Week 25

Gettin' busy doin' nothin'

Today I have been Sober for 25 weeks. 175 days.

Sobriety

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t kind of hoping this week fly’s by. I try to remain conscious to never wish time away. To me, time is the most valuable commodity we have. The fact that it is finite and we aren’t lucky enough to see or “bank balance” increases its value. Like most of us with money, we would have a rough idea of how much money is currently sitting in our bank account(s), but only an idea. Time is similar in a sense. We have a rough idea of how much time we have left, but the one difference is, we can’t pull out our phone and quickly check exactly how much of it we have left. We can’t (really) earn time. Not in a measurable way anyway. Sure, we can quit smoking, get fit, eat foods that promote better health and do all the things David Sinclair suggests we do. But they won’t stop you from getting hit by a fucking truck because you’re checking your bank balance on your phone to make sure you have enough in your spending account for a coffee whilst walking across the fucking road… don’t do that shit. We just kind of have to trust the universe, or god if you’re that way inclined, that we should get to live for roughly as long as the average life is. The problem with that is, you might not. So we need to place a higher value on the time that we do have right now because although we can assume how much of it we have left, we just never fucking know.

Why do I want time to go quickly this week? The math’s genius’ among us have probably already figured it out, but next week I (hopefully) will have been sober for 26 weeks. So fucking what? Alright, I’ll stop going on. It’s 6 months.

I’ve spoken about milestones before so I won’t go into it too much, but basically, I’ve always struggled with milestones. Not like, mentally, as such. But just, what the fuck do they mean? Why do we celebrate them? Why are they so significant? Like we just kind of made up an amount of time one day and thought, “we should celebrate this shit?” Which is cool, I don’t have an issue with it, I just can’t let things slide without wondering how or why they came to be.

I’ve always sort of had that attitude regarding achievements. Everything I have ever worked towards, once I achieve it, I felt underwhelmed. The first car, first marathon, first house. I even expected to feel amazing after achieving them but just kind of felt nothing. Like, “as ya fuckin’ should have, mate. Should've done it sooner… and better”. I’ve heard someone describe it as apathetic before. But that’s not me. Maybe shit like that just doesn’t do it for me? This is odd because I love metrics and statistics from a viewing or sports fan perspective. It probably comes down to having low self-worth or low self-esteem and just never thinking anything I do is impressive. I dunno.

I just can’t tell if I’m more excited for next week because apparently on that day my sobriety will mean significantly more to everyone than it did the day before, or if I’m excited to get it over and done with and revert to my shell and keep doing shit.

I’m pretty confident I will get there. I’ve had a pretty stressful time lately with a few things but my sobriety has now become one of my constants. I’ve said it a thousand times but I’ll say it again because consistency is key, I know I’m never truly in the clear, and addiction can flare up at any given time, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised in recent weeks when even in stressful situations, my mind hasn’t reverted to thinking about drugs or alcohol.

Ya gotta take ya fuckin’ wins. So for now, I’ll take this one and remain cautiously optimistic that my hardest days of sobriety are behind me.

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Susan

A few weeks ago I spoke about a family friend called “Susan” and her 30+ year battle with alcohol. The last time I spoke about this Susan had completed her first week in a detox facility and was off to a rehabilitation facility. She fuckin’ blitzed the detox but was a little scared of the rehab. She is only allowed one ten-minute phone conversation per day in the rehab. So updates have been a little hard to come by.

I spoke to one of her family members the other day and I’ve been told she is still smashing it. Struggling with the no smoking rule, but otherwise going well. The family is concerned because unless you’ve been ordered to attend rehab by a court of law, you can walk out whenever you like. This is something I am torn on.

One on hand, if you are told that once you arrive you can not leave for a fixed period, this would affect how many people would be willing to go in the first place. I guess it would essentially be the same thing as keeping someone against their will should they decide they no longer want to be there. The fear of the unknown is too great. People who are checking into rehab are usually terrified. So knowing that they can leave whenever they like would be comforting for them. “I just have to give it a try and if I don’t like it I can leave” type shit. I like that element of it. I think this method gets more people through the door and into a facility to at least give it a go.

On the other hand, rehab, I assume, would be fucking hard. Real hard. Especially for someone who has spent the last 30 years ingraining these unhealthy coping mechanisms in their brain. The vulnerability of having all those layers of comfort stripped from you all at once would mortifying. I don’t know this as a fact, but I imagine there would be a lot of people out there who have left rehab and wished they hadn’t. Once they return to the comfort of their home they would reflect and think “It wasn’t that hard, I should have just toughed it out, I might be sober now”, but everything is easier in hindsight. I just worry that it opens the door for people to walk out of a service that works before they need to.

Luckily, I don’t need to know about that shit. I just know that for a lot of people, rehab works, and there are people far more intelligent than me helping the people who need it. In Susan’s case, for now, at least, it’s working a treat. I just hope she can manage to remain committed to the cause and stay the course. She, like many addicts, is an amazing person at her core. After years of internal torment, I hope she can do the work needed to gain some peace of mind and enjoy the rest of her life with her swag of grandchildren.

I think she will. Before agreeing to get help, she insisted she was different from drug addicts. She thought she was nothing like them. I guess because alcohol is legal some people think being an alcoholic is not as bad as being a drug addict. They are no different. Addiction is addiction. Often it’s just whatever substance a person stumbles across when they are at their most vulnerable. I think she has started to realise this, because the other day she excitedly exclaimed to a family member, “I’m making lots of friends! I like Karen! She’s a heroin addict AND has been to jail!!!”

God, fuckin’, bless her.

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Take a Load Off

I fucking suck at resting. especially since I have been sober. After spending a couple of days recovering from the mother of all benders that sent me crashing to my version of rock bottom and ultimately to sobriety, I didn’t have a rest day for something like 63 days. Nine weeks. The only reason I broke that streak was that I came down with a viral infection. I wonder why? I’ll certainly never recommend anyone else does the same. At the time, it was what I needed to do. I was vulnerable, scared, and susceptible to relapse. I still am, just less so now than I was then.

Last Monday I broke a 37-day training streak because I ran a marathon the day before. I had one day off and then trained the next five. 42 out of 43 days. You can see from the below snapshot of my training log just how much I substituted my poor coping mechanisms with training.

You can see that in March I was doing something other than training with my time. I don’t remember any particular reason why it was a bad month of training. I caught COVID on the 12th of March, I think. Six weeks before Canberra Marathon where I was hoping to PB. You can see I tried to run twice when I got out of isolation later in March. Both wear failures where I collapsed into a sack of shit on the side of the road and had to call my dad to come and pick me up.

This was also when I started to get really cold feet about moving to the coast, starting a new job, and doing all the house bullshit. So I was stressed and almost physically incapable of using a coping mechanism that I’d relied on so heavily over the past few years. It’s funny how obvious it is in hindsight. I thought my breakdown snuck up on me, but when I look back and consider some simple date, it was probably as predictable as Penrith walking all over Parramatta in this year’s NRL Grand Final. A very handy little nugget o’ knowledge to take with me moving forward in case I ever find myself unable to exercise for whatever reason.

In September I started tracking my calorie intake for the first time in 12 months using The Alfred App. The app itself is fucking brilliant. It is the easiest, quickest way to track calories I’ve come across. When I started using it, it motivated me to spend an extra 15-30 minutes in the gym every morning. I decided I wanted to get back into running and set some goals for the middle of next year. So, what better way to burn some extra calories and get back into my running than doing a few k’s on the treadmill at the end of each gym session?

I’m a fucking sucker for sweet shit, especially after dinner. Alfred has helped me to make better decisions about what I snack on after dinner. It’s been super fucking handy for that. I also know that I struggle a lot during these hours, so to make it easier to get it under control, I can burn those extra calories of a morning and then associate less guilt with my snacking and not feeling like such a piece of shit for doing so.

I’m not going to shit all over myself and how of done things over the last six months. There’s no point. Firstly, because it’s done. Secondly and probably most importantly, because it’s fucking worked.

Nor am I suggesting that I’m some kind of fucking hero for working out heaps. If anything, I think it’s pretty obvious that when I first got sober I was just replacing one addiction with another. Also, I would never recommend people to exercise more so they can eat more junk food after dinner. If anything, I’m identifying a couple of mechanisms that whilst better than the previous ones, are still not great. Getting sober to clear my head enough to develop new and healthier coping mechanisms serves no purpose if I’m just going to ignore the issues I’m trying to resolve by over-exercising and justifying eating bad food because of it. Sure, I’m doing way better than I was, but I’m here now and it’s time to tune up a little bit more.

So, on Saturday night, I decided that the next day, I would be having a rest day. This isn’t the same as the days off I’ve had over the last six months. they were forced. They were all days where I would have exercised if I could have. This was planned and intentional. rest days are fucking great. Even the legendary David Goggins implores people to have rest days. The only proviso is that if you’re going to rest, fucking rest. A rest day is not having a day off from exercise so you can work in the backyard all day. It’s a rest day.

I struggle with rest days because they make me feel lazy. They make me feel like I am wasting my time. My logical brain knows this isn’t true and that rest is vital. My emotional brain tells me I’m a fat, lazy cunt for having one day a week off. If I go to the gym for an hour that voice goes away. The other thing is, I know what I am like. I’m all about momentum. I have a genuine fear, as ridiculous as it is, that if I have one day off exercise and being mindful of what I eat, I will never exercise ever again and exclusively eat junk food for the rest of my life. This is fucking ridiculous, but it is what it is. This is the shit that fly’s around in my head.

Hanging out with people like Ben Alexander who constantly challenges himself and those around him to work on what they are no good at and/or want to improve inspired me to challenge myself. So I picked Sunday, as it was forecast to rain all day so I couldn’t do any yard work. I banned myself from the gym and running for the day. I was also not allowed to track my calories. I planned to do a few small things that would give me more time throughout the week. I go from the gym to work every morning, and every afternoon I unpack my gym clothes and repack fresh work clothes. So I packed a week’s worth of work clothes to leave at work. Recently I have forgotten a shirt on one occasion and undies twice. So this would prevent that and give me an extra 15 minutes with my son each afternoon when I get home from work. I made a week’s worth of breakfast smoothies and put them in my car fridge to have on my way from the gym to work of a morning. This means I would save another 30 minutes or so during the week. I eat the same thing at work every day. A container of mixed dried fruit and nuts, an apple, a banana, and some harvest snaps. So I packed a week’s worth of each to leave at work, another thing I was doing each day that I won’t have to do each afternoon when I get home from work. Look, this shit is barely groundbreaking, and I feel like a bit of a fuckin’ numpty for not thinking of doing any of them sooner. But if doing these things once a week instead of five times a week buys me a few extra hours of free time each week, which it should, I’d be mad not to, especially given how stressful things have been around here lately. It’s only been two days since I implemented these things so I’ll have to let you guys know how I go. But surely that extra time of an afternoon to spend doing more important shit, like winding down and spending time with my son, who changes every single day, is a great fucking thing. So, I’ll have to report back on this later.

I struggled a little once I’d done everything I needed to do. I genuinely didn’t know what to do. I have ADHD. At stages, I was sitting on the lounge, and all of a sudden I found myself just.. standing in the living room. Ultimately though, everything worked out ok. I’m more prepared for the week, I actively did less than I normally do and I slipped straight back into my routine again yesterday morning. I tracked my calories in and out. I ate my standard daily work stapled and stayed within my calorie goal range. The world didn’t end.

It might sound fucking crazy for someone to struggle with doing nothing. But I think there’s a lot of us out there. We need to learn to unwind, recover and recharge properly. I fucking suck at it. I still do. One lazy Sunday isn’t going to do the trick. But I’m going to take what I learned from this past Sunday and go again this coming Sunday. I need a bit of help I think. How do you actively and consciously unwind, recover and recharge?

I need your advice because I fucking suck at it and I think it’s important that we do it. If you redline your car the engine will blow up. We are the same. Maybe I need to identify some TV I have been wanting to watch and binge it. Maybe (when the weather allows) I need to make a habit of taking my son somewhere every Sunday and reflecting on how much he has changed in the last week. I’m not sure exactly what it has to look like for me. I guess I’ve never really done it. I either spend my weekends as busy as I am during the week or spend them drunk and on drugs.

There’s more to it. When I slow down my thoughts get louder, and I have less distraction. But I need to learn to allow the thoughts to come a little louder so I can practice processing and dealing with them

I’ve set myself a reminder for 7 am every Sunday to make sure I keep practicing. I know it won’t always be easy and some Sundays it may not even be possible. But as I’ve said a million times, nothing worth having comes from inside your comfort zone. I think in this instance, only positives can come out of this.

Thanks for listening.

Cheers Wankers

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