Stella (Chook), I stole your booze...

[NoraC]

Stella (Chook), I stole your booze...

RunningCourage;1443082 wrote:
PARTY [pahr-tee]noun
1. a social gathering, as of invited guests at a private home, for conversation, refreshments, entertainment, etc.: a cocktail party.

Nope, no matter what way I look at, my parties-for-one were no social gathering. There were no invited guests. There was no spoken conversation. Little entertainment. Although there were refreshments...

But that's called "drinking" not "partying".

Thanks for this RC. Really sums up my drinking. I copies this and put on my journal. Want to remember this. :h

[kuya]

Stella (Chook), I stole your booze...

I have just finished a BBQ with family and friends, good food, good chat, laughter and the guests swam. Now 8.20 PM house tidyish, going for a little dip before getting to bed in a few hours.......... NO ONE drank alcohol.

THAT is partying. If only I had known.

[startingover]

Stella (Chook), I stole your booze...

kuya;1442969 wrote: The most abusive relationship is the one we have with ourselves.

I am my own child. I was born perfect and beautiful ( I KNOW that, I have seen the photos )
This is how I have been treating my child.

I have starved her for years with eating disorders.
Told her she was fat and ugly time and time again.
Made her work far too hard and gave her hardly any breaks.
No matter how well she did or hard she worked I was never satisfied with her
I never treated her to enough new clothes or did nice things for her to make her feel good.
I fed her drugs every day to shut her up so I didn't have to listen to her.
When she was obviously getting ill I ignored her and didn't get her help.

If this was a child you were given to raise you would be jailed for neglect.

My God, that is an incredible post.
Thank Kuya, I bet we are all guilty of this

[RunningCourage]

Stella (Chook), I stole your booze...

Day 44 - fears of success

I am looking forward to getting through Day 49 and waking up on Day 50. That will then be my longest stint AF. Many have posted here about using the accumulation of days to add resolve to their quit. I can understand that. I too use the accumulation of days as an aid to the quit.

But the days, week and months are one thing. The reason for quitting is another. And FORGETTING the reason we quit. Allowing the reason we quit to become a vague memory. To begin to think:

"hang on, why the blazes am i doing this anyway?"

and

"Now, look here, I'm an adult and I am allowed to choose to have a drink, say, if I want to"

and

"Surely now would be a sufficient enough time of abstinence to allow AL back into my life in a sensible and measured fashion"

and

"...ehm... the longer I go AF the more accustomed I will become to being AF ... and yet is this ME? Is this who I am? ... am I not denying myself something, some small pleasure?"

and

"I can't succeed - who will I be? who am I becoming? I can't see what the change will be other than relinquishing some social opportunities to meet with folks"

or

"fuck it, who am i kidding with this AF malarky"

There has been some things written about the fear of success (of an AL quit) being a stumbling block or an Achilles heel for some. As I look towards 50 days and my longest time sober, I too begin to wonder whether I have similar fears. Almost as if there is part of me saying, "Hey, you're just attention seeking! You CAN handle imbibing AL! STOP IT! Stop this AF nonsense!"

I needn't worry too much about drinking this next week. Got my eyes on the Day 50 prize. But after that I am concerned that a combination of Euphoric Re-call perception combined with Aufulzing Abstinence perception fuse together to create the You Got This All Wrong perception.

Reckon I need to cultivate more the "I don't drink" mindset, rather than the "I can't have a drink mindset". "I don't drink" is not a deceleration of abstinence for life. Simply that I don't drink. Forget about "success" per se. That's a by-product of not drinking.

Perhaps the bigger success is not drinking - right now. Today. And in many ways, that's enough.

[RunningCourage]

Stella (Chook), I stole your booze...

"inadequacy"

Forget that last post this morning. Forget it. I was driving home from the posh school and thought about my other work - the main job - and felt some resentment, some anger, some waves of pissed-off-ness. Not sure about what. The frustration of trying to find an artist to work with our young company (our young/youth theatre co.); with my boss; with me feeling that my boss doesn't think a whole great deal of me (whether that's true or not who is to say... i'm not sure how much I believe some people some times); with my own feeling that work hangs around my neck like the proverbial albatross, when it should be worn less like a cross to bear, but a cross to prize.

Anyway, as I was saying, I was driving home and having an overwhelming thought and desire for drinking beer. Simply just drinking beer of an evening filled me with desire. Just letting myself go there. The buzz. The forgetting of feelings. I don't want anything else to drink. I don;t desire anything else to drink. Just a crunchy cold beer.

Get home.

Have to phone an artist about working with our young company. She says possibly. Phone the boss to let her know where we are at. All's fine. Then she checks in about another class happening tonight - have I cross checked with another colleague about the fact that it's cancelled and that all participants have been informed. Flounder. Well, yes, to a degree, but not today. Fuck, yeah I'll call the other colleague. Fine.

I wish the constant presence i feel of my boss around me, near me, looking over me (I'm at home right now, she's approx 50miles away) would simply fuck off. I'm not saying I wish she would fuck off because I don't know how much she is a control freak and how much I can seemingly quickly fill with such negative feelings of inadequacy. Indeed perhaps she wants to say fuck off to me, as much as I might want to to her, but neither of us know where the other is at at the moment we feel something negative towards the other. She may have had a horrific day for all I know...

Still...

So, I phone the colleague - she's sorted it. It's all covered. There is nothing to worry about. No. But boy do I feel as if i can't do my job. Or that perhaps this aint the job for me. Perhaps I'm not a co-ordinator. Or a manager. I said to the artist "we want to work with professional artists like yourself, out there making work." I once kinda did that. Well, tried, for a bit. But now I'm not really an artist either.

So I'm not a maker, or a doer, or a manager or a spider weaving all these strands together into an intricate and beautiful mosaic. Nope. I just feel pretty fucking flat. And to perk me up, to put some bubble back into my mojo... (or at least to get rid of the flatness and have something to tittle me for a time)... I think "ah BEER! That would reeeealllllll niiiiiiicccceeeee!......"

I won't. Forget about counting the quit days - more importantly, perhaps, is I got meetings in the morning and being hungover would exacerbate all of the above. So I'll ride this evening out. Writing and posting this...

ARGH n FUCK n PFFFT n FUCKING WANNA ARRGH :stomper:

[Byrdlady]

Stella (Chook), I stole your booze...

Don't give in the the small child pitching a fit to get its way. This is The Voice giving you a last run for your money. It will tell you anything to get you to cave...it IS a trick.

Let me tell you, getting all these Voices out of your head is worth the price of admission. Getting thru this period in your quit to get to the other side is priceless. I would have never believed it, until I just lived it. You will get to the other side of that mountain, and these arguments in your head will be gone as they relate to AL.

Is my life perfect without AL? No, far from it, but at least I'm not making things worse by giving in to that spoiled child called Addiction. You are in the midst of growing, and with that comes a few growing pains. I'm looking forward to your 50 days, too. You'll get Half A Byrd!!! XXOO, B

P.S. Kuya is amazing....she is our secret weopon. Shhhh, don't tell ev'body...we saw her first!!

[RunningCourage]

Stella (Chook), I stole your booze...

Thank you Byrdie. :l

The voices in the head... hmmm a good egg around here has spoken to me about voices in the head before... basically how listening to the values of a warped society warp our thoughts and opinions - and these are the same thoughts and opinions we adopt as our own voices: the voices in the head.

What is different right now, I feel, is that although these voices are very present, the voice that challenges them is one that is thinking with clarity. It may not yet have the strength to change or stop the chattering of the other negative voices, but at least it's there, quietly trying to influence me. I can only truly listen to it when sober.

The paradox is that the same voice seems to speak loudest and strongest when drunk, but I like to see this as a lie. That's actually another voice altogether. A drunk masking both the negative voices and the true inner voice of the self. "That'll be the whisky speaking" Is an old and common phrase.

Yet, the greatness with not drinking is that the true voice, once weak and meek, may have an opportunity to grow and express it's true self. In other words, that I may grow, that I may express who I am without feeling oppressed all of the time about who I am, what I should say, who I should be and what I should think...

This will take time.

[RunningCourage]

Stella (Chook), I stole your booze...

To drink as a cry for help

I have come to a realisation, i believe, that I have in the past drank as a cry for help. My first year at uni I drank all the time... not because I felt I needed it, but because I could not deal with, or come to terms with, other aspects of my life.

I couldn't fully, properly, process the reality of things. As much as I could intellectualise what I was doing (even back then I recognised almost immediately what I was doing with AL), I couldn't process it in any other way. Perhaps I needed to fully collapse back then - in mind and spirit - and gradually rebuild myself. Perhaps, with this not being the case, I have hobbled along in areas of my life with AL as a wobbly crutch ever since.

I say this because, with now nearly two stints of 7 weeks AF under my belt, I had recently thought about disclosing to certain persons about some of these issues which I have mostly privately lived with these past years. And the thought of doing so puts the fucking fear of Godot into me. And I thought - but what if I got drunk. What if I got drunk ALL THE TIME so as it clearly became an issue. Wouldn't they then see there was something amiss (they know I've gone AF)?

I hope I don't. It wouldn't be right. Nor real. Most likely I would still hide from it, but hide further away, under a dark cloud of grogginess. What's more, no one might see the cry. Or see it, but dismiss it. Or see it, but not want to confront it and so dismiss it. Or see it and simply think, oh look, the old RC is back. Then where would I be? Drunk and no further forward. Indeed, a few steps back really.

At least now that I am AF, the quiet voice in the head, the weaker, meeker one, will listen to sage advice, ask questions of others and... speak to me in a whisper...

to let me know...

what I should really do...

[Catbuddy]

Stella (Chook), I stole your booze...

Hey RC,

Don't do it. It won't make them realize what they are not prepared to acknowledge, what they did not question your first year at uni, and before. Give it more time. Then, if you need still to cry for help, do so, but really, cry "fucking help me already."

Oh, can I now join Byrdie's chorus? It won't sound real until you live it. You said, you fear that we lose the reasons we stopped drinking, so we start again??? No, as you progress, you lose the reasons, AND you lose the urge to drink. So gratefully, you actually don't need to remember acutely why you quit. Now, sure, urges come. But they are getting weaker, oh so weaker. They don't grip like they use to. So, hang in there. Live 100 days AF. See how incredibly different it is after that passage of time. It does not stay as hard as it is right now. And you've run a marathon. You can do this. Just BELIEVE, BELIEVE in the future. Have the courage to endure the present. It is not a life sentence. I guarantee you will get to the place when you accept and no longer resent that you are a non-drinker. I'm there.

Cat

[kuya]

Stella (Chook), I stole your booze...

Those negative voices and harsh critics are caused by alcohol.

It is often said here that the maturity, emotional growth becomes frozen at the point drug use begins.....I think it is so.

When you get sober your true authentic voice starts to be heard. As you say, at first it is a whisper. It gets louder but it never screams, it doesn't have to because when you hear it you know it is really you.
And those other voices, the voices of negativity, sadness and self loathing, start to fade, along with the desire for alcohol.
You needed the alcohol to drown out the voice of the real you.
Now it can start to be heard. And if you stay sober that authentic you will tell you when to do what you may need to do at the right moment, in the right way.

I say this from my own experience. After only a few months further along from where you are those critical voices have all but died. There is just the real me now.....and I rather like me.....at last.


Stay sober, stay present, be patient.

[almost free]

Stella (Chook), I stole your booze...

Hi RC,

"....... I guarantee you will get to the place when you accept and no longer resent that you are a non-drinker".....Catbuddy

Hoping to get to that place myself. Hang in there RC. As hard as it is now, try to remember how hard it was to get this far. Remember why we came here in the first place....sobbing in despair.....a bleak future....helpless, hopeless, demoralized.......

When I was constantly relapsing, some woman at AA once told me that in order to get to the other side, we have to sometimes cross a road of broken glass. She said that I keep stopping halfway across that road and going back, instead of forging ahead to get to the other side. Having to start all over again....more needless pain and suffering.

We are all here for you, RC. Keep posting. It will help you over the rough spots. It also helps us. We are here to help. And unlike others in our lives, the people here absolutely understand what you are going through and want to answer your cry for help. Hugs!

[RunningCourage]

Stella (Chook), I stole your booze...

Day 49

Well, here we are. Day 49. The day I fell last time. No - that's wrong. I did not fall. I consciously chose to drink. To have a drink. To see if I could mod. That wasn't the fall as such. The fall was that having let myself have a drink I had no plan as to how to deal with drink in my life and so immediately (as in by the weeks end) fell into my drinking habits of old. Read post 1 of this very thread for the run down of what happened.

So that wont be happening today. Anyway have to be up at silly o'clock tomorrow to go hiking.

One of the main differences in this very early stage of the quit, as compared to last year's quit, is that (other than xmas) there have been no real reasons to be out socialising. Or rather I have not made myself be socialble in the evenings, preferring to relax inside with a film, or posting here, or researching new abodes as I'll soon be moving. One part of me says, this is just part of the recovery and of the discovery of a new me. Perhaps. Another part just wonders whether I am only really doing what I did before but without the booze. And really should make more of an effort to get out. Perhaps. In due course. But at least for now, chilling of an evening is done AF, and not in private debauchery. This is at least good.

Anyway, would rather get up tired at 6am on a Sunday morning to go hiking in the snow than wake up groggy, sweaty and downing pain killers...

[Byrdlady]

Stella (Chook), I stole your booze...

RC, tomorrow will be milemarkers for both of us! We are charting new territory on this journey.
I was a bit of a hermit (well, a LOT of a hermit) my first 4 months...don't sweat it....YOU will know when you are ready to get out and about. It is an odd thing to try to put into words, I guess it's like the little birds flying out of their nest, but you will know when you are ready and have the confidence to fly. It will come...and it will come on its own timetable. Go with what your body is telling you now because you are doing some major healing! Mind AND body..this is a lifestyle change of the first order.
Tomorrow, we shall celebrate together! And why not!!! We deserve it! Hugs to you, dear RC! B

[RunningCourage]

Stella (Chook), I stole your booze...

Day 50

Byrdie - Happy 2 year anniversary there! I do look towards those folks here who have months and years of being AF... and keep in mind their adamant positivity about how GOOD life is free from AL - this is one of the mind tools I use to keep me treading forward.

The Maintenance Thread, started by Byrdie, has been discussing these last couple of days THE HOLE that we once filled with AL. Many good points made. Indeed, Micks point immediately after Kuya's (see quote below) is another good post on observations of why we fill the hole. First though, Kuya's post:

The funny thing FA is I actually felt hungry when upset, that inner emptiness that some feed with real food and we fill with alcohol.

The answer, I believe, is self acceptance. You fill the 'hole' with self. This is not to be confused with being selfish or selfless but truly recognising every part of you as acceptable. Most people reject ' bad' parts of themselves......this is the 'hole'.

I am nothing like the person society expects me to be, this used to make me feel like a fraud. I now realise it is our society that is fraudulent, there is nothing wrong with me, there never was.

I would like to agree with Kuya in that we (or I, perhaps you might disagree) need to fill the hole - my hole - with me. Not selfish, not egotistical, not self-centered. Just a sense of self. An acceptance of self. It reminds me a bit of meditation - something I once did many years ago, but have not done in about a decade or so. It reminds of quiet meditation that just seems to accept and embrace (if these are appropriate terms, I'm not sure) the now, and therefore the self in the now. It's not about "Whoa, I'm becoming enlightened". It's just TRYING to accept ones self for what and who they are at all times. I can feel my slightly Buddhist side tapping on the inner sanctum of my mind saying "Um... hello... can I come out and play again?" :H

The part of Kuya's quote highlighted rings true to me. There were times, I have little doubt there still are, when I would feel shame about some action of mine and consciously think - "hey, it's not so bad, at least you wont have to spend the night through thinking about it. You'll have drink. You'll not think. You'll sleep quietly in your coma tonight...shhhhhhh" I rejected the bad part of me. Or, what i perceived to be the bad part of me. It may just be a human part of me and not bad at all.

From what I remember, Mick's post following this on the Maintenance Thread follows this thought of filling our lives with things to do often to fill up the hole. This is not to say (and it is not what Mick is saying) that everything we do is to fill up a hole. BUT that often our actions may be us running from some feeling, some sense, some uncomfortableness. If so, what is this? What is this and how best to resolve this? If we resolve it do we gradually become truer to ourselves? Do we eventually become what and who we were born to be? Human beings being fully conscious being? (That sounds pretentious, and I am none the wiser as to what it really means.. but I am pondering on it.)

I am aware, to give a direct example, how I often feel some anxiety if I have not done at least some form of exercise most days. This is not the feeling that we can get if we've been a bit slothful and we feel the desire to move, to stretch, to change the scenery. This is about my perception of equilibrium: I am trying to create order. Trying to create order where there is, perhaps, none. (Suppose that's one of the paradoxes.) So I run, and I'll cycle and I'll walk the 3miles to work - all of which sounds HEALTHY, and it is... to a degree... but it is UNhealthy when I feel anxious when it's not happened and the equilibrium has been upset.

Someone threw the die in the air and I need to make sure the right numbers land the right side up...

So, day 50. This is where it is at:

1) Not drinking is relatively straightforward.
2) I want to be AF - this does not have timelines on it such as "forever" I'm not prepared to proclaim a definitive. I don't know what tomorrow brings.
3) The voices in the head are there, sometimes with loudspeakers, other times muffled, other times asleep.
4) One of the main reasons I stay AF is an unfounded belief in the future. A pretty human trait if ever there was one? There is still stuff to be sorted out. I believe I need to - or at least I WANT to - do this AF. It make take time. I have no idea how long. I apologise to the reader for this sounding cryptic, but I know what I mean, and just now this is for me.
5) Beyond this time of sorting out, I am also hugely intrigued and attracted to what Byrdie mentioned in her post today on her 2 year thread - how the second year of her sobriety she found a peace.

Deep down, no matter what we all do with our lives, who we are and what we become, presidents or postmen, princes or paupers, i wonder whether the hole - that hole we have filled with AL and all sorts of other 'life stuff' - is really a hole that desires, wants to be filled with and consumed by, peace.

With our self, our very being.

[Lavande]

Stella (Chook), I stole your booze...

We do have to leran to love ourselves, don't we RC?