The Sobriety Experiment: Chapter Two

[Lunarer]

Re: The Sobriety Experiment: Chapter Two

Tuesday, August 22nd 2017 (The Family of Detached Protectors)


The Food Banks are getting better, bigger, all the time, which is both a very good and bad thing. That's around eight times now I think I've benefited from their help and each time I have noticed an improvement on the time before. The change of venue last year, the extension, the number of donations, the extra staff. This is all good news. The fact that we need them at all perhaps a sign that things haven't much changed in the last couple of hundred years. Technology has a way of papering over the social cracks.

So I arrive at Lindsay's last night with a couple of bags of food. I call it ''Lindsay's'' but it feels awfully close to home these days. Assuming I don't sleep in the cave between now and Thursday that will have been five full weeks since my last night there. Things seem to be moving forward with us all the time, not stagnating, although I admit that this is still quite early days, one year into anything is still quite new, a magical time it is nonetheless. When we reach one year of sobriety all of a sudden our sponsors and AA peers chill out somewhat while we celebrate the milestone and seem to take the reins off just a little (although maybe not in my ex-sponsor's case) and so why should it not be the same in relationships?

Later on this afternoon, or maybe even this morning – whenever Barry the Bullet and I take a break – I will be making a couple of phone calls. One will be to the college. Am I attending an induction day next Monday? Shaun and Paige seem to be and they are on the same course so why not me? Have admin just missed me out? I'll find out when we take a comfort break. It looks as though this could be another day without rain we're gearing up for this morning and so I am expecting to work. The second call will be to the community use school to book a place on the creative writing short-course. It starts next Tuesday night and so I should grab my chance now while I'm not so busy. Once the course is finished and the cycle (nine weeks) begins again the college course will likely be getting into the thick of it and will be getting a little more difficult. I should do any little extras now rather than waiting.

Lindsay and I were even thinking about attending dance classes together at some point soon but admittedly this is still at the ''thinking about it'' stage and so an unknown distance from the ''actually get around to making the call'' phase. Hopefully we don't leave it too late in the day but there really is no rush.

It's around thirty eight days until I next see Dr. Bacon, my clinical psychologist, and so I am effectively on my own in that respect but with so many changes on the horizon I don't expect this to be a big issue. I can remember the days when I saw FASS (Fife Alcohol Support Service) counsellor Margaret every week, once upon a time, and can recall the horrors I felt when she would go on holiday or take the break over Christmas and so on. I think I'm a little more emotionally stable these days when it comes to inevitabilities such as longer appointment gaps. With Dr. Bacon I saw him only once in July, twice in August, and I'll be seeing him next on 28th September and so only four sessions over the space of three months. This is okay though – it feels as though things are moving along at a rate that feels normal, not too slow but not too fast, sensible.

I am there ten minutes before I am called and waste no time in getting straight into my homework assignment. Having skipped around the pleasantries and small talk less than one minute into the session we are into the nitty-gritty. We only have the time to go over one of my home work assignments and that is the confrontation with mum last Monday afternoon as we paid a visit to St. Andrews with the nieces.

A few things I learned. One is that I was quite right in not letting the matter rest and trying to bring up my feelings about it. I had mentioned to mum that I felt our relationship to be very poor these days and that we don't see each other – her or my brother – often enough. Her response was that her sister hadn't seen her son for eleven months until last week and that this didn't seem to be an issue. This made me more than a little angry but instead of dealing with it in a healthy adult way I brought out my Bully and Attack mode to help me cope with it. I don't mean that I began shouting and screaming – that's no longer the way things happen in my world – but my passive-aggressive stance could definitely be deemed as behaviour consistent with a Bully and Attack schema mode and, as Dr. Bacon reminds me in the session, there can never be a connection when one or both parties are in any kind of coping mode. It was an opportunity missed.

As we discuss the incident at length I also discover that I tend to, rather than a Healthy Adult might do and mention something in a direct manner, approach situations very indirectly. This is not very helpful when it comes to getting my needs met and the main reasons I am here to begin with, both getting sober and in therapy, is because I have unmet needs in terms of connections and feeling loved. Abandonment still rules my psyche. It would have been better if I had approached the situation with mum in a manner more direct in terms of pointing out exactly the problems I was having with her. Don't be so ambiguous – sometimes things just have to be pointed out directly. Here is the problem and this is what I'm struggling with. This is what I feel as though I need.

Another thing is that my mum herself seems to have quite a strong Detached Protector mode. As I think back to her reaction, her reaction to most things actually, she does fit into Detached Protector territory fairly well and fairly consistently. My brother too. It's no wonder that this could be the case but it's becoming clear to me that all three of us have developed Detached Protectors that are quite advanced. In this way it is no wonder that when we go through difficult periods when communication is key that we struggle and that nothing gets done. Things are just left to fester. Hopefully, if enough time goes by and we don't say anything, then things will just go back to normal on their own and we won't have to open up is an attitude we all three seem to have cultivated our whole lives together as a family.

Not any more, I say! Not any more!

Unfortunately I can only do my bit and hope that they follow suite. I can only keep my side of the street clean. The rest is out of my control. I am powerless in that respect.

Barry the Bullet and I should get out to work again today no problems.

Could this be a third day in a row where it doesn't rain?

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Stevie

Doing his bit.

1287

[Lunarer]

Re: The Sobriety Experiment: Chapter Two

Wednesday, August 23rd 2017 (Good Points and Bad Points)


Lindsay had her solo session with our Relationship Scotland couple's counsellor on Monday night. Next week we have another week off. It'll be a week completely free of all kinds of therapy. I like that idea every now and again although it seldom happens these days. One of the things that Lindsay and our counsellor Donna were talking about the other night was how difficult I am to break down. I used to pride myself on this, why should I not have, I only have what I am, and liked the idea that I was complicated and difficult to understand; that I was multi-faceted as this made me appear interesting, or so I thought, now I am sick of it. I realise that it does nothing but bring me problems and that there is nothing interesting or advantageous about it at all. Being complicated doesn't serve you in any situation. There is no pride for it now – only the desire to rid myself of my own complexity.

Although Barry the Bullet and I have not exactly made the very best of this summer where working is concerned we have done a bit better recently and notice that already work is at a shortage, or at least is about to be, and so we should be okay for this week but there won't be an awful lot due for next. My college induction takes place on Wednesday and then I am due to start full time the following Monday. At least I know that from then I'll be busy again. This little ten week break has been okay, maybe even good for me in many ways, but I yearn to get back into the college where I can be in a learning environment with like-minded people. I enjoy having projects to do, work to do, something to do, anything to do. This has been lacking somewhat these past couple of months.

We managed almost to land ourselves a third consecutive day without any rainfall at all yesterday but it rained from nine in the evening until after I was asleep and so that is only three days in August here in Scotland where we haven't seen water falling from the sky above and onto our heads. This has made things a little less miserable and my mood is often weather dependent. This morning I wake to another wet looking day – it's actually raining again, perhaps still going from last night – and so my mood is at one with it. Barry the Bullet and I should have another unproductive day. I'll still be able to work two days a week when I go back to college – Thursday and Friday will be my two free days (although I will have to fit in Dr. Bacon appointments every now and again on a Thursday afternoon) where I will keep myself as available as possible for as long as possible – but I expect rain to get in the way during these times and I won't have the luxury of being off all week to make up for any missing days. I guess there are good points and bad points to everything.

Although I opened the post talking about it I notice that thoughts regarding it keep flooding back to me as I compose this latest post of mine. My awkwardness, the difficult part of me. The part I used to pride myself as having but now realise only to be nothing more than a constant pain in the ass, something that always takes and never gives – something that will only ever bring me misery. Although I enjoy my sessions with Dr. Bacon and we spend a lot of time talking about and trying to understand my personality and all of the different schema modes that make it up I often still don't feel at all any further on in knowing me and how to change me as I ever have, even when I was an adolescent and even way back, to some extent, when I was a kid.

My dad moved on and my relationships with people started to suffer. Rather than learn how to meet people and bond with them in a progressive and natural way I treated everyone with suspicion and viewed them as having the potential to hurt me and so was more difficult to get to know. It took more effort than most people were willing to bother with. This has been a common theme in my life the whole way through – from high school to the workplace; from the primary school playground to the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous. Each and every time I have kind of frozen up at first, wondered if it's okay to be me in these new surroundings and so held back a lot.

This is not new information to me. This idea that I have modes of behaviour triggered by my inner child, the Little Stephen, who is in the middle of all this is not revolutionary to me. Nor is this idea that the main two coping modes I have are the Detached Protector – which deals with hiding away from responsibilities and emotions, situations that Little Stephen feels unable to cope with – and the Bully and Attack mode – in which I can take an offensive stance on situations that come up in my life as has recently been the case with my mum and the workman as I wrote about in here over the weekend. I now have fancy little words and phrases with which to endearingly term them but at the end of the day I am still not really any further forward where it comes to dealing with them, to stopping them. I'm still effectively watching a car crash and being unable to stop it.

I'll have another appointment with Dr. Bacon at the end of September. That will have been eight months this has been going on. It takes a while, so it does. It was eighteen months before I managed to get the first appointment and now a further eight before we have reached this point but we're still not all that much further forward really. Dr. Bacon did say that when we started to do some of the more intensive work we would need to meet up more regularly and so fortnightly sessions would be best and so over the winter I expect to start doing some of the heavy lifting. I mentioned just the other day (could have even been yesterday actually) that I was in no rush with this, and this is still the case, I just feel as though I might be sounding impatient in what I am writing here. This isn't the case. I don't think so at least.

Anyway, there's a little voice from within telling me that this is enough and that no good can come from typing any more. Like this journal's producer is pushing me on towards the end and contacting me through a little earpiece to tell me that the show is almost over for another day. Stop rambling and get to the point.

So stop rambling is exactly what I shall do.

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Stevie

Stopping rambling, but only for now.

1228

[Lunarer]

Re: The Sobriety Experiment: Chapter Two

Thursday, August 24th 2017 (Late This Morning)



I slept a little later but I still have plenty time before I have to leave for work. Barry the Bullet and I making good use of my penultimate week.

Why the fuck did the English League Cup draw take place in China last night at four in the morning our time? Stinks, so it does. One day tickets for sporting events won't go on sale as they do at the moment, they'll be auctioned out to the highest bidders. I've been to plenty football matches where the ground is full of fans and I've also been to one or two where non-fans have turned up just for a day out because the match was deemed a big one. The big difference is the atmosphere. Fans create an atmosphere. Highest bidders tend to sit in their seats and act in accordance with political correctness. It's like festivals I suppose. They never have the same buzz about them that actual gigs do as so many people are there for different reasons whereas if you are all their to see the same act you tend to all make a noise about it. I hope England supporters can somehow wrestle their cup back from corporate greed but I fear it just to be another nail in the coffin of football as we know it. China and America have begun with their dissection and dumbing down of it already and it's a slope to slippery and too profitable to see a change back to the old ways.

Imagine if this attitude was to find its way into the rooms of AA or suchlike. Someone with money comes along and buys out the fellowship. Apparently it has been tried before but we wanted nothing to do with it. I try to imagine a corporation owning AA and what this might do for the meetings – especially were it an American or Chinese company. The Preamble would be sung rather than read out as the chairperson for each meeting pranced around a little stage in spandex and fake tan. The Tradition Seven donations would be out the window and instead at least five bucks each would be required to pay for your seat for the night.

I think of a similar money making machine. I used to go to Slimming World. I didn't really need to as I've never been above or below my B.M.I at any point but since I was quitting smoking I found myself very vulnerable to the chat that would try to tempt me not to bother and just to keep smoking anyway. I would gain weight, turn purple, my penis would shrink and I'd lose my hair. I had to keep smoking or I might have a seizure. Of all these threats from the tobacco companies and other smokers who didn't want a fellow toker to quit so that they had to, for a moment at least, evaluate their own dedication to the habit the one I felt to be the most immediate was the weight gain. I could see how this could happen. So I joined Slimming World and lost ten pounds I'd put on over the time I'd been sober and got myself back down to eleven and a half stone which is roughly where I still am to this minute. I learned that we don't gain weight when we quit smoking at all – we only do that if we eat too much. None of the other threats have turned out to be true either. Slimming World didn't really care about you losing weight – it wanted your money. It was subtle but it was pretty obvious too.

For all of AA's problems (and there are a great deal of them, let me assure you) there are many things it manages to successfully avoid and it's all the better for it. I've still never been to a meeting outside of my country but am hoping to change this in October when I'm in Spain for the week. Spanish seem to have, in general, like most places you go to, a small knowledge at least of the English language, and so it's possible that it might not just be a case of me sitting there and listening to a bunch of people I don't understand. There may be a bit of this but I expect to be able to communicate to some level. Hopefully this will make me feel a little better connected to the fellowship, allow me to see with my own eyes that it is actually worldwide and consists of a couple of million members and is much more than just the few people I meet up with every Saturday night in this town.

I haven't been to my usual meeting for a couple of weeks actually. Two weeks ago Lindsay and I went to St. Andrews in the morning and so we caught a meeting through that way and last weekend we had her graduation ball and so that's been two weeks missed. I quite like this idea of not having a home group anymore as it frees me up to come and go as I please rather than having the rooms, or at least one of them, dictate to me where I can go on a particular evening. I'm not saying that having a home group is a bad thing – I'm just saying that I am too young still to be tying myself to a particular meeting and that I haven't found one yet that contains a bunch of people I would want to spend the time with every single week without fail. Perhaps when I'm a little older I will thrive on the routine and the forced solidarity that attending such a group would offer me. For now though I find it difficult to commit to something that would require me to be there at all times.

I don't have to either. Just like I hope that football one day realises that it doesn't have to turn up to games every week. It doesn't have to buy the new strip every year. It doesn't have to support this all the way to the bitter end. The bottom line is that the owners, clubs, players, none of them would give a shit were the sport to be sinking as it perhaps has been now for twenty five years since the formation of the sport as a brand in this country with the Premier League and the European Cup changing to the Champions League the same year – they would save themselves.

I suppose that's the big difference between AA and football.

Or are they just the same in this respect.

I hope I never have to find out.

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Stevie

Talking shit this morning. I'm really disappointed with this post. Oh well – better luck tomorrow morning.

1158

[Lunarer]

Re: The Sobriety Experiment: Chapter Two

Friday, August 25th 2017 (The X-Ray)


Right then – so how am I doing? Sometimes I don't even know how I'm doing, especially recently since I've been posting in the early morning before I set out to work or whatever else I might be getting up to that day. Usually I have been used to posting towards the end of a day when I am a little more ''in the zone'' and more able to put my thoughts into words but I've enjoyed writing in the morning these last two or three weeks (or has it been even longer?) and hope to continue doing it this way at least until I start college in a couple of weeks. Then I'll have to get a much earlier bus and so won't really have the time to write much beforehand and so I'll have to find another way. Maybe this is a sign that I should be starting to write a little less. We'll see. At the moment I still think that these forums act well in dumping any shit that might be floating around inside my mind each day and I still have the feeling that life would be worse, even if maybe just a little, by not doing it. So I continue.

Lindsay had her X-Ray yesterday afternoon, just a little check on her jaw, and the news is good, except maybe if you're Lindsay from the future listening in to the possibility of arthritis creeping into it at a later date. I have injuries too and this is the kind of thing they like to warn us about. Arthritis. Lindsay's jaw came about as a result of her last relationship with someone from AA. He was still drinking at the time, both of them were actually, but Lindsay was going through one of her spells where alcohol was taking a back seat. He wasn't thinking along such lines and one night they found themselves with alcohol in the house with Lindsay's son sleeping in the next room.

After a while the guy, Mark, starting getting a little on the drunk side and Lindsay, who'd had a little to drink but not all that much (and I'm only going by what she tells me here), decided to leave him to it. You can drink what you want but I'm going to my bed. I'm not interested. She gets up to leave the room but he starts getting a little weird. He's not keen on drinking alone on this particular evening some six or seven years ago and tries to get Lindsay to stay with him. She sticks to her guns and he leaves her, eventually, to head to bed. She drifts off to sleep. She wakes to find him on top of her and punching her. One or two blows find their ''mark'' and one has obviously led to this X-Ray that was taken yesterday afternoon.

The joys of meeting someone in recovery when both parties are still drinking but there really is no excuse. What happened afterwards was, for me, one of AA's lowest points and some reasons I feel that many of their members should pull their heads out of the sand. Because both Lindsay and Mark were members of the fellowship they are both, by AA's own Traditions, welcome to attend any meeting they want at any time they want, so after he got out of jail (I think he was only in there for a couple of months – at least that time) he tried to look for Lindsay. AA did what it does and followed its Traditions. It has no opinions on outside issues and so cannot stop anyone from doing anything. Mark was able to track her down at meetings no problems.

Lindsay's sponsor at the time was Leader. I've written about him loads of times in the journal as he's a general sleazeball but one of the more respected members of AA in this part of the world. He would say to Lindsay that we need to put this little problem they were having to the side and work our programs here to the best of our abilities. That the best for everyone would be to get Lindsay to the point where she can happily sit in a meeting with Mark and it not be a problem.

I'm glad she stuck to her guns and said no. This wasn't what was going to happen at all. Things didn't change though. Mark would follow her home from meetings and turn up looking for her. She'd change her meetings up but he'd find her. She had only really a few she could attend as her work and son required she be at certain places at certain times whereas he didn't work and so had the freedom to go anywhere at any time. In the end it was Lindsay who stopped attending meetings and she stayed away for around a year. Almost as soon as she stopped going – so did mark. I think that the police were involved one more time and there was another arrest.

Mark had been allowed into the rooms of AA when Lindsay was there even though everyone knew what the situation was like and even though she had a restraining order against him meaning that he would be arrested if he came near her. The same thing happened again last year when a couple who are in AA had a scuffle and Spud ended up strangling on/off girlfriend Vanessa. There was a restraining order handed out. Spud could not approach her or come near her. AA didn't care about this. I promised that the buck would stop with me. If I was sitting in a meeting (most likely the Tuesday night Step meeting as this was Vanessa's home group so she was there every week) and Spud walked in while she was there – I would make way for the restroom and call the police. I wouldn't have cared if this meant that uniforms had to walk into a meeting while it was underway and life one of us from it. This situation never presented itself. For better and worse.

But Lindsay is fine now. Something to look out for in the future. Aside from that I guess everything is going well. Money is being spent and it is being earned, probably spent a little more quickly this week than earned, it has to be said, but this evening Barry the Bullet and I will have our debt-collecting mission and we should do well. It's been a good week. Only one more to go and then I'll be back studying. Working hours will be limited.

I'll get off and get ready. I have to make up my rolls and fill up a bottle of water still.

Then I'll be ready to face the day.

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Stevie

Thanks for reading.

1159

[Lunarer]

Re: The Sobriety Experiment: Chapter Two

Saturday, August 26th 2017 (Heerewaarden)


It's a much later time of writing today. I think that's a good thing, I mean to write at different times, perhaps it stops things from seeming a little samey. If I write early morning all the time I can tend to be focused on the same things all the time, usually work and weather, and whether or not Barry the Bullet will be joining me for a day of window cleaning, which I can tire of. So this makes a nice change where I don't actually have to mention any of those things, which, of course, I just did (insert roll eyes emoji).

Lindsay has been working hard at her placement all week (little problem there though but I'll get to that in a moment or two) so she continues to sleep through but I cannot manage to resist the early morning ritual that is her cat's desire to be fed at six and so I am up as early on a Saturday as I would have been had I been working. This is fine though as I have things I can be getting on with. One of them is trying to get back into the walking thing. If I can get up tomorrow morning and do again what I did this morning (assuming the cat gets me up at the same time, which is all but a guarantee) then I'll beat my best monthly total for walking miles.

Since I quit smoking and decided to take up power walking to try to keep any weight I was promised I would gain as a result of giving up said nicotine my monthly totals have gone like this:

February – 88.5 miles (started walking at the end of the second week after quitting smoking on the 07th – the day of my two year anniversary from quitting drinking alcohol).

March – 142 miles (still the highest number of miles recorded by me in a single month with an emphasis on much longer walks, just not all that many of them).

April – 111 miles (during this time I enrolled myself into the Walk the Walk Moonwalk for breast cancer charity walk of fifty mile – which I absolutely failed by the way – and so kept with their training plan which actually saw my mile count reduced for this month).

May – 140 miles (again – following the Walk the Walk training schedule and this month included two walks that exceeded the thirty mile mark. Two miles short of my best though).

June – 61.25 miles (amazingly the first month since February to reach decimal placing in the total all things considered but all the more amazing given that half of this monthly total was walked on the one night – the night of the charity event I had been training so hard for).

July – 33.49 miles (this total strongly suggests that with the charity event over and done with and my realising that I had actually lost ten pounds in weight rather than gain as I was told I would I stopped giving a fuck about walking and so dramatically reduced the number of hours I was out there putting the steps in, which has resulted in my poorest month so far).

August – 130 miles (an intentional return to form and with enough time left over to smash the record set back in March. Should do it tomorrow morning, assuming the cat wakes me up as usual. If not I'll do it later tomorrow morning).

This gives me, on my hypothetical trip around Europe, since I have quit smoking, a journey starting outside my front door in Fife, Scotland, across the border into England, all the way down and through London to the tunnel, through the tunnel into France, across the northern French coastline into Belgium, through the centre of Bruges, into the Netherlands and up into Rotterdam, then turning East and reaching a little place called Heerewaarden, heading towards Dortmund. It's my next destination. I'm around one hundred miles out, approximately thirty miles from the German border. It's a fair distance to be honest. I shall keep going. Keep trying to get a little further each month. Think about where I might get to by the end of the year.

More statistics take me to looking at my smoking, or not smoking, as it were, and, without adjusting for inflation and just keeping things as they were at the time of my quit, £5.05 for 12.5g of Amber Leaf rolling tobacco giving me around thirty cigarettes per day, I have saved a whopping £1010 and, more importantly I think, prevented myself from taking in the damage of, quite astonishingly – six thousand cigarettes! That's 6000. SIX THOUSAND!! Six – fucking – thousand cigarettes I've not smoked that otherwise would have. That's pretty amazing actually. Makes it finally feel totally worth it. That's only in a little over six months too. Imagine six thousand cigarettes sitting in a pile on the floor in front of you. It's madness, I tell ye, madness!!

I couldn't possibly work out what I've saved (both financially and in terms of my health) from not smoking weed for the last eighteen months or so, not taking any Class A drugs since New Year's Day of 2016; and not drinking any alcohol whatsoever for more than two and a half years but I imagine that the statistics would be even more mind-boggling that I might expect. I could half expect to have saved a thousand pounds by not smoking but could not have predicted having saved myself from smoking all those cigarettes – six thousand!!!!! - even though it is a really easy sum.

All statistics aside I have to say that things are going okay. Having college to look forward to is definitely a good thing. The window cleaning is a good way of passing the time in between but the college is where the action is really at. Things will change dramatically from a week on Monday onwards. The induction is this Wednesday and I'm looking forward to being reunited with Shuan and Paige from the sound production course we completed last term as well as meeting all the new students I'll be spending the next year or two with.

I never got around to talking about that problem Lindsay was having after all.

That can wait until tomorrow now.

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Stevie

Walking through strange lands.

1089

[Lunarer]

Re: The Sobriety Experiment: Chapter Two

Sunday, August 27th 2017 (Bad Fun)


Probably quite a big post today as I can feel myself getting warmed up and with plenty to say. Most of it likely just a load of bollocks, but lots to say anyway.


1) Walking:

Yesterday I managed to walk a total of twenty one miles – the longest distance in a single day since the Walk the Walk breast cancer charity event back on June 10th. Although split into three separate walks I was stiff pretty chuffed with it and consider it a slight return to form. I still struggle to believe that I would go out and walk those super long thirty mile walks in one go. I'll have to try another one of those soon. This total added onto my Endomondo account means that I am just five miles short of my record month and I intend to do more than this when I leave in a little while this morning. I'll maybe head out later on as well. I still have four days left but can't see when I'll be able to fit in a walk – they are quite time consuming to be honest, if I had to say one really negative thing about them.


2) Sugar:

I've been thinking about the calculations I made yesterday regarding the number of cigarettes I've avoided smoking by choosing to quit. Six thousand with yesterday being my two hundredth day. You can add another thirty onto that total for today. Bewildering. For a few weeks now I've been thinking about what might be my next quit. What else is a habit I could do without? I'm not hunting for things to quit for the sake of it – I'm looking to get rid of things that are bad for me and shorten my life or at least lower the quality of it. Sugar is definitely one of them. I'm not much of a sweet tooth really, haven't been for most of my adult life, and I have never been overweight. I have noticed an increase in my sugar intake these last couple of years though. They say that it's very common for those quitting drinking to seek sugar as a fix, a new coping strategy, and I was no different.

What I did have, however, was weed to smoke. After being off the drink for five months I started smoking weed again as a way to cope with life and with my emotions. Before long I realised that this would also have to be ditched as a coping mechanism. I dropped it on my sober anniversary. But then I still had the nicotine. This was still a pretty useful coping strategy. Ask anyone who smokes and they, if they are honest (and perhaps if they even have the insight into it), will tell you that one of the main reasons that they continue to pay for the habit is that it relieves stress and acts as an excellent coping mechanism.

For the last six months I haven't had that either. It was Lindsay and my Relationships Scotland counsellor Donna who had said that she would be interested in hearing about what coping methods I have left now that all of these are gone. It wasn't until she said this that I thought about it and noticed that she's right. There aren't any left. My nails are fine at the moment but there have been a couple of times in the last six months when they've been bitten to the quick. Times when the stress of the day has required me to find an outlet and this being an obvious way of me letting off some steam. I don't know I'm doing it until I'm halfway there. I also notice myself reaching for a sugar fix every now and again. It's not cool.

In the same way that I tried to envisage six thousand cigarettes sitting in a pile on the ground in front of me yesterday I am trying to imagine what six months worth of sugar might look like weighed out and dumped in front of me too. How many kilograms in just six months? Probably a great many.

I could quit sugar tomorrow and be done with it but by the end of the day I would have failed. This will take a little planning. I'll need to look at my options and what foods I can have. It'll take some preparations but if I'm going to do this then I already know when I'll be doing it – February 07th. This is my quit date for alcohol (2015), drugs (2016) and tobacco (2017) and so it makes perfect sense. There's something about this date that makes me stick to my guns with what I say. If I'm quitting then it'll be on this day – a little under six months from now.


3) Lindsay Placement:

It's been a nightmare. There have been horrible placements in the past but this one, the big one, the sign off, has been the worst. There was a time there when I didn't think she was going to make it as she was taking a lot of time off. Now this has come back to haunt her as on Friday she was given her finishing date. Her sign off date. Everyone else is already finished but for those with catch up time. Due to a few things happening (like her fall while drunk and brain haemorrhage) Lindsay was given extra time and was not scheduled to finish until September 28th – the same day that I next see Dr. Bacon – my clinical psychologist. Now though, due to the absences taken since this placement began, she has been given a new finishing date of October 27th. This really sucks.

Although she has a job to walk into once this is all said and done there is a small chance that she won't manage to get the hours in until after the graduation cut off. This would mean not being able to graduate until next year. She can't even work extra days as due to her illnesses there is a maximum hours per week and she cannot work more than two twelve hour shifts consecutively. It's all rather horrible. She'll also stop getting her funding at the end of the month and so won't have any income. The rent will start building up from next week. It's not as if I can pay it as I have my own rent worries.


4) Moving In:

It would be the logical move in so many ways. I would give up my council house and move in with Lindsay. I've never been happy in the cave anyway and it's just been a horrible place for me with horrible memories and just general horribleness. I'd spoken with both Barry the Bullet and Ian and asked their thoughts about it in the last couple of weeks. They were both of the impression that I was out of my mind even thinking about it. Keep the council house! What if things go all tits-up? What if indeed? But what I'm having to start doing now is to pay rent on a place I never use. It's been over five weeks now since I slept a night in the cave and in this time I think I've only spent the odd ten minutes here and there as I've gone in to check mail and so on and so forth. There seems to be little reasons to keep it other than as a back up for if things go wrong.

On Friday I was on the bus and English Sara got on at one of the stops. I asked her thoughts. Again – she advises me to be careful. All of these people have one thing in common I notice. All of them have their rents and rates paid for them through the benefit system. None of them have to worry about rent at all. It is obvious that the smart thing to do if it was just a free house sitting there that I could use as a backup for when things go wrong or if I fancied some time by myself but when I have to pay three hundred bucks a month it suddenly becomes a very expensive backup for if things go wrong or if I fancied some time by myself.

The longer I take to think about it the more the rent needs paid. I'll bring it up with Lindsay again when I get a chance and we can have another chat about it.


5) Creative Writing Course:

I phoned to ask about it the other day and was told that there are still seven places available. I couldn't tell you if this is a little or a lot of spaces as I don't know how big the class is but on Tuesdy I'm going to sign up. Nine weeks of creative writing tuition for fifty bucks. I'd never been too used to writing until around 2012 or so when I started journaling regularly. Then in 2014 I started this journal and got daily practice as I stuck to the commitment of keeping it going. I have little experience of writing outside of this journal though. I have no idea if I'd have any talent or if journaling suits me best as it allows me to just go with the flow where my self-indulgence is concerned.

I wanted to try it out before, this course, but back then the fifty pounds was far too much to expect me to pay. Now I can afford it and so I'm going to give it a go from this Tuesday onwards. Nine weeks. Should be good fun, not that something can ever be bad fun.


6) Alcoholics Anonymous:

I was supposed to go last night but decided against it at the last minute and walked back here. It gets dark now around closing time, the summer coming to a close. I don't know if there will be much of an AA presence in my life this winter or not. There was last winter. It's just never been the same since I took that ninety days away from it.


7) Nikki Baby:

Restoration's Nikki gave birth to her second child this week, a little boy named Conrad. I thought it was a weird name when I first heard the volunteer telling me about it as I bumped into him at the bus station the other day but I don't mind it now that I've had a bit of time to think about it and get used to it. Without Nikki I have noticed how poor Restoration becomes and I don't know if they are even doing anything for this year's Recovery Walk. Last year they made a fuss over it but this year there had been nothing mentioned.

Right then – I knew it was going to be quite a long one and it's getting dangerously close to reaching My Way Out's character limit so I'm going to go before I start rambling overly so.

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Stevie

Having some bad fun.

1864

[Lunarer]

Re: The Sobriety Experiment: Chapter Two

Monday, August 28th 2017 (Happier Within Myself)




A terrible night of tossing and turning meant that I wasn't up early enough to post this morning. But here I am – more than twelve hours later than I'd normally be writing. Gotta get that daily entry into the journal though......for some reason long forgotten.

So August is coming rapidly to a close. On Saturday we had rain in the morning. It died out by eight o'clock and we were treated to a pretty sunny day once it had, but this still counts as rainfall and so August has only had three days where there has been no wet weather whatsoever. Today it rained at lunchtime and stuck around until Barry the Bullet and I were ready to go back to work, around an hour later. Convenient maybe, but it still counts as rain. I guess it's not so bad when you consider what's happening with rainfall across the pond at the moment. We're doing okay all things considered.

Yesterday I managed to put one foot in front of the other enough times to smash my record miles for a month and so now have a new total to try and best next month. It's one hundred and fifty four miles. There's still time to add to it but I can't see when I'm going to have the time to given how busy this week will actually be. Of course I have walked much more than this and must have completed a few miles at work today and during the little debt-collecting mission I sent myself on this evening but I don't count walks unless I know exactly how long they are and if I don't plan beforehand and go out with a power-walking mentality. So they don't count.

Barry the Bullet and I are chatting over the course of the day:

Barry the Bullet – ''Your missus has put some photos online from that night out yous had the other weekend.''

Stevie – ''The graduation ball? Cool.''

Barry the Bullet – ''You wanna see them?''

We take a break and he loads up Facebook and so on. There are a few photos uploaded.

Stevie – ''I wish I'd got my hair cut first.''

Barry the Bullet – ''Nah, man. You look fine.''

Stevie – ''Everybody smiling for the camera for a few seconds, looking all happy for the Facebook photographs before all going back to looking like they've been chewing on wasps.''

Barry the Bullet – ''Haha.''

Stevie – ''We were talking about the whole 'me moving in' thing again last night. I mentioned that I'd spoken with you about it, and Ian, and English Sara and Dennis, and that each and every one of you had said the same thing – don't do it!!''

Barry the Bullet – ''I'm only asking you to watch out. You'd be giving up a council house. These things are much sought after and you managed to get yours and now you're thinking about giving it up!? I just think you should be careful is all.''

Stevie – ''It's not that hard to get a council house really, you just have to wait it out for a while.''

Barry the Bullet – ''Things are changing with the homelessness situation in Fife. It's getting harder than ever to get allocated a spot in homeless accommodation let alone end up in a house.''

I don't know where Barry is getting this information from exactly. Perhaps it's an opinion. He's maybe read about it somewhere.

Barry the Bullet – ''When I was homeless last time it took a lot longer than it did when I was homeless last time all those years ago.''

Stevie – ''I see.''

I don't recall it this way. Barry was in his scatter-flat for eleven months after spending around two months in a homeless hostel. During my last stint I was in the hostel for three months and in the scatter-flat for fifty four weeks – more than Barry in both cases. It's possible that the places we wished to stay had slight differences in allocation time due to certain areas being more sought after but not to the degree that it would make any major differences. We were very close to waiting the same length of time. My biggest battle would be the fact that I would be given non-priority status due to my now having no addiction issues and not being on any medication. They wouldn't have me in there for long. But why does everything in this situation lead to me ending up in a homeless unit a year down the line? They are only coming at me with their experience, I guess, and fair enough – it has been my experience too.

Barry the Bullet – ''It's been about a year you two have been together is it not?''

Stevie – ''It's a year.''

Barry the Bullet – ''How did you two even meet? That's what Ian was asking the other night.''

Stevie – ''In an AA meeting. There was a time when we were the young people in AA. There were a small bunch of us all in our thirties and if you're in your thirties in AA you're pretty much the babies.''

It's true It's rare to find people even in their thirties. It takes a while, evidently, to become skilled in the art of heavy drinking. Most are in their fifties, sixties, seventies and beyond. But there was a bunch of us youngsters when I first arrived. Lindsay and I were just two of them but at the time I had the car and so we would stick together. There was Spud and Vanessa, Newest Quitter too, and, of course, there was Jenna. The bunch of alkies in their thirties in AA. The babies.

Barry the Bullet – ''Aye – you were battering the meetings in for a while at the start.''

Stevie – ''Two hundred thirty five meetings in two hundred and eighteen days.''

Barry the Bullet – ''I remember.''

Stevie – ''That was about as good as Cristiano Ronaldo's goals to games ratio at Madrid at the time.''

Barry the Bullet – ''You've come a long way.''

Stevie – ''Sometimes I wonder still. I'm better at coming out to work these days than back then, that's for sure.''

Barry the Bullet – ''I think you seem a lot happier within yourself too, the banter's better.''

Stevie – ''Yeah.''

Barry the Bullet – ''I think you had a lot of the old self-loathing going on back then.''

I guess it wouldn't be too difficult to spot. I think that both Ian and Barry have had spells of self-loathing recently too and so it's maybe something we all go through, or maybe it's something that those belonging to the absent father crew must battle with all their lives to greater and lesser extents. I know that Lindsay was discussing shame with our Relationships Scotland counsellor last week – something we don't have this week as we couldn't fit it in.

This week will be pretty busy to be fair. I've been out all day trying to pull in some pennies and managed to leave the house with three pounds and return fourteen hours later with one hundred and forty five pounds. That's not bad going. That was working all day and a solo debt-collecting mission in the evening, going back to the doors of people who were out during the day. Tomorrow I will be at it again before heading to another town in the evening to attend a creative writing course.

On Wednesday I have my college induction day.

For now I am off.....

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Stevie

Happier within himself.....apparently.

1291

[Lunarer]

Re: The Sobriety Experiment: Chapter Two

Tuesday, August 29th 2017 (Two Wolves)



I guess everyone is familiar with this story but I'll stick it up here anyway:

''
One evening, a Native American elder told his grandson about the battle that goes on inside people. He said, 'My son, the battle is between two wolves inside us all. One is anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride and superiority. The other is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth and compassion.' The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, 'Which wolf wins?' The elder simply replied, 'The one that you feed.'
''

I know – it's a little patronising and isn't as clever and filled with ''Oh My God!!'' factor as it perjaps thinks it is, but it's certainly worth a moment of my time. I still think, to a large degree, that I feed the negative wolf. Despite what Barry the Bullet says about me being happier, or at least appearing to be, happier within myself, as was the case yesterday afternoon, I still think that there is a pull towards the wolf that does not mean well. Dr. Bacon probably feels that this is obvious and so assigns me this homework I always get which is designed to enable me to be able to look at the less obvious ways in which I feed my darker wolf.

I've said many times in the past that the main reason I believe AA and its Twelve Step program struggle to bring about any changes in people is because it assumes that we can, with the help of an unqualified and often still quite sick in many ways sponsor we will be able to see clearly our character defects. It doesn't allow much for the possibility that most of us, or at least some of us, are sufficiently damaged that we have destructive lifelong habits and personality traits and that we need expert help to deal with. I feel like one of the lucky ones in that I managed to qualify for this expert help and that I manage to get it.

At the moment it's a little stop/start though. I don't see Dr. Bacon again until September 28th which seems like a long way off. Lindsay has started seeing her psychologist and her appointments are far more regular. She sees him once every fortnight, so far, without exception. It's teaching me patience I guess, having to wait, as my default state would be to try to force this, try to rush myself to some imagined finish line whereby I'd magically be well. I know now that it isn't going to work like this and so have gradually learned to try to put therapy and self help to one side for periods of time and enjoy what else is going on.

If the Native American elder is to be believed then I should make a conscious effort today to try to feed the positive wolf. It's not always easy though.

Another wolf I seem to have been feeding at various points over the past few weeks to a couple of months or so is wolf who literally likes food. I weighed myself this morning and am currently over my Slimming World target weight. Let me start off by saying that I am in no way overweight and have never been. I have also never been underweight although there was a time around 2009/10 where I was quite thin due to problems I was having with amphetamines. Lindsay says that I have some kind of body dysmorphic condition that means I have to be within a certain weight or my general mood decrease.

I think everyone has this to some extent. I know that my current weight of eleven stone and ten pounds (74.5 kg) is one that many thirty nine year old British men of five foot and ten inches (1.778 m) wouldn't mind having themselves. I know all about the obesity problems we have in this country. But for one time in my life I don't really think about other people with this one. I don't compare myself with others when it comes to this. It's just something I have a deep-seated fear about. Becoming overweight, even slightly so. I'll have to change up my ways.

The thinking I've been doing regarding joining the army of people fighting the Sugar Monster on these forums is for many reasons. My teeth are beginning to struggle and I just don't feel as though I believe a human being is supposed to. If we are what we eat then I am sure that a typical British diet is likely to be bringing me down and this will include my daily sugar intake which must be pretty high. It's time to start thinking more seriously about it. When it comes to fighting weight I know that I am as dedicated and serious about it as even the most enthusiastic dieter. I suppose it's a little easier for me to get back to my target weight – which would only mean dropping a few pounds – than it is for someone enormous to get to where they want to be. I could lose the weight I ''need'' to in less than a week. It's getting into healthy eating habits that is going to be the main challenge. It's a challenge I'm beginning to rise to though.

My height and weight gives me a BMI score of 23.5 which is well within the normal range yet my brain seems to worry a little about it. I had selected my target weight at Slimming World (I joined mainly so that I could monitor weight when I quit smoking) because it made my BMI exactly 22.5 which was dead centre – as in the middle as you could get. I'm perhaps not allowing for my body maybe being of a specific shape or design or whatever. I don't know. All I do know is that I won't be too happy again until I get rid of those few pounds. This is with me doing all of that walking too. I think that it is important to eat a little extra when exercising but perhaps it's time I took a good look at what it is I'm eating. I won't be in my thirties for much longer. Laurence Fishburne was around my age when he played Morpheus in the Matrix movie and he looks pretty lean back then. Look at him now as he approached sixty. Getting out of bed in the morning must be more of a struggle than it's ever been. Who needs to start off each day in that way?

So I have many wolves to be aware of today. There's one that wants to be fed but spread misery to myself and most I meet. There's another I know to be in there but it badly malnourished. There's also one who likes sugar. There's one that doesn't but he's a little deeper back there in the cave.

Who do I feed? These are, as they always are, the choices that I have the freedom to make each day.

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Stevie

Feeding wolves.

1217

[Lunarer]

Re: The Sobriety Experiment: Chapter Two

Wednesday, August 30th 2017 (Stepping Into the Cave)


Yesterday I got the phone call telling me that there were not enough students signed up for the creative writing course to run it. They needed seven; they only had five. They will call me if it is to start up again in the ''next block'' which I am told begins in November but this time around the class will not be running. It's a bit of a shame. Dr. Bacon likes to set me homework from time to time but is always quite specific in that there is not really any pressure to succeed with it. Things are more about looking at how I approach a situation and me recognising what is happening internally than it is about making sure that the homework is completed and handed in on time.

The creative writing thing was nothing to do with Dr. Bacon, he has no idea I was even interested in it, I just think that the process got started, I actually did sign up, and so while this task may not have been a resounding success I went for it and signed up, I documented the internal struggle. I wanted to do this course a few times in the past three years or so but money was never available to me to make it possible. It's a sign that things are improving. The absence of cigarettes from my life for an extended period means I now notice the financial benefits and always have a few pounds sitting around for something like this.

I'm not at work today. Barry the Bullet doesn't have to be called. Instead I have my college induction. In an hour or so I'll be getting the bus – an earlier but than I would normally get for work – and expect to be at the college for around a half hour before the induction begins at around half past nine. Who will be the students I will be spending the next year or two fighting side by side in radio studios with? Shaun and Paige from last year will be there and there's one other guy from the other sound production group from last year who has also signed up but the rest will all be new faces. It's an exciting time. Starting new things always is.

Speaking of starting new things – Lindsay and I had another little chat about me perhaps moving in with her. It feels as though it's going to happen. I took a quick jog up to the cave yesterday morning while Barry the Bullet and I were working in the area and felt that I could see the place for what it really is and has been. It was the place I lived when I got sober and clean. This is a fact. It is also the place I spent my last two years drinking and the place I had two of the three depressive winters I've experienced in my life. Thoughts of suicide began in my previous home but they really found their feet in this place. I never managed to turn this cave into a home. I don't think I'd have been able to had I been given ten years. I've already had four. I spent two Christmases in here alone in 2013 and 2014 even though the option to be with family was there.

The place feels cold and dirty. It's like there's something evil and sinister hidden in these walls. In some respects I feel as though a part of me did die in here on one of those winters and haunts me every time I walk through the front door and stays with me until I leave. I just could never turn this place into a home. On Friday I will have been here for four years – easily the longest time I have spent in a property since I left my children – but still the main room has not seen a lick of paint. I still have no fridge or cooker. Without the silent humming of a fridge/freezer or the humming and light rumbling of a washing machine there is a deathly silence about here. Without a current gas supply there is a total absence of any kind of warmth.

I have to be careful not to look at a potential move in with Lindsay as being the ideal way of backing out of my responsibilities here. Am I running away from dealing with this cave of mine? Am I giving up on the difficult so that I can take the easy? I don't know, but sometimes you perhaps have to cut your losses and look at the facts: I have been absolutely miserable in this cave. It has been the worst property I've known to be involved with. Never before have I struggled to make something feel comfortable. I hate it here. Maybe this is reason enough to want to get out but it is completely disconnected to moving in with Lindsay. I'd have to do that for the right reasons. Ian and Barry, English Sara and Gillon – they all recommend I keep the cave open to me as a back up option but then each of these guys leave much to be trusted and respected when looking at their own lives.

Ian is going through a tough time with his ex-girlfriend and has started the whole ''If you leave me I'll kill myself'' emotional blackmail game. Even though he's thirty five. Sara just moved in with Dennis which was for nothing more than convenience and it's working out quite well. Gillon seems to think that by getting himself a degree he'll be able to paper over the cracks in his own family life. Basically I think that we're all just great at looking at everyone else's lives without actually being able to see where the issues lie with our own.

I've decided to sleep in the cave tomorrow night. I'll be able to finish work, go visit English Sara and Dennis like I promised I would start doing on a Thursday, go to that AA meeting just around the corner from theirs, and then walk back to the cave for the night. Spending a little time in there might help me come to a decision about all of this, or at least stop me from stalling. Perhaps it'll be like tasting freedom for one final night. I don't know. When I wake up in there the next morning I won't have the same pressure to work as Barry the Bullet and I have looked through our schedule and found that there is only really enough work this week for us to go out for three days. We've done two already and so tomorrow will be our third. We'll have the debt-collecting on Friday evening as usual.

Then I'll be reverting to part time. I'll be in college from this coming week every Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday morning. I'll be available for the rest of the week and we might even start working on a Saturday morning if we have to.

Starting a course of study. Moving in with my girlfriend.

Things are about to start changing again.

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Stevie

Couldn't make the cave feel like a home if he had a million years.

1231

[Lunarer]

Re: The Sobriety Experiment: Chapter Two

Thursday, August 31st 2017 (The Radio Induction)


What a real good giggle that was yesterday. I needed that. The first day back at college after a ten week break and it's as if I never left. I had wondered if Shaun, Paige and me, having been together in last year's sound production course, might have been the only three people familiar with each other but most of the class is made up of guys (and a few girls) that were together on a media course last year and so it is the three of us who are actually the outsiders. The group is friendly though and we fit in no problems. There are three or four guys who weren't studying at all last year and so they seem a little quieter than the rest of us but even they manage to find some way of interacting at various points throughout the course of the morning's induction.

I'll be in class all day Monday and Tuesday from next week and that's it. I had expected to also be in for the Wednesday mornings but apparently not. Just the two days. This means that I can still get out to work with Barry the Bullet for three days every week – potentially at least for rain will continue to fall in this bleakest of places. Three days is roughly what we are working at the moment and have been throughout my ten week break (possibly not even if I'm honest) and so not much will change in that way. I'll still be able to earn cash – something I've had almost no experience of in my entire adult life until very recently.

We are paired with another student and this is who we will run our first show with. Next week we will be starting out on our study adventures and so will be learning the core skills needed for the production of radio programmes at this level and then the following week is Fresher Week, which I'm not really sure means as we didn't seem to have anything like that last year, but then the week after that we will be working with our partners to produce our first show. I don't know any of the details yet but I managed to get a chat with my partner, a woman we'll call Steph, and got a little information about her skills. She was one of those studying in the broadcasting course last year and so her experience and skills in the radio studio would appear to greatly exceed mine. She's produced a couple of shows and seems to know a lot about the equipment and techniques used and required for these types of projects. Should be good fun.

One thing I've had to go and do is create a Facebook account. For so long now I have managed to get by not having one but the lecturer mentioned at the start of the day that you practically need one to do this and so when the student comes around to take our details and add us as a friend make sure that you comply. If you don't have an account then you have about ten minutes to create one. I got down to creating one and so now I have gone and done it. I've become a Facebooker. Not so good. I won't feel so left out though. If there was an option not to (and there is always an option whatever we might be discussing) then I would likely miss out on bonding opportunities within the Facebook group with my peers. In some ways there is relief in me having to do this but it does feel a little as though I wonder what's next. Am I gonna start listening to happy hardcore music and begin to appreciate terrible remakes of classic movies? No – it's just a Facebook account, it doesn't mean that I am going to turn into all I disrespect about modern society.

I'll be leaving for work in a moment and won't be back in this spot for a little longer than usual. This is because I am staying at my own cave tonight. This will be the first time I've done this in six weeks. Six weeks! It's certainly the longest time I've stayed away from this place since I moved in almost exactly four years ago. While I'm there I will have something I have always kind of neglected but respect and care for deeply now – my freedom. I'll be alone in my cave with nothing and no one to answer to. It'll be different. I guess I look forward to an evening with no responsibilities for as little effort as being with Lindsay requires it nevertheless commands a little responsibility, certainly more than sitting around in the cave does.

Will this be the last night I ever sleep there? It could be. I won't know for sure until after this night is over. Tomorrow morning Barry the Bullet and I have no work and so I'll be off. This could give me a little time to start packing. How would I get my things from there to here? What do I really need to transport? Would most of my stuff not best be ditched? Taken to the local recycling centre and dumped where it belongs. Again – I'm not sure. These are questions that I expect not to linger though. I think that if this is going to happen it will happen quite quickly. I don't think that my trademark rumination will feature much at all in this decision. Again – I won't know until tomorrow.

I think that I'm going to take the trip to my home town of St. Andrews tomorrow while I have the free time. Sometimes the thinking of the past has lessened in recent days but it's still always been there. I still feel the pull. There's a reason I have to go there. If anything it'll give me some new and different roads and paths to walk. You can get bored with walking the same routes all the time and when you're covering the distances I am trying to these days you tend to see the same things many times.

Anyway – it'll soon be seven o'clock and so I guess I should go and get ready. I'll not be able to post until at least tomorrow night at the earliest due to lack of internet in the cave. I'm dreading a night in there to be honest but also looking forward to it a bit.

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Stevie

Having one last night in the cave.

1117

[Lunarer]

Re: The Sobriety Experiment: Chapter Two

Friday, September 01st 2017 (Waking In My Own Bed)


Four years ago to the day I moved into this cave. Ever since then I have been trying to make some kind of home out of it but have been quite unsuccessful – incredibly unsuccessful actually. It's gone back and forth between being an almost empty series of rooms one month to a complete shit den the next. There have been some terrible times spent in this place. It would appear Lindsay and I have made the decision. We fly back from holiday on the 09th October and that begins two weeks off college. Sure, I'll be working when I'm not at the college, but at some point over those two weeks I will be renting a van and we'll make the move. I'll be leaving this cave behind and moving in with Lindsay.

A couple of years down the line and I'll start thinking that this place wasn't all that bad. Nostalgia will kick in and it'll become just another one of those places I lived. It'll be interesting to see how quickly I forget all the shit and just fondly recall the cave as being the place I got sober. I wrote a lot of music while living here although those were during very different times. The rooms have been switched around since then and the desktop I used to record them has been binned for more than a year now. The bus shelter still sits out there but no longer holds for me the fears I once associated with it. It's just a bus shelter now. I don't seem to have the same fears when I'm in here anymore. The paranoid feelings of having to be quieter than a mouse so as not to let anyone know I'm here. I don't make excessive noise – I just don't have to be silent.

I do have some fond memories of being here. I was rather central to many friends I had at the time I moved in. Gillon is just a stone's throw from my front door and English Sara stayed just a hundred metres away until she moved in with Dennis back in January. Those two were places I once had weekly – or sometimes daily in English Sara's case – contact with. Now I see her once a week when I visit on a Thursday evening and I see Gillon just whenever I see him. Mostly, though, this time spent in here has been horrendous. It has been at times pitiable. The cave itself perhaps a symbolic reflection of how I have been during my four years here.

It managed to go and spoil itself last night and rain thus making August a bitter series of wet days. It rained at some point for twenty six of the thirty one days this year. That really is lame. Hopefully it will stay dry today as I'll be heading to St. Andrews in a little while. This will be good for me in two ways. It'll hopefully give me the nostalgia-bashing I need but will also double up as a good walking opportunity. Today begins a new month and I'll have to put in some longer walks if I want to have any chance of beating my total miles walked for August (which I'm not totally sure on what was just yet until I get to a wi-fi hotspot and work out last night's walks to and from English Sara's, probably close to seven or eight miles so around one hundred sixty for the month), which I do. Maintain the self-care while I'm in the mood and it keeps the body supple and active for trying the Moonwalk again next year – both laps, if you please.

There were a couple of strange things I noticed upon waking this morning that I don't normally get when I'm waking at Lindsay's. One of them was the lack of a cat. For weeks, if not months, now, there has been her cat waking me up to get fed. This is handy as it is at just the right time for me getting up to go to either college or work and it's noticeable her not being there. It's noticeable there not being any life at all in here. None apart from my plant of course, it's been alive and kicking in this cave of mine for fourteen months now.

The other thing was the completely frozen toes. The gas is cut off due to the gas safety check being overdue. They are scheduled to come out in two weeks but I'll have to change the date as this will conflict with a college day so for now there is no gas meaning no heating and no hot water. This doesn't really bother me much when I'm staying at Lindsay's but last night when I am actually sleeping here it is a very uncomfortable thing to wake up to. Cold all over but freezing toes.

There was something wonderful about last night though. The way I could do as I used to and put the headphones on and shut out the world. It's a little more difficult to do when Lindsay and her cat are around. I wonder when I might get the chance to do this again. Shut the world out completely. It's something not to be taken for granted.

Last night I went to visit with English Sara and Dennis. I had told myself that I would attend the AA meeting just around the corner from theirs at eight o'clock but couldn't go through with it. I almost did but stopped and watched from the distance as they arrived in the car park and walked into the church. I recognised every one of them and this was enough. It's a social club I have little time for now. This particular meeting anyway. They flock in to have a little ninety minute party very loosely based on alcohol and don't care if someone like me doesn't want to attend as a result. They say it's something in me that keeps me from going. It's not. It's something in them. This meeting, like so many of them, depends completely on conformity and being friends with each and every member who goes there. I take the long way back to the cave.

Today I am going to make my way to my home town in a bid to tackle my nostalgia. I've been planning to do it for three or four weeks now but haven't managed to get there yet. Today it is. I'll get the half past ten bus and so will have four hours there before I have to get the bus back in time to meet with Barry the Bullet to go on a debt-collecting mission this evening.

It's gonna be a fine day.

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Freezing toes.

1158

[Lunarer]

Re: The Sobriety Experiment: Chapter Two

Saturday, September 02nd 2017 (Looking For Little Stephen)


I've actually woken in my own bed for the second consecutive morning after deciding that missing the usual but I get after a debt-collecting mission at work meant that I'd be too tired for the later bus and so I would just walk up to the cave for some rest. The toes were as cold this morning despite me wearing socks throughout the night as they were yesterday morning. Having no heating and hot water is a real pain in the ass but it's only for this morning. When I get to Lindsay's we are going to Edinburgh for the day and so there is that to look forward to. Getting out of these clothes and this cave and into something warmer and more fun.

Yesterday I did spend some time (around four hours) walking around the places I grew up in St. Andrews as I had been hoping to and as I said I would. I'm supposed to be looking for Little Stephen, looking to connect with my inner child, the vulnerable part of me, the part of me that created these coping modes I talk with Dr. Bacon about at every session. The part of me that created the Detached Protector mode and the Bully and Attack and is so ready to call upon them whenever he feels threatened, which is most of the time, and in so doing has spent most of his life hampering his own chances of having meaningful connections with other human beings, hampering his own chances and my chances, and thus developing a cynic out of me. I was hoping to find him, wherever he may have been, and tell him that everything is okay and that there isn't always a need to bring out these coping modes, to explain that I understand why he has created them but that they have not done us any favours. I think this is what I am doing here anyway, why I find myself standing in St. Andrews' bus station.

Whereas on the previous times I've been here in recent weeks (the morning with Lindsay and the AA meeting and the following Monday with mum and the nieces) I had, to begin a football metaphor, played like a defensive midfield player, providing cover, going only where I need to be going. This time I was, to continue the footballing metaphor, more akin to a Lionel Messi in his prime – I covered every blade of grass. For three and a half hours I wandered the streets of this town and built up another thirteen miles for my walking total for a new month. August was my best month yet with one hundred and sixty five miles, I think – let me go check......actually it was one hundred and sixty six miles. That's still my best for a month since I started doing this back in February when I quit smoking. So this trek around St. Andrews was the beginning of what I hope will beat this total – the first thirteen miles of a new record in the making. We'll see.

So did I find what I was looking for this time?

It's a complicated question for I'm not entirely sure what it was that I was hoping to find in the first place but I did find connections with my past to some degree. I have, like I've said before, been back to this place many times since I moved away back in 1996 not long after my eighteenth birthday but I've tended to stick to the main areas – the tourist spots, the town centre and surrounding areas. This time I was more into getting around the town itself – the parts of it I grew up in. The parts of it I believe Little Stephen, my younger and vulnerable self, is still locked into and won't let go.

Upon revisiting certain places I haven't seen in years I notice a few things. I notice that I haven't always been as full of anger and hate as I am now. I don't think so anyway. I can remember many times when these emotions dominated my thinking while I was growing up but I think they came a little later. I don't think they were there from the beginning. I think that Little Stephen was hurt and so formed a protective shield around him, not quite instantly, but gradually and over time. Then he began to practice these coping modes Dr. Bacon and I talk about all the time – the Detached Protector and Bully and Attack – and then around high school age, the onset of puberty, had got them to the point where they were well-oiled machines. I was then ready to let the decline begin.

I think that my grandmother, who's old address I happened to walk by a couple of times on my thirteen miles, had higher hopes for me. My mum too. I also think that this kind of pressure was not something that I would have chosen for myself without some insight into what was happening in Little Stephen's world at the time. It all backfired when I went to high school and didn't care about any of my classes. I don't know why because I loved school when I was a young boy. I think that this was before the coping modes had been fully developed – before the hatred and anger had really taken hold. I notice that my mother, brother and sister-in-law have already started the process of expectation on the nieces and they have certain parts of their lives mapped out for them in advance. No one learns anything. How is it that mum and Gary hope the nieces learn when they seem incapable of learning life's lessons themselves?

Some parts of the town have changed. Wherever there are people there will be the need to remove something pretty and build over the top of it and St. Andrews is no different. One or two memories of mine are now houses. One of them so small it looks as though no one would realistically be able to live there but someone will be making a few bucks out of it and there's always a desperate guy needing somewhere to stay. Maybe I'm just annoyed because the town is moving on and it didn't ask for my permission first.

There's a little forest to the north of the town. When we were younger it was the perfect way to get out of the place for a while (before I discovered that alcohol works better at getting out of places better than anything else) and I decided to take a little walk up there for the first time in more than twenty years. To get there I have to follow a little path and this path begins at the back of my old friend's house. This same old friend I have still to make a Step Nine amend with. I have to walk directly past his kitchen window to get to the path that leads to the forest. If he is out the back smoking then there's no way he won't see me. He isn't. No one is. I reach the path without a hitch.

I can't tell if he even still stays there. One day I'm going to have to knock on the door to try to find out but it won't be today. I've tried to look for him on social media, just to lurk and prowl, to spy on him from a distance while I wait for the right timing, but I can't find him. This means little as there are many people these days choosing not to indulge in the Facebook pantomime (I am, sadly, no longer one of them since I had to start up a Facebook account at the college induction the other day). It just means I'll have to try finding him some other way. Stu would have been all up for it last year when I was working through these amends of mine and had I still had him as a sponsor with AA then I would already by now have knocked the door and this amend would have been carried out to the best of my ability.

Dr. Bacon sees it differently though. He think that we should practice with people we know currently, practice on those we already have connections with in our lives before we go racing into former connections. I know that Stu meant well but I do prefer this idea of approaching the amend with Greame with a lot less Detached Protector, a lot less Bully and Attack, and a lot more Healthy Adult. The only way is practice. And practice.

I guess I'd better get going. It's actually Saturday night and I'm writing about yesterday. Today Lindsay and I spent most of the day in Edinburgh so I'll have that to write about tomorrow. St. Andrews is in many ways like a mini-Edinburgh. Certainly fancies itself as being so anyway. I don't like the little town I grew up in as much as I thought I did. Sure – wherever I walked on my thirteen mile round trip I could recall a happy time, a time when, like I said: the anger and hostility within me, the hatred I have, wasn't there, and these memories make me smile but only a little – but for each and every one of these memories I could also recall a darker time, and, quite poignantly I feel, an embarrassing time. I felt quite embarrassed to be me when I was younger I think. Quite a lot.

Memories mean very little actually. I don't think that it was Little Stephen I was in St. Andrews to try to locate, or if it was, he remains very elusive indeed. Hopefully I will wake tomorrow and my thoughts will not be so much about days that have gone past me, what was then and what is not now, and more about the college next week and how I'm going to move forward with that. I've also realised that while much of my time feels as though it has flown by and been totally wasted I have actually had almost forty years, just like anyone else approaching the dreaded end of the fourth decade. It's just I didn't make the most of it.

It's great to see Leeboy joined up on Ryver WQD.

Right – I'm done here.

That's more than my nine thousand characters.

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Moving forward.

1777

[Lunarer]

Re: The Sobriety Experiment: Chapter Two

Sunday, September 03rd 2017 (Hustle and Bustle)



One of the more interesting things about Edinburgh for me, and I notice this about every city, is that we are always told in the media and in adverts how we live in such busy times, how we're always on the move, and how our new world never sleeps, but how I don't get this at all, in any way whatsoever. In fact – due to so many traffic lights and crossings, people walking all of the place in all directions almost bumping into one and other constantly showing us to be the insects we truly are: Lindsay and I spend more time standing around waiting to get to where it is we are trying to go than we do anything else. All of the things that hamper speed and chaos and being constantly on the move do exactly that.

Interestingly I think that when I am back in my town I have more opportunity to be mobile. I can move at a constant speed without having to stop every two minutes to get out of someone's way. Everyone in Edinburgh moves at a snail's pace. So, so many people are overweight. There's nothing super busy about the place. It's a slow moving city, just like every other city I've ever been to. The very nature of it stops it from being fast-paced and constantly moving. It's busy in that it's town centre has a lot going on at once, but it's all very, very slow. The idea of hustle and bustle is just a media term to get you to buy whatever product their trying to sell when they say these things. But everybody knows that anyway....

Lindsay had a bit of a drama at her placement during the week and there are times, I have to admit, when I wonder if she's going to get through it. She needs this placement signed off to get her degree and she's a hundred and fifty hours or so away from that. She's fairly dragging it out as long as possible. This is another of those times. She was supposed to finish around the middle of September (which is already late given that she had some time off when she had a drunken fall a couple of years ago and ended up in hospital with a brain haemorrhage) but absences during this placement have meant that it looks as though now she won't finish until two, or maybe even three, weeks after we come back from Spain. Around the end of October. This trip to the capital for the day is designed to get her head (and mine too) away from thinking about this placement and the drama of the week.

One of the things we are there for is to prepare for the trip in a month's time. I don't have much in the way of holiday clothing so we take some of our holiday fund with us and get me some shorts in. Obviously this means that I have to make my way into the fitting rooms. I take eight items in with me, the maximum allowed, although stealing from this store would be very straightforward I have to be honest, given the 'hustle and bustle' inside, but my shoplifting days are a good twenty or twenty one years behind me. These eight items require me to strip down to my underwear. Mirrors from all angles allow me to see myself all ways and I'm not at all happy with what I see.

Everything seems to be bulging in ways it shouldn't. I look too heavy. I look fat. I weighed myself last week and was just a pound or two over the weight I was when I reached my stopping smoking Slimming World target – a good eight pounds less than I was on the day I quit smoking and even then I wasn't overweight. There's something wrong though. I look far too big.

Lindsay says that I have some form of body dysmorphia. I'm not sure about that. Body dysmorphia, from what I can tell, seems more to be focused on a specific feature and having an abnormal, but overwhelmingly negative, view on it. Maybe if I had a tiny spot on the end of my nose but seemed to think of it as an enormous, witch-like one, maybe then I'd be guilty of having this dysmorphic condition. This is nothing specific though – it's just my whole body. This morning I stepped on the scales expecting to have added three or maybe even four pounds since my last time of weighing. I certainly look and feel as though I am heavier than I was back when I quit smoking (the heaviest I've ever been that was) and so I'll just have to watch what I'm eating from now on.

The scales give me a surprising reading. I'm a pound lighter than I was last week – just two pounds heavier than I was when I reached that Slimming World target four months or so ago. This is nothing really. I could go out on a walk this morning and come back having lost three pounds. I'd put it back on over the course of the day but it would be temporarily lost. A short walk's worth of weight. Yet it seems to be a huge problem for me. My weight hasn't changed much at all in the last four months yet it feels as though it has, feels as though weight is always being added somehow.

There were good things happened in Edinburgh though. We did manage to get some holiday clothes and have a nice something to eat. I got some ideas for Lindsay's Christmas as well. Maybe I should plan a little trip to Edinburgh myself in the coming weeks. Not close enough to Christmas that it might be suspicious. Maybe sometime just after we come back from Spain.

It's a little too early to be reflecting on 2017 but I have to say that in sobriety things do keep getting better. My first sober year, 2015, while it had its great many problems, was better than my last year of drinking by some distance. Last year was infinitely better still. This year has been better again and with the college starting up properly tomorrow morning I think it's about to gather some proper momentum. Lindsay and I moving in together? That's still on the cards although I do admit to starting to get cold feet, but I think it's more of a Detached Protector thing than it is genuine Healthy Adult concern, although there are a few things to worry about, of course.

Shaun will contact me in the morning asking if I'd like a lift into the college but by that time I'll already be on the bus. I like my morning ritual now where I get the chance to slowly ease my way into the day. There's not much in the way of a high-paced and hectic life where I come from.

It's a lot like Edinburgh in that respect.

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Moves a little more quickly than a snail on a good day.

1212

[Lunarer]

Re: The Sobriety Experiment: Chapter Two

Monday, September 04th 2017 (Keen Students)


There were times back when I was struggling to get a hold of Barry the Bullet for work over the summer there where I prayed for this day to come. I wouldn't have to rely on anyone else for stimulation – it would be provided for me by our country's educational system. Now that this day is here – day 940 since my last drink now that I mention it – I find myself wondering how Barry might be. Will he go out and work this morning like he said he would? Probably not. He'll take the long lie knowing that he can get out with me for three full days at the end of the week. I'm only in college today and tomorrow. After that it will be back to cleaning windows and so not all that much will really have changed between the last couple of months and the next. I can do both. Work and study. I wouldn't have it any other way.

It's beginning to get dark around ten past eight. That's not even the night. That's late evening. Things will only continue to get worse, darker by around a quarter hour per week from now until the dreaded clock change occurs in late October. When Barry the Bullet and I embark on our next debt-collecting collecting mission this coming Friday evening it will be dark before we finish. It won't be long before it's dark when we're starting. Eventually it will be dark so early that we'll have to stop cleaning windows before five o'clock as it will be too dark to see what we're doing. On days I'm not working at this time I will be leaving the college classroom and walking out into the pitch black and freezing cold nights. I'm sort of looking forward to them though, somehow, in some crazy way.

Yesterday I went out for a walk a little later than I normally would even though I'd done my big walk for the day as I wanted to break a couple of my personal bests. Yesterday was the best day in terms of miles walked (22.12) since the marathon back in mid June, and this made this week the best week's total (53.60m) since the week before the marathon. If that doesn't signal a return to form then I don't know what does. I do wonder, however, if this is as much to do with weight control than any kind of attempts to live a healthier lifestyle or keep myself supple enough to attempt both laps of the Moonwalk next year. Still I think of that mirror. What a nasty mirror it was. I checked myself out in the mirror in Lindsay's bathroom and it didn't appear to reveal the same Stevie. Could it be that high street stores do this deliberately? What would they have to gain? I can't see why they'd bother if they cater for all sizes and each size costs the same.

I've rambled for over five hundred words already and feel as though I haven't even started yet. What a waste of my word count. I'm going to be getting ready for my first big day at college in a few minutes. I have my lunch to make up and ensure that mu bag is ready. I have to make sure that my book is packed for on the bus. Everything should still be all in there from last week but I'm going to be making another coffee as well so either way I'm running out of minutes here.

A couple of things about tonight:

Usually on a Monday, for the last couple of months at least, Lindsay and I have been seeing a relationships counsellor. This was set to be happening every Monday evening at five o'clock, changing to seven o'clock when the space became available so that I could attend when I went back to college. Lindsay was there two weeks ago but it's been three for me. Last week and this her placement has gotten in the way and so there will be no session this evening. I can take my time coming home after college tonight. Next week placement hours have not been scheduled yet so it's a waiting game for me where Relationships Scotland is concerned. That's okay though.

Speaking of Scotland: world cup qualifiers continue this evening and we have Malta to look forward to. Having just trounced Lithuania 3-0 (which I was quite surprised by if I'm being totally honest) this is exactly the kind of game I'd normally be worried about. We have a habit of going out in ''glorious failure'' but since this campaign got off to a really poor start last September we are leaving it late in the day to peak, but peak we seem to be doing. It's been twenty years (will be by the time next year's world cup starts) since we reached a major finals in a football competition and so I meet people all the time who have little recollection of it. They've grown up knowing that it happened once but not really being able to recall it. I was of pub going age back then, just, and so in some ways I was part of Scotland's Golden Age if you like, our last one anyway.

Anyway – enough rambling. I'll leave the house at a quarter past seven which will give me half and hour to get to the hospital which is where I'll get the number 39 bus at 07:44. This will get me into the next town for around quarter past eight and I'll get off at the stop next to English Sara's. From there it is but a short five (or more likely around seven) minute walk to the college, which I should arrive at for just before half past eight. This was always the way it worked last year and I was always first in. Then came Shaun, then Paige. I don't know why but come nine o'clock it was only ever the three of us that were in class as we should have been. I don't think it's going to be like that this year. The other students seem keen.

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Also keen.

1056

[Lunarer]

Re: The Sobriety Experiment: Chapter Two

Tuesday, September 05th 2017 (Good First Week)


Ahh.. How distant the drinking days appear to be at the moment. How different things seem to be. These days seem even distant when compared with my early days of sobriety with my lack of AA participation giving this stage of my recovery a different feel, a different style. It's not that I am going out of my way to stay away from meetings these days – like I did when I first embarked on my overwhelmingly successful ninety days away from meetings thing – it's just that it doesn't seem to feature much in my life anymore. The attraction has died off. It no longer seems to be attracting me. The bullshit and drama deterring me more than the positive aspects of it are pulling me. I still haven't been to a meeting since Lindsay and I took the trip to St. Andrews a couple of Saturdays ago. Largely because it was so disappointing.

Next week I have a little trip lined up and I'm optimistic. I used to, every Sunday, go to two AA meetings. Firstly, in the early afternoon, I would make my way to the big town and attend the hospital meeting there. I have good and bad memories of it in terms of what I've listened to while sitting in those chairs. Overall though it was one of my more favoured gatherings of alcoholics. I haven't been since January so it will hopefully feel fresh again, if not exactly exciting. From there I would usually have carried my bag into town and grabbed some dinner from the Wetherspoon's, using the wi-fi to check up on emails and post on the old WQD forum I started this journal on. I then had a bus to catch which took me to my old home group. Most often I had the keys so I could get in there and get everything set up for the punters arriving, not that they ever really did to that meeting.

My home group was struggling so badly when I last was involved that we changed the format in a bid to keep it alive. I left the group when sponsorship with fellow member Stu broke down. This was all a year ago, or will be next weekend. Fifty two Sundays ago I will have last been there. Since then Stu has become a father for the first time, at fifty two, with his rent-a-Russian bride, but I know nothing of what else has happened involving people from that neck of the woods. I don't even know the sex of the baby. They tend to keep themselves to themselves, so they do. I did bump into someone who told me that it was really pathetic the last time he took the trip through and that the meeting should just be put out of its misery but I'd like to make my own mind up. It's not to see how it's going that I am attending next weekend. It's because it's been a year since I resigned from the group and so that I can reflect upon past AA relationships and connections I may have had. I'll be the judge of that myself though when I return on Sunday.

That's enough about AA though – how was my first day at college? We're starting off on a Level Seven course in the UK Education and attainment hierarchy and I've been here before – twice. Once more than ten years ago when I studied at the Music Academy in Edinburgh but quit in the April as juggling coursework plus keeping addictions going was just too demanding; and another time in 2012/13 which I quit in the March for the same reasons and because I was falling behind with the workload and placement hours. This level was too much for drinking Stevie. I can't imagine how I might have fared had I still been drinking. I would have given myself a complete disadvantage from the start as I would have been counting down the hours until I got back to the cave and seeking out drinkers and drug takers within the class from the get-go.

It's good fun. I'll give it that. It's been a fun class so far and I am still a little blown away by how inclusive the group appears to be. There are some people who already know each other and the ones new to the group have slotted in nicely. Sure, it's been little more than ice-breakers thus far and I have no doubt that the work will begin shortly but for now, this first week at least, it's been relaxed and fun. I have had a little time to work on my Facebook page and have a few ''friends'' tucked away in there. Two of them are my brother and sister-in-law, Scottish Sarah. How easy and straightforward it is to add them onto a virtual friends list when it is so incredibly difficult to actually keep in real life, 3D touch. I have to up my game in this respect. I've reached out and received responses from both of them. I have to make the next step and go to the door and knock it.

I don't know why it has to be me all the time but I guess I'm supposed to be making amends here still and so I'll make a point in doing this through the week. I can but try. I must be the only person in AA at the moment who says that his relationships with direct family members has become worse as a result of getting sober. It's insane but it is the way it is.

I've been putting the miles in this weekend and I've started this week as I mean to go on. I'll be going on holiday soon and then the fatty season will be upon us and so it is important that I keep my habits of regular walking going. I'm not far off fifty miles for the month already and I want to keep that going, keep it going so that I can beat my new record as I won't be able to for much longer. From next month it will start getting colder and shitter and this could get in the way big style. I have a pedometer winging its way here from Amazonland and this will hopefully help me to keep track of everything accurately.

I'm looking forward to another day. Tomorrow I am back to normal and will give Barry the Bullet a call tonight to make sure that he's still on the ball. Should be another chance to clean some windows. The week will be starting to take shape.

I'm getting there.

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Getting there.

1138