog got sick and cost a lot of money. I’ve been working all day and spending afternoons working at home. My son is going through a clingy stage where it’s hard to put him down without him crying so the workforce around the home is split in two whenever he is awake. It’s fucking hard. Maybe sometimes I need to shit can the afternoon chores, let the dishes pile up a little, fold the washing tomorrow and just spend it with my son.
That’s why I don’t blame my parents for my emotional issues. They did a hell of a lot better than their parents, I just want to continue the evolution. Take what I have learned from them and my experience as a kid and improve on that for my son. I am grateful for the opportunity to learn from them and try to make my son’s upbringing an improvement on mine.
As always I want to thank you for your time and the opportunity to share my thoughts.
I hope I have helped someone this week.
Feeling particularly grateful right now and better for having shared.
May or may not have dried at times writing this one.
Cheers Wankers
X
This is great, Sam, really good stuff. I feel it must be pretty cathartic to get all this out and to go back in time to analyse the things that make you you.
In some ways I find it pretty relatable in that I spent a lot of my childhood alone (only child) and my parents were super busy with their cafe. I'd spend my entire school holidays hanging out in the cafe being so bored, my parents would never take me friends house, have sleepovers, birthday parties were essentially family only; they didn't have the time to take me or even build that relationship with other parents.
Like you, I can't blame my parents for this, my dad being an off the boat Greek wanted to work hard to set me up in life, everything he didn't have. I owe him heaps but I sometimes wish that he had the time to kick the ball around with me rather than being at work or exhausted. I think it's probably worth me unpacking some of this...
You’re working through some deep stuff Sam. Power to you.