Day Twenty-One - three weeks! Sober bitchiness, and a new PUPPY pic

On being THAT person

If there's one good thing about the general aura of shittiness I'm exuding at the moment, it's that my family can't blame all my past grumping on grog.  I'm short-tempered and a bit fed up with not having wine in the past couple of days. 

We've had some lovely dinners at home and yes wine would have been a nice and natural addition, but I was also able to throw a big fat reality check at myself: I'm not a 'glass of wine with dinner' person, and if I was I wouldn't be intentionally sober now, or writing about it to stay strong!

I'm a glass of wine before dinner person ... AND topped up twice while preparing dinner, grudgingly shared with partner over dinner, topped up again (possibly from a new bottle) after dinner, and maybe another time or two - or three, if there was something good on tv, or four, if it was a Friday night - just to make sure I could sleep. 

And sometimes that would definitely make me a cranky person, a mean spirited person, a laugh too loud person, an impatient person, an intolerant person, a lazy person, a slow person, and an isolated and unhappy person too.

Replay

So it would be very reasonable for the family to feel that alcohol was the reason every time I had the cranks up after dinner, and judging by comments made in the past year or two they certainly noticed the difference in me mentally and physically when I was inhaling runny grapes.

It hurts to write some of these comments down but I am going to, because I deliberately didn't want to acknowledge them at the time and they remain horrifying to me now. I need to replay these moments in my head, with my totally three-week sober brain, and own it.

Sample comments

• I hate it when you get like this (teen child with meaningful glance at my wine glass after I'd snapped at her or her father)
• Maybe if you hadn't drunk so much already (teen child, with contempt, as I refused to help with something or other that yes, he was probably capable of doing but, well, it wouldn't have hurt me to get up and assist)
• Have you ever thought it might be easier to just stop drinking so much? (teen child, helpfully and hopefully, when I was talking about the latest attempt at diet and exercise)
• Go and pour yourself another one (husband, with contempt, pissed off that I was snarking at him about something)
• Maybe don't have another one? (teen child, helpfully, after me breaking one glass of wine by knocking it over and, after cleaning up, heading to the kitchen to replace it)

Ouch. Yes, just a sample.  And not occurring every night or even every week - but maybe once or so a fortnight  in the last year?

So then... choices

I'm not perfect. I'm going to get cranky sometimes sober or not. But I'm going to remember at least one big difference is that when I am sober, I am so aware of how I feel that there's a level of choice in my mood.

I can choose to walk away if I am irritated.

I can choose to use kinder words.

I can choose to see a situation from someone else's point of view.

I can choose to rise above pettiness.

I can choose to set an example of adulting that I'm almost too late to share with my younger children.

And I do. I choose this. I choose to be sober and to be responsible for myself.

PUPPY!!

Your reward for scrolling this far down the page is a sleeping puppy.  Pic taken earlier this week but as I type she is in almost the same position. Lying over my left toes, under the desk, enjoying her third most important nap of the day.

Day Fifteen - in which not drinking is like not hitting your thumb with a hammer (and a puppy in MUD)

Builder's tricks

I don't know how common this saying is, but in my little world we sometimes talk about walking away from a bad situation as being like no longer hitting your thumb with a hammer.

I'm a builder's daughter, and correct hammering and sawing were some of the few useful things my father ever taught me (most of my paternal lessons were observational and involved learning how not to be a functional adult, but more on that another day).

So if you aren't familiar with the hammering scene, the saying conjures the need to keep doing something even though it hurts.  You can't leave a nail half-hammered and you can't let pain get in the way. You are totally focused on the job in front of you and you come to associate the job with the pain as a necessary thing.

It's only when you either become really good at hammering or you stop hammering that you might recall, with a flood of relief, how good it is to not be hitting your thumb with that bloody hammer any more.

Don't examine the analogy too closely, it has all sorts of holes (boom tish), but trust me: there are times in your life when you only know how great something is because you stopped doing the awful thing that had become your very focused normal.

The path to peace, and unbruised thumbs

And here I am, two weeks' done, and the bruises are fading from my metaphorical thumb.

Yesterday, for the first time in a fortnight (let alone pre-sober) I woke up without a dull headache.  It took me an hour or so to realise what was different.  This morning I was a bit headachey again but I had a late (dry) night and sleep was a bit broken so I was not on top of my game anyway.

BUT, here are some things I'm noticing about not hitting my body, brain and spirit with alcoholic hammers every day:

• hints of inner peace. I would think it's anything like the vaunted 'pink cloud' but of course it's very early days for me yet.  There most obvious thing is a slight slowing of my Popcorn Brain.  Ideas stick with me a bit longer and don't bounce away before I really grasp them.
• my skin feels about a hundred times softer.  Maybe that's about hydration, as I'm drinking about four litres of extra water and tea every night.
• flavours. I'm enjoying flavours more and using less salt on my food.  To be fair, this is partly because a month of sub-tropical downpours and humidity have rendered every salt source in the house unusable, but without the grog I find I mind much less!
• reading non-fiction. I have been reading pretty much constantly since I was three years old (47 years ago) and apart from text books I reckon I've read perhaps six books of non-fiction, total, including biography and autobiography. At first it was falling headfirst into The Sober Diaries and Mrs D Is Going Without, then trying (and rejecting) similar stories but of car-crash style alcoholics who I can't relate to, like the journo in High Sobriety and others.  But now I'm into a looong book called Lost Connections about the nine major non-chemical causes of depression and anxiety (not as grim as it sounds)  and absolutely relishing every page.  I can only reason that this is connected to the aforementioned inner peace and being willing to delve into my own thinking without having to hide from myself.
• self care not self denial. Friend J called back after the disrupted puppy call and we talked at length about the why of not drinking.  This handy phrase was how we decided to describe the difference between past attempts and my current mindset. In some ways I'm still a long way from traditional self-care (you DO NOT want to imagine the stains on the toenails of a 50 year old woman who can go barefoot most days but is suddenly surrounded by mud), but by not drinking any more, I'm also fully and permanently immersed in caring for myself. And it feels good.
• time to do things. For a long while now I've been (blearily) wondering how I ever found the time to do more than work and slump.  How did I ever have enough hours in the day to bake cakes, sketch and paint, crochet, read magazines, clean things, garden, visit people and places? Turns out that needing to ensure you get and wallow in your daily alcohol fix takes a lot of time and mental energy.  I'm no DIY dynamo yet, but there's a gleam in my eye and a vision of a gorgeous acre of garden that will outlive me and bring joy.

Muddy puppy

If you've made it this far, you deserve a treat xx 

(Also you've seen too much of the clean, cute and fluffy side of Ms Maggie, here's her inner grot shining through.)

MTC

Day Five - what I'm reading (Clare Pooley, Lotta Dann et al)

A big part of my mindset is due to the reading I've been doing in the past week. The Sober Diaries and Mrs D is Going Without are the highlights.

The Sober Diaries

Seven days ago I downloaded The Sober Diaries and read it like it was water in the desert. I couldn't stop.  Clare Pooley's story was so much like mine, except I'm still working more or less full time (but I did leave horrible senior exec roles to be self-employed so I'm at home, ie, close to the wine fridge).

As I read through the stages Clare described I could see myself there. When she talked about visualisation I pictured myself where I wanted to be. I drew a mind map of everything I'm hoping to achieve in the next five years and what that would look like and feel like.

For the first time, when planning anything about my future, I added SOBER in a little cloud, along with FIT and ACTIVE - which are regular aspirations for me, and I didn't feel weird about it.

I turned 50 last August. It doesn't feel real yet and I didn't really mark it with any milestone activities, but I have had this feeling that something big needed to happen.  It never crossed my mind until Clare's book that the 'something' would be giving up grog.

Things that are me from The Sober Diaries

• Mother of three
• Former career high flyer (ish)
• Wine belly (how have I never called it that before? Of course that's what it is!)
• Good if quirky husband who drinks but can stop
• Wine-gulper (how do people take sips? I never could though I tried and tried)
• Wine-stasher (sometimes I'd hide how much I'd had from a bottle, sometimes I'd brazen it out with a big SO?! if the Prof was a bit shocked another bottle had disappeared while I made dinner).
• Embarrassed about the amount of wine-bottle-recycling that's gone on, especially because our son has to carry them out as his job.  It must stink - I never thought of that part much before.
• Regretful drinker - knowing it was too much and out of hand in the morning, pushing it all aside by wine o'clock to start again (and feel soooo good)
• Rarely has real hangovers any more (the Prof can't understand why I don't feel worse in the mornings but either I don't feel it, or I hide it from him)

Things that are not me from The Sober Diaries

• Her kids are still young. How I wish mine were and I had stopped sooner
• She has a social life. I used to have a bit of a social life when we lived in Sydney - both work and personal, but since moving north I've been a virtual hermit.
• She's more financially secure
• She's got a happy childhood/extended family
• I'm four years older than she was at the giving-up stage.  I'd like those four years back but a big part of the message I'm getting from the books I am reading is to just 'own' it and move on. 

Mrs D is Going Without

I love that Lotta is a Kiwi. There are so many stories out there from American but there's a different drinking culture there - it seems to involve more dependence on spirits and a lot more religion and I just can't identify.

The only time I've ever drunk too much hard liquor is when the wine ran out.

Oh dear. Yes, I see that too.

But back to Lotta for now.  She and Clare (a Pom) both guzzled wine, like me, and had three kids, and a husband who could drink and then stop.

Things that are me from Mrs D

• Journalist/writer who loves to blog (more later on my whole secret-blogging past)
• Antipodean! 
• wine guzzler and gulper (see note above)
• battles through hangovers

Things that are not me from Mrs D

• young children
• working husband
• likes reality TV (although I have a soft spot for cooking shows AND Say Yes to the Dress)
• has real hangovers, which are these days very rare for me because my body is a drinking machine
• goes to the gym
• has a massive social schedule of weddings, parties, etc

So what?

Well the reading is helping. A lot. 

I have picked up a couple of other books about going sober but I can't really identify with the extremes of being picked up by police or crashing cars.  I'm an alcoholic out of control drinker but I am definitely at the high-functioning end.  Keeping it all together is part of why I told myself I needed  to drink. 

Apparently that might turn out not to be true.

MTC