The Sobriety Experiment: Chapter Two

[Lunarer]

Re: The Sobriety Experiment: Chapter Two

Wednesday, December 20th 2017 (Posting in the Evening???)


A post in the evening? I've started having problems getting to sleep at night and getting up in the morning and so I didn't have time this morning to be typing anything out. For around a week now it has been going on and while I am not very pleased about it I am not going to freak out about it either. I had tremendous trouble in getting into a sleeping routine when I first got sober (easily the first big challenge in my recovery) and it took a lot of patience to stick with it for eighteen months until I managed to get myself settled. I'm just going to pop this online this evening and then hope that I can get back to posting in the mornings again from tomorrow.

Barry the Bullet and I were working today in the part of town I used to live. The place where the cave can be located. It is still empty. This is quite shocking actually. The amount of times we come across empty council properties on our travels is scary but this case is the most revealing as I know there is nothing wrong with the place. It was left empty and in need of no repairs that might have delayed someone moving in. The annual gas safety check has only just been carried out also. There can be little to stop them getting someone from the housing list in there but still it remains empty. Come this Friday that will be six weeks since I moved out of there and into Lindsay's own cave and so it is starting to become very obvious where much of this criticised wastes of council money goes, if it wasn't obvious before (which it really was!).

When this Friday comes I will have reached the longest time I've spent away from the cave in terms of consecutive nights. I went a six week spell last year. Now I have reached six weeks again but this time I have nowhere else to go. I have to admit that I probably would have stayed in the cave a couple of nights over the last six weeks had it still been available to me. My Detached Protector was kind of asking it of me a few days ago. Things are better the way they are at the moment though.

I went round to my brother's last night. I kind of had to if I wanted to go to my friend English Sara's tomorrow after work like I'd said I would as the gifts for her Christmas had been delivered to my brother's, along with some for Lindsay, last week (or perhaps even longer ago than that). This was my way in. I am coming to pick up gifts and get them out of your way. That's what we like to do sometimes, isn't it!? To make it out as though we are doing them a favour.

What is kind of fucked up is that it was another case of me going round to my brother's to pick up a bag from the back garden. No one was in and so when I contacted him during the day to say that I would like to come round at some point in the evening he explained that he wouldn't be able to meet me but could leave the stuff for me to collect. It's another disappointment really. I was hoping to tell Dr. Bacon all about this recent reconnection with my family but it isn't working out like that. He'll be happy about the effort though. It's about me reaching out and pushing myself, taking risks, and I guess I've been a little bit better at doing this with regards to family stuff in the month of December when compared with other months of 2017.

My next session with clinical psychologist Dr. Bacon is tomorrow afternoon at half past three. I'll have to cut work with Barry the Bullet short maybe around twelve tomorrow afternoon. Today was a full day but tomorrow just a half. Before I head to meet Dr. Bacon I am taking a little trip to the college to meet with one of my fellow students to record a mini podcast. This is some extra work which is what we've been advised to try to get into the habit of doing from the start of next year. I'm glad to be getting started on a new semester when we get back to class in January as I will find my diary fully booked again. Class work and extra projects.

I did find out one of the reasons why some people are still working on these Assessed Shows that I finished off last month and how most students are now going to come in after the Christmas break and still have some of this work to do. Resits and remediation. Shaun was letting the lecturer hear one of his assessments and at the end of it he passed it. Shaun sits down next to me.

Shaun – ''At last!''

Stevie – ''Was that your second attempt?''

Shaun – ''Third.''

I managed to pass all of mine on the first attempt and had never really considered that some might have had to record their live shows multiple times before getting the green light and passing them. Must be frustrating.

Sometimes recently I've been wondering what I might actually do over the next two weeks while I don't have college or work to keep me busy. I do rely heavily on both of these things each week to keep me occupied. A life without them seems quite difficult to imagine. It'll be my reality for a couple of weeks in a few days' time. My last day of work will be this coming Friday and then I don't start back at the college until January 08th , not getting back out to work until the Wednesday of that week (January 10th) so I had better try to think of something to do.

I would like to have thought that I might have picked up the guitar again after what is fast becoming the longest spell I have been without it. Now they sit in the spare room and pretty much gather dust. I did say when I was drinking that I wanted a life completely different from that which I at the time had, I just didn't think that it would be THIS different, a life in which I don't see my nieces and doesn't in any way feature playing music. I can't see me picking it up anytime soon but never say never.

We had our Secret Santa yesterday and things went well. I was working today and that went well.

Tomorrow I have some work in the morning before a podcast session with the Shaman at the college and then a session with Dr. Bacon – my clinical psychologist.

All of which I think will go well.

We're closing in on the Christmas break now.

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Stevie

Closing in on that Christmas break.

1193

[Lunarer]

Re: The Sobriety Experiment: Chapter Two

Thursday, December 21st 2017 (Thinking of the New Year)



I've enjoyed this week leading up to Christmas. It hasn't felt altogether festive or anything like that but it's been good. Being in the college on both Monday and Tuesday for the first time in a few weeks was decent. I still can't believe that there are so many people in the class still with so much to do to stay afloat. Makes me feel really pleased with myself for doing the work and making sure that there is no stress, or at least as little as possible, going into the Christmas holiday. I can come back in two weeks knowing that we start Semester Two in a couple of weeks and that I have nothing outlying before that. I can look forward to the second half of the first year of my studies in radio and broadcast media.

Things could be hotting up at college next year. The lecturers say that those who come to class and do the work will by the end of the degree program be the average students in the pile. There will be nothing separating each and every one of them. It's those students that go out there and put in the extra work that will be the ones that benefit from the course long term. We've got to start doing more. I've pretty much raced ahead, done all of the coursework, and then put my feet up where the college is concerned and just went out to work with Barry the Bullet and forgotten all about my studies. Next semester I have to be putting work in on the days I am not in college. Not just work into assignments given to us by the lecturers but extra work too.

This extra stuff is where the college will be hotting up this coming year, I think. Today I will be leaving work at lunchtime to go and make a podcast with the Shaman and I'm looking forward to that but in the new year there are four of us, the four sports fans, who are looking into possibly taking technology into local football grounds and attempting to broadcast live. We are told that this has been done at university but never before from college students doing their Level Seven. We are looking at changing the rules of the game here. What an idea though. Streaming, probably through the college radio's Facebook page, live football matches with the possibility of player and manager interviews afterwards. It's quite exciting to think about. Work on this will begin as soon as we return from the Christmas break.

We were given our new partners for the second semester – those we'll be broadcasting with every week. I was given a girl I've not spent much time with in this first semester so I'm not sure how that will go. There is a Monday morning group as well which will be a sport show and my name is down for that. There will be four of us doing that one. This means that I am the only student who will be helping out with two shows and so the only student who will be presenting on both days we are in the class. College will start becoming interesting again in the new year. It's been good.

Aside from that I have been working and this has been helped along quite nicely by incredibly mild weather and temperatures for this time of year. It always makes things go a little more smoothly when the sun is out. It's not warm, not by a distance, but it isn't terribly cold. It's acceptable, pleasant, workable. It's been pretty good since I haven't felt the pain in the hands more than a couple of days at the start of the month when it was really painful. This week has been easy so far. We just have today and tomorrow to go, plus a debt-collecting mission tomorrow evening (which will be cold, there's no getting away from it) and that will be another year ticked off. Next year the business turns ten years old, not that it's actually officially still a business or anything . . .

Lindsay had said that it was entirely my choice whether or not we went to my mum's on boxing day again this year and I'm still undecided although I have to say it would probably be the healthy adult thing to be doing. On Christmas morning her family are coming to the house and her dad will be picking up her son first to bring him here. Things are such that I have not met Lindsay's only child yet and so I am to be vanishing out of sight for a while in the morning while they have their little get-together for an hour or so. I'll likely just head out for one of my walks and then return when I get the text message or phone call telling me that the coast is clear. It's not an ideal situation but it won't always be like this. The situation is just as it happens to be for this Christmas. Next Christmas things will be better.

I still have a way to go if I want to reach my total of fifteen hundred miles walked for the year, or since I started back when I quit smoking in early February but if I keep going as I am there is more than enough time. I only need to walk around five miles per day for every day for the rest of December and I'll reach this goal. Unfortunately the way I keep track of it requires me to log in the routes I've walked afterwards and so nowhere close to every step I make throughout the day is logged. Only the God of my Understanding might know how many steps I've walked this year and so what my total distance walked might be closer to but I am happy with being able to log it the way I do.

My final Dr. Bacon session of the year will take place this afternoon in the usual room in the usual hospital and there will be plenty for us to be talking about. We're moving away from the diagnosis phase, away from pattern spotting and behaviour analysis, and more into helpful methods, behaviour changing tools and tactics to get me out there taking more risks and trying a little harder to build my life into what I would like it to be. In 2018 I have quite high hopes for the work that we might be doing. I think that there could be some really significant changes made in the next twelve months. He said that I had done really well in making the changes I have so far, that I had likely come as far as I possibly could have without doing any of the difficult stuff. Now the time is drawing nearer to be trying my hand at this difficult stuff.

Just another thing to look forward to next year.

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Stevie

Thinking about the new year with optimism.

1200

[Lunarer]

Re: The Sobriety Experiment: Chapter Two

Friday, December 22nd 2017 (Session Twenty)


It's not yet. Friday, I mean. It's actually still Thursday, December 21st, around half past ten at night. Since I have been having some issues in rising in recent mornings I have decided to write this evening so that there can be a tomorrow's post. If I don't do it now, and I have a late morning when it comes, then I'll be struggling to get a post written in time for tomorrow night since I'll be out working all day and not getting home until late. I would then have it carrying on to Saturday morning which will likely be another busy one and so tonight it is. Keep it simple. One might ask why the fuck I feel the need to post every single day and I wouldn't really know how to answer that one. I just do. I've written in this journal every day of 2017, even when I was in Spain, and so it would be a shame to stop now just because I couldn't be arsed or because I felt like letting a return to poor sleeping patterns win over me.

There were many things happen today but the most notable two were the Dr. Bacon session and visiting English Sara to hand in her Christmas present. English Sara has been living at a different address this past eleven months than she was the rest of the time she's been involved in my story. She used to live in a block of flats directly next to the cave when I stayed in the next town. I used to pop in most days, often going through spells where I would nip in every day, and things are not like this anymore. I probably won't see her again now until we're well into January. It's a bit of a shame.

One of the scary things about having an addictive past, a past in which I acted and used so compulsively for so long that it became very habitual, is that it takes so long to find other ways of coping. As I sit with Old Dennis and English Sara I can't help but think about what things were like back when I ''lived'' in the cave and she stayed next door. It makes me think positively about things such as drinking and smoking and being by myself. I couldn't say things like that in Alcoholics Anonymous, they would moan that I was trying to convince myself to drink this Christmas, but I can tell you guys for you guys know that this is not what I am doing at all. I am merely missing something that I don't have anymore, pining for something that no longer exists. I am grieving for something that was just fantasy. I always say that it is like the battered wife finally breaking free from the abusive husband but then finding she misses that life because they were married for so long.

I don't want to smoke either. It was just easier to. It's in my nature to seek solitude at times. It's the Detached Protector part of me. It's part of my Borderline Personality Disorder. I guess that to say it is my nature is inaccurate then. It's just something practised until it is the norm. It's something Little Stevie learned to defend himself and then used to the extreme. This little bit of nostalgia regarding it is not a desire to drink but is more just a little reminder that I am not all that far into this journey just yet. I am still a sober baby.

Bacon tells me that it is time for a review since this is our twentieth session. That's quite surprising actually. It seems like there are sometimes great distances and gaps between our time but by the time we reach the one year mark we will have twenty one sessions under our belt. Last time he said something to me that stuck and I've mentioned it a couple of times over the last fortnight, thought about it even more so. He said that I had done well in the time I have been sober. That I have probably come as far as I likely could have without doing any of the difficult stuff.

For someone who has thought that some of the ''easy'' stuff I've already done was quite difficult this wasn't easy to hear. Then I think about it for a while. The biggest thing I find in the rooms of Restoration and AA that people have that I don't want is exactly this. No one really does the hard stuff. From what I've seen on my travels they don't even do it in ACA, the Adult Children of Alcoholics and Dysfunctional Families. If I don't want to end up like that then this is the way I'm going to have to go. I'm going to have to do the difficult stuff.

What Dr. Bacon means by the difficult stuff is me allowing myself to be vulnerable. This is indeed tough. We always struggle when we are trying to do work around this. To Little Stevie – vulnerability and stupidity are bedfellows, totally synonymous and inseparable, and Dr. Bacon feels that getting around this type of thinking is important for me. He has me doing things that make me feel stupid. They make me feel stupid because they make me feel vulnerable. They being out the Critical Parent in me. It's like that episode in Friends when Chandler makes that deal where he can't say anything sarcastic. That is what this is like. My Critical Parent mode feels like Chandler Bing must have at that point. Unable to get off the leash.

This is what we're doing here. We're trying to bypass the Detached Protector and Bully and Attack modes, and sneak past the Critical Parent, so that it is my Healthy Adult and Little Stevie who are the main two parts of me conscious in the room at any one time. This is when it can feel silly though. We often have to picture an imaginary Little Stevie, a young boy version of myself, sitting in a chair that Dr. Bacon places in the room beside us. I am then to take up the role of the Healthy Adult and speak only from that perspective. This afternoon he wants me to encourage this imaginary little boy and gently support him, tell him that the work we are doing here is necessary both in helping him to learn how to relax and refrain from activating any of the more destructive defensive modes and me to learn how to better be able to parent him and offer him the support he never had growing up.

It's up to me to mature his emotional state. I get it, and it's going to be revolutionary for me if we can pull it off, but it doesn't half feel stupid talking to an imaginary younger version of me sitting in a chair.

As long as I remember that it feels stupid because it makes me feel vulnerable.

Tomorrow will be the last working day for many of us and myself and Barry the Bullet are included in that. It'll be a tough day but after tomorrow I get two weeks off to recharge the batteries.

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Stevie

One last big push to go.

1239

[Lunarer]

Re: The Sobriety Experiment: Chapter Two

Saturday, December 23rd 2017 (The Edinburgh Christmas Market)


Good morning. How incredibly mild the weather is still. Last night's debt-collecting mission was like a summer's night, albeit one in which dark replaced the light evenings we get during the warmer months. It was crazy how mild it has been this December. I'd say it's the second warmest December I can remember although I know how fragile our memories are and how they can play tricks on us, and do play tricks on us, all the time.

This is as prepared as I've ever been over a Christmas period. Again, memory could be fucking with me, but I don't recall having been as prepared as this, at least since I was with my partner and children all those years ago. Dr. Bacon says that this is something we may, and he did say ''may'' – he didn't say ''definitely'' – talk about when our sessions resume in the new year. We may talk about the situation with my children and how I haven't seen them in years. Do I want to have any kind of relationship with any of them in the future? I don't know quite how that conversation will go, if it does at all, and if there's one thing I find interesting about talks with him it's how they never seem to go how I think they'll go beforehand.

Maybe it's this lack of involvement in my children's lives that makes Christmas so difficult for me to get into. Perhaps it's not obvious but is working away somewhere deep below the surface. It's the time for families, after all. It's possible but I don't think it's that. It's not that I'm not enjoying this festive period at all – it's just. . . I don't know, I just can't get into it for some reason. It feels forced. Lindsay and I went to the firework display and the official start of Christmas with the parade and the turning on of the Christmas lights at the town centre a few weeks ago and it seems like a long, long time ago now. Like it was far too early. The Christmas Creep perhaps ruining the celebrations a little too much now.

Last year things were a little different and I was loving Christmas. I don't know what was all that different. I guess that Lindsay and I had only been going out for four months and so that was our first Christmas together and things were exciting. Also I seemed to have more involvement with the college. This term I've been up to date with the work for so long that I've had loads of days off. Last year we all seemed to be working together and so I was in all the time. We had a festive project to do in the two weeks leading up to Christmas. This year there have been no such festive projects.

I don't know if it's any of this either though. Maybe it's more to do with social politics. Maybe it's because I can see how much this time of year highlights the differences between the rich and the poor, and by rich I don't mean those with billions in the bank, I mean your average family who has more money than they need. The people who don't think that they are rich. Alain de Botton once said to me in a documentary that wealth is not an absolute, that it's relative to desire. When we are content with what we have then we could be considered rich, regardless of how little we may have; whenever we are found in constant want we may be considered poor, no matter how much we may actually possess. It's a shame that so many people fit into the latter category but I appreciate that they have been groomed this way since birth and continue to be through television and things like Facebook.

This is probably the biggest reason I don't feel very Christmassy at the moment. The inequality shines through more than at any other time of year. Not just the inequality, I guess it shines through at any time of year, but what is most evident over the Christmas period is how little people give a fuck about equality. In fact – I don't really care so much about it anymore. I understand that there is one per cent of us that has the same amount of wealth as the other ninety nine per cent but the same ninety nine per cent that moan about this constantly are the exact same ninety nine per cent that go and give so much of their money directly to that one per cent by buying into what they sell. The same people that moan are those who keep it happening. It's time I stopped caring too. Just let it happen until the bubble bursts. If I can help speed it up just that little bit then I am doing my bit for the humans of the future, even though they will just start over and create the same scenario all over again. Because we're dumb like that.

So this afternoon Lindsay and I are heading to Edinburgh – the City of Selfishness. This will be my second trip there in December. We're going to the famous AA meeting to check it out. Lindsay has been in AA for years so she's been to this meeting many times but never at this new venue. I am optimistic but am also aware that it is an AA meeting and so is incredibly limited in its insights about alcoholism. A bunch of amateurs trying to pass off as experts. I don't sound very optimistic, do I?

After this we will head out for something to eat, probably within a quarter mile of some guy out on the street begging who hasn't eaten all day, and then we'll make way for the Christmas Market itself. This will perhaps be my final chance to get into the mood before all is lost. Tomorrow I will be heading to church in the morning before trying to enjoy the last of the time before the actual day itself is upon us.

I was speaking with English Sara and Old Dennis the other night about what they were up to this year and they are going to her son's for the day. She hardly sees her son these days so at least there's that, I guess. She'll be getting to see her son. I might even get to see my mum. I guess Christmas is good for something then. It creates guilt within families that aren't very close about not seeing each other all year.

It's a shame it only does it for one day though.

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Stevie

Still searching for the festive spirit.

1148

[Lunarer]

Re: The Sobriety Experiment: Chapter Two

Sunday, December 24th 2017 (Disaster on the Christmas Weekend)


Yesterday was a bit of a disaster. Lindsay and I were supposed to be getting up and going to Edinburgh for the Christmas Market, grabbing something to eat, and generally having a good old slice of festive fun. Before all of that we were going to be catching an AA meeting in the early afternoon. I was more into this idea than was Lindsay. It was the cause of the disaster that was to come. Yep – an AA meeting causes a problem!!

We had figured the night before that in order to make the meeting's start at two o'clock we would have to leave our town at around eleven and, even though I have been struggling to rise from bed a little more this last week than has been typical for the rest of the year, I manage to get myself up for before eight. Lindsay, on the other hand, doesn't get up until twenty past ten. We end up getting a bus to the station at twenty five past but the time all of the fucking around has been done and we miss the bus to Edinburgh by five minutes. Lindsay doesn't care. She wasn't fussed for the AA meeting. As long as we got through there for the Christmas market then all would be good and well.

This whole way of thinking left a sour taste in my mouth. I decided to try out some of Dr. Bacon's suggestions. I decided to put my point across. Decided to try to be rational as opposed to detach from this or get angry about it. Tried to summon the Healthy Adult Mode rather than the Detached Protector or Bully and Attack.

Stevie – ''Looks like the next bus isn't for forty more minutes so we'll miss the meeting. I just want to say before we go any further that I'll get over it but at the moment I'm pretty pissed off with you for not being ready and us missing this bus.''

There. I figured that was the best way of handling it. It put my point across. It claimed responsibility for the way I was feeling and an acknowledgement of the fact I was trying to change this. It wasn't aimed towards causing offence. I thought I'd done an okay job. Had this not been such a regular thing (we miss planned buses quite a lot and every now and again it results in something like this happening, only usually I decide to keep my frustrations inside, go into Detached Protector mode and stay there until it goes away) then it might not have been as bad.

I did not get the reaction I was hoping for, whatever that may have been. Instead it became quite confrontational and Lindsay ended up walking away from me and we didn't go to Edinburgh after all. I went to the local greasy spoon to give this some thought. What was it I said? I thought that I had done pretty well. I didn't moan, I tried not to be too harsh, it was in keeping with the facts. I couldn't immediately see where it was that I had gone so wrong.

Then I wondered about something. I know that in AA we are asked to look only at our own parts of any situations, and I can see why they say this, but to do only this is to pass up the chance of learning to empathise with another person as well as we might be able to. I don't know exactly what Lindsay does with her psychologist but it doesn't seem to be along the lines of what Dr. Bacon and I are doing. I appreciate that things very much depend upon luck in these cases. Lindsay was given someone who was finishing off their training at the time so has only this year qualified whereas I was paired with a veteran, someone who is mentoring others, who has years of experience in the field, (but not too much, if you know what I mean), and so I think that, in comparison, I have a much better outline of exactly what it is we are doing in our therapy sessions, individually from week to week and as a long-term thing too.

Maybe I'd do better to look at things from Lindsay's point of view. I have not been directly diagnosed as being a Borderline patient (Borderline Personality Disorder) – although it has been hinted – but I do understand many of the symptoms and how they come about and where they originate. I get that we, as ''Borderlines'', tend to react very poorly to criticism and sometimes believe that small situations, especially with those with whom we are close, can resuscitate those feelings of abandonment that we are constantly plagued with. Perhaps there was a little of that going on here. It's possible that I am beginning to learn about healthy adult responses in therapy whereas Lindsay is not, given the different approaches that her therapy seems to be taking.

I don't know. Maybe I'm still just as emotionally immature and underdeveloped as I've always been. It's done now. A continuation of the same old patterns. It's not as if I can pick up the phone any time I want to and ask Dr. Bacon what the ideal thing to do or say would be in any situation that crops up in my day-to-day personal life. I guess it's better when these things happen with those who know me but I guess I am seeing the causes of me ending up where I am and things turning out for me as they have. People who don't know me will no doubt find me a little too much when I have one of my moments.

I have tried hard this year to get into the festive spirit but for some reason it has been much more difficult than I would have expected. I have no doubt that the situation with my family has something to do with it whether I will consciously allow myself to think this way or not. I don't yet know if I'll see any of them over the Christmas period and that does suck. Lindsay will be seeing all of her family tomorrow. They, including her son, will be coming here tomorrow morning for a spell. Because I have never met her son before, and given how complicated that whole situation is, we have decided that I should make myself scarce. Since we don't have our own transport I will just have to get out there and wander the empty streets. At least for ninety minutes or so.

I don't mind walking, and I don't think that it'll be particularly cold tomorrow either. I just wonder how Little Stevie might feel about this. It is he Dr. Bacon would want me to think about. My adult self can take it. Little Stevie might feel a little like he's been shunned again, like this is a little too close to spending Christmas day on his own again. I am hoping I can help him to see that this is not the case at all.

Whatever happens I know I'll come out the other end fine. I don't know what's happened to Christmas for me. I know that it isn't, in theory at least, just another day. When I go out walking tomorrow morning there will not be a soul on the street. It will be very different from other Mondays. It's a shame the meeting in the next town wasn't a little earlier or I would have just walked the eight miles through.

It's not though.

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Stevie

Merry Christmas

1298

[Lunarer]

Re: The Sobriety Experiment: Chapter Two

Monday, December 25th 2017 (Stevie's Third Sober Christmas)


So here we are again. Another Christmas. It's been really difficult to get into again this year. Very soon people all over the world will be waking to find out which colour of the new iPhone Santa has brought them. Being young seems to be really boring these days. I think that I spent so long this year trying not to let shops and television adverts tell me that I should be into Christmas early that I maybe left it too late. Now that it is here the bubble always quickly bursts and it all seems anticlimactic again. This is why the build up is so important I think. The build up IS Christmas. Without a good build up in the two weeks beforehand it can be quite a difficult thing to get into.

Yesterday turned out to be a pretty good little day and I was at church three times in one day for probably the first time in my life. I went to church at eleven o'clock (seems to be becoming a regular thing on a Sunday now) and then in the evening I was at the AA meeting before Lindsay and I went to the same church I had been to in the morning for a midnight service. It was all pretty good fun. The eleven o'clock service featured a makeshift nativity play and ended up being pretty cool, as well as being perhaps the catalyst for my Christmas cheer, at long last.

The AA meeting was good too. There were twelve of us made the effort to get ourselves there on Christmas Eve and this again helped me to get into the mood, even though Christmas was not mentioned much at all during the meeting. The same thing came to me as did when I went to the Restoration Christmas lunch a couple of weeks ago. I was alerted to the fact that not everyone will be having a great time just because it's Christmas. For some of us it is a pretty lonely time and you don't have to go digging too far to get this feeling from people in the church room tonight.

Another thing I notice now when I am in AA meetings is this certainty from people who share about their lives that they have done all of the hard parts and got sober. I feel really lucky by having Dr. Bacon to work with. Because the sharer mentions a little about his sponsor and life in the AA Twelve Step program the others in the meeting share a little on their own experiences. I feel as though much of what they say totally contradicts what Dr. Bacon is trying to work through with me. This is one of the problems AA will always have, I guess: we come in pretty useless at knowing how to live life and then expect to learn how to do so by taking lessons from someone who has never really learned to. I don't feel better or superior to anyone in this room but I am incredibly grateful that I have taken the route I have and that I have found psychology.

This way I can go about doing the hard stuff, which is what will be happening in 2018. Everyone else in this room has convinced themselves that the hard stuff has been done. I don't think so. I think, like me, they have only continued to do all of the easy stuff and it feels a lot better so we'll talk about that and that's that. It's up to me to just put the work in this year in getting through the hard stuff and share about that at times when I am in the rooms. I am really glad that I have Dr. Bacon and really have him to thank for me not being contented with where I have managed to get to now and just being happy for staying there, for letting me know that there are harder parts to come. It was a good meeting though. I felt connected to the fellowship this Christmas.

Something else I did to help get into the mood rather late in the day was to watch a few Christmas movies. This was an experience. I had never actually seen the movie Elf before. Nor had I ever watched How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Another I had never watched was The Santa Clause. Only the God of my Understanding knows exactly what I have been watching over Christmas periods past but whatever it was I know that I was the only person I knew who hadn't seen many Christmas movies. The old ones, yes (but in saying that I have still not to this moment ever watched
Miracle on 34th Street or It's a Wonderful Life) but nothing too new and up to date. I don't know what I used to watch when I lived with my children over the Christmas period but it was none of those films I've just mentioned.

I think if there was one thing I felt in watching these movies it was a connection with childhood. I guess that this is one of the things Dr. Bacon is trying to get me to do in therapy – trying to connect with childhood. My own childhood and childhood in general. I won't be adding any of these Christmas movies onto my list of films to take to a desert island (well, you never know actually) but when next year comes and all of these movies are advertised as coming on the television again I will think back to this year.

In a little while I will have to make myself scarce and head out for a walk while Lindsay's family comes to visit. It's not that I've done anything wrong. It's just that I haven't yet met her fifteen year old son and we don't want to spring this on him and certainly not today of all days. The time will no doubt come but he will be in this flat in less than two hours from now and so at that time I shall not be. It's a shame we don't have our own transport as I would have just made my way to the next town. It's actually been raining quite a lot yesterday and it is still raining yet so I am going to be much like a little drowned rat by the time twelve o'clock comes and I can get back here into the warmth and dry. It's getting the miles up while we are so close to the end of the year though.

Now I can't connect to the internet and so will have to post this once all of the Christmas cafuffle is over and done with.

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Stevie

Will post this later on. . .

1155

[Lunarer]

Re: The Sobriety Experiment: Chapter Two

Tuesday, December 26th 2017 (Boxing Day Dinners)


Now that I think about it – it has been a pretty good Christmas. I haven't seen any of my family yet, not that there are many members of it, but mum is hosting a dinner this afternoon as she always does on Boxing Day and I know she would like for both Lindsay and I to be there. It's just that it doesn't look like it'll be happening. Maybe next year. When we moved my things from the cave in the next town into this flat we rented a van for the long weekend. Again, last month, we rented a car to take a trip to Glasgow to watch Swedish progressive death metal band Opeth. On both occasions I think Lindsay warmed to the idea of having our own transport. Now that we are living together and seem to be moving forward as a couple we are thinking more along the lines of having things like a car. Lindsay finishes her nursing training as soon as this current placement is done, which should be the second week in March at this rate, and then she'll be in full time work. I'll still have a way to go with my own studies but will hopefully still be cleaning windows with Barry the Bullet. Together a car is not an impossible thought. If this turns out to be the case then next year we should be able to drive to my mother's for Boxing Day dinner.

As things stand at the moment, however, this is the one thing preventing us from attending. I say that, but I think that there is definitely something a little more sinister at work and it's something I should be careful of. Part of me wants to not go just so that I can keep the distance between us as it is. That I know that my mother wants us all there under one roof and that she is going to all the effort to make dinner (and she does always put a lot of effort into it) fuels my fire further. If I could manage to get out of attending this dinner then it might go a way to teaching her what it would be like in the future to not have me in her life. In many ways this feels like a desperate last stand for attention against my mother – she who has been so absent for so long in my life. Always there but never really ''there''.

I am wondering if this is what a healthy adult would do. This is one of the ways in which I enjoy not having an AA sponsor. The sharer at the Christmas Eve meeting mentioned many times how he would face a problem in his life, call his sponsor, and then he would get the answer. It was supposed to come across as evidence of the power of an all-seeing; all-knowing sponsor and the importance of fellowship with the secret society that makes up the rooms but all it showed me was that this guy is, and probably always will be, completely dependent on another person. With Dr. Bacon we do things differently. We try to teach me what healthy adults would do and I go about it. I make mistakes, loads of them (I was never shown how to be a healthy adult when I was a child and so how could there not be problems and mistakes when I go about trying to become one now?), but it all comes back to the same thing: I am doing the learning! There is no sponsor waiting to tell me how to do everything. There is only a psychologist waiting to hear about my experiences and then figure out with me which parts of me were most active and what I might have done differently.

When you say ''psychologist'' in an AA meeting people tend not to like it. Or they think instantly of ''CBT'' (need I point out that this refers to Cognitive Behavioural Therapy? I doubt it but I just did so there you go, maybe it's word count related when I do things like that) which shows the limit of knowledge in the rooms. I feel as though I have to mention Dr. Bacon at times as it's a big part of my journey. I don't go into what we go into. I certainly won't be telling the rooms about the different modes that make up my personality – they'd think me mad, and it's got nothing to do with sobering up – but I feel it's my responsibility to mention to the newcomer that AA does not have all the answers it says it has. It's a short term solution.

Just look at what was said here the other day (on the Ryver site, if you're reading this on My Way Out then you won't have read it). One of our forum members had an episode with his sponsor who has now gone back out drinking. He had six years of sobriety. Nothing really. I get that any one of us can potentially go back out and drink and that if we do it could begin a really turbulent episode for us where we struggle to get back into a sober way of life but it was something our forum member said that chilled me to the bone. He said that he was now looking for a new sponsor.

Nothing wrong with that, I guess, but is it not a little like the person who has just had a romantic breakdown and instantly goes on the search for a replacement? Perhaps it's a little worse actually. Maybe it's a feeling of not having someone to tell us what to do when things get tough and us having become dependent on that in the rooms of AA. Members of the fellowship say that there is nowhere else you can have someone at the end of the phone waiting to give you guidance – and this is true – but this is one of the reasons I feel better about having a psychologist rather than a sponsor. I have to wait until the 18th January before I can next discuss what is happening in my life. It teaches me to be self reliant. To be independent. To be sober.

So how I approach this situation with my family this Boxing Day will be interesting, as will my motivations for doing so. It won't be someone out there who advises me on what I should and could be doing, it'll be something inside of me. A mode. Which mode is entirely up to me at the end of the day although I do have the security of knowing that it couldn't possibly be expected of us to travel all that way by taxi and there is no public transport today so we are kind of rooting.

But then that's just my Detached Protector talking.

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Stevie

Talking shit.

1179

[Lunarer]

Re: The Sobriety Experiment: Chapter Two

Wednesday, December 27th 2017 (Reflecting on a Boxing Day Dinner)

I would have liked to have still been in bed at the moment but that damn cat wouldn't let me sleep any longer, jumping on me like excited children may have been on their parents a couple of mornings ago. This is not for presents but breakfast. She is now sitting in the usual spot on top of the digital television receiver not giving a shit that she has just disturbed me from a most enjoyable and welcome slumber. Add to that the toothache I have been experiencing and I am now up and fully awake, although in good spirits.

Yesterday we weren't sure if it would be possible to go to my mum's for our dinner. It would be possible, of course, she only lives a few miles away, but to taxi it there and back would be the better part of eighty quid and that was just too much. If I really wanted to see my family over the festive period like I constantly claim to then this amount of money would not be a problem but in the end my auntie picked us up and dropped us back home again and refused to take anything for it despite my attempts. It ended up being a really good afternoon/evening.

I was trying to work out how often I'd seen everyone this year. My mother I saw just last month when she came into the college to be interviewed for one of my Assessed Shows for the radio. Before that I saw her in August when she picked me up to head to St. Andrews to go to the annual market with my nieces. Prior to that I think it would have been Oldest Niece's birthday back in early February and before that it would have been Christmas. There was one other time during the summer as we met up and she gave me sponsorship money for the Walk the Walk marathons for breast cancer. A total of around four or five times from one Christmas to the next. It's not too bad when I think about it.

With regards to me nieces I saw them back in August at the market in St. Andrews and before then it was back in March, once in February, and then Christmas. There were two occasions throughout the year when I bumped into Youngest Niece with her grandmother when down the town and we stopped for the briefest of chats but there hasn't been much in the way of contact at all over the course of 2017. It has been the same, even worse actually, with my brother and Scottish Sarah. I saw them yesterday but then haven't seen them since March, February, and then last December for this very day last year.

So we arrive at dinner not really knowing what to expect. I think that everything would probably have been a little worse had we been the last to arrive but we managed to beat most people there and so only my mum and her partner were there when we got there. I am happy to say that things were not in any way awkward. Until my brother and his family arrived twenty minutes or so later.

Absence is supposed to make the heart grow fonder but in this case it has made the heart pretty unsure of what to say or even how best to make eye contact. I didn't send or receive as much as a text message of Christmas wishes over the period and so I definitely did sense some uneasiness in the air and at the table, uneasiness that seemed to subside gradually as the dinner progressed but didn't at any point completely leave the room.

What is awkward for adults is water off a duck's back for children and the nieces acted as if they had seen me only yesterday rather than four and a half months ago. I ended up eating most of my dinner with a girl on each lap, just as it has always been at Christmas or at any time over any dinner I've had in the same room as them since they've been born. I was tired by the end of it.

It worked out really well. I did find things a little awkward with my brother and sister-in-law and we left things without having a definitive plan as to what's happening next as I might have liked and they left early to go to an Aladdin pantomime. This was a little distressing but left the rest of us with some time without two little girls jumping around and getting all the attention. It also gave Lindsay and little bit of time to get to better know my family which is something that hasn't really happened before. She met them all when they were mostly steaming drunk at Gary's wedding in September last year and then again last Christmas and then hasn't really seen any of them since. It's a really slow process, getting to know my family. It's a shame but I'll take it over nothing.

In the end things went really well. The conditions weren't absolutely perfect but they were certainly very good. Mum is planting trees in the garden over the next couple of weeks and I don't start back at college and work until the week of the 08th January so I'll be sure to give her a call and go help her with that. As far as things go with my nieces and brother I will likely have to push that one myself although having had this little nudge that is Christmas will probably make this a little easier providing I don't leave it a long time.

Dr. Bacon has been proved right in most of the things we've talked about regarding my family. It does seem to very much be just a case of a bunch of people who don't really know how to communicate with each other and don't know how best to ask for what they want, from themselves and each other. A collection of people for which intimacy and emotional availability are alien and unknown concepts, or at least perhaps more underdeveloped than we'd all prefer. It doesn't matter whether or not I believe other people to suffer from this also, or even if I believe that it is becoming more commonplace through the generations, as we only ever look at me. Since I am the guy in therapy I guess that I'll be the guy who has to do the reaching out from now on. That's fine. Anything that gives me practice in being more adult can only be a good thing.

So Christmas is turning out to be pretty magical again. Things seem better than they did a week ago. I haven't stepped on the bathroom scales yet as that will surely spell the end of the good times. I can feel myself kicking around the twelve stone mark and I'm very seldom wrong about my weight. It'll be fun losing half a stone in the new year though. I'll get my walking miles back up as well. Try to beat this year's total.

Today Lindsay and I are having a lazy day to recover from all the excitement and then tomorrow we are going to Edinburgh like we should have done on Saturday but were too busy falling out.

There will be no more of that this week.

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Stevie

Having a happy Christmas.

1267

[Lunarer]

Re: The Sobriety Experiment: Chapter Two

Thursday, December 28th 2017 (Watching All the Christmas Movies)


Doesn't it feel weird to log on this morning and read about how people had a great Christmas because they didn't do all of the shit they used to do when they were drinking? Had a great Christmas because I didn't wake with a hangover. Had a great Christmas because I didn't fall out with the husband. Had a great Christmas because I didn't puke all over the kids' new toys. That's a pretty negative way of looking at something. It doesn't really mean anything. It also makes journals and indeed entire forums like these seem genuinely tired now. We need an influx of newcomers this year. People to take the emphasis off of us. People to allow us to take a deep breath and to start again. To start thinking about what we are actually posting. To stop us from writing the same old stuff year after year after year. . .

I don't know exactly what I have been watching on the television over previous Christmases as every time I saw adverts for Christmas movies I had never seen any of them but I have made up for that this year. On Saturday I started it all off when I watched Elf and then saw that The Santa Clause was on and so watched that too. Hadn't seen either of them before somehow. On Christmas Eve I searched through online lists of ''Greatest Ever Christmas Movies'' and so on and saw the same old ones cropping up time and time again so downloaded the Jim Carrey How the Grinch Stole Christmas. After dinner on Christmas day Lindsay said she had recorded Miracle on 34th Street (1994 remake) and asked if I wanted to watch that, which I did as I had never seen it before either. Then on Boxing Day, before Lindsay was up and long before we found out that we were to be going to my mum's after all, I streamed a copy of National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation – which I'd also never seen before.

Yesterday Lindsay and I had a lazy day and watched another couple of Christmas movies. She's seen them all before but they were all new to me. The Muppet's Christmas Carol which I, again, am amazed I had never seen before now. Bad Santa 2? Let's just say that if they ever release a Bad Santa 3 I won't be watching that. Some Christmas movies are better left unseen. I have never seen It's a Wonderful Life either but I think that now the chance has gone this year. It feels like a pre-Christmas film and so I will have to simply pray to the God of my Understanding to allow me another year on this earth before I can see that one.

Like I said – I don't know exactly what I have been watching over the Christmases gone by as that is a lot of festive movies that I had only heard of before but never seen. Especially when you consider I lived with my children for the first five years of their lives. I suppose I'd already seen all of the children's Christmas movies, most of the animated ones, and of course I watched Home Alone many times as a kid, and I watched Love Actually with Lindsay last year which was my first time watching that as well, but next year when all of these movies start coming on television again I will think back to this Christmas as being the one when I finally caught up with the rest of the world and watched some Christmas movies. Should be fun. Christmas is fun.

Today we are taking a trip to Edinburgh to have some dinner and visit the Christmas market. I would say that time is running out for us with this holiday period but the fact is that we are not even halfway through. I don't go back to college until a week on Monday and Lindsay is the same with her placement. I really am going to start pulling my hair out if I can't find things to do. There aren't many Christmas movies left and the time for them has now passed until next year anyway. I think when the start of the year arrives I will try to walk ten miles or more each day until I start back at the college. It will kill a bit of time but will also get the first hundred miles of the new year started as well as working off some of the pounds I've gained sitting around for a couple of weeks now. And I know I have gained.

It's not something I like at all. Carrying excess weight. As an alkie and drug user I spent most of my time borderline malnourished and constantly light. There wasn't much of me. This is the case with most drinkers/druggers I know/have known. They hardly eat and so get most of what their body needs from what they drink. It leaves us looking and feeling rather unwell, only we don't really notice because it has for so long been our reality. Now that I have sobered up and stayed sober for a sustained period I have gone through three Christmases and (barring the first one in which I was still drugging, still smoking heavily, and still living in squalor where flies were buzzing around my bedroom having hatched from the filth that was lying around in my cave and I had to constantly squash them to stop them from buzzing around in front of the laptop screen) on both of the last two occasions I have noticed my weight increase dramatically.

Last year I went all the way up to twelve stone and four pounds (78 kg) and ended up going to Slimming World to get back down to around eleven and a half which took around six to eight weeks or so. The perfect weight for my height is set at, apparently, 157 pounds which would require me to be around a stone lighter than I was at this point last year and probably am close to again this year. We'll see what happens but I quite like losing weight. There's something about the deprivation I enjoy. Something about finding something so easy that so many find so difficult.

With a sugar quit coming in a few weeks this will be the last Christmas in which I can eat Christmas pudding and trifle and so on and so I don't really care what happens too much between now and the end of the year. I certainly won't let it stop me from having a pudding in Edinburgh if the fancy should take me. I don't know what we'll be doing when we get back home tonight.

It won't be watching a Christmas movie though.

I've had enough of them until next year, thank you very much.

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Stevie

Has now seen all of the Christmas movies.

1179

[Lunarer]

Re: The Sobriety Experiment: Chapter Two

Friday, December 29th 2017 (Losing Track of the Days)


Have to admit to losing track of the days at the moment. Couldn't have told you it was Friday today, or even December 29th, when I initially woke this morning. Would have got the year right though. I think. There's the usual lack of structure in life at this time of year and it's always worst when you wake up and can't even say what the date is. I find that this is something that used to bother me even when I was drinking. Maybe it is some way I had developed to feel safe somehow. Know what day and date it was. I feel really disorganised when I don't know either of these things. Even though I write it at the top of every journal post I write, and have done ever since day one, I still sometimes have to remind myself. Just a thought. . .

Tomorrow I will start to better remember since there are things starting to happen again. We have the Old Firm tomorrow afternoon (actually kicks off at noon – Old Firm being Celtic and Rangers playing each other, Scotland's two most famous football teams) and this is followed by a full card of league games in both Scotland and England which will help cement within me the fact that it is a weekend. Almost a normal Saturday. I may head to the pub to watch the Celtic and Rangers game. Don't worry, for goodness' sake – I won't drink! I went to the pub to watch this fixture back in September and didn't drink then either so why would I go and spoil it all now?

After this we concentrate on some ice hockey. I still haven't ever been to a game. I was supposed to go a few weeks ago, the sixteenth of December it was, after going to watch my local football team in action in the afternoon but it was called off due to a frozen pitch and then the idleness bug caught me (as well as not fancying going back out into the freezing temperature that was about at that time) and so I did not go to the ice hockey after all. This Hogmanay Lindsay and I are to be going with her brother (huge ice hockey fan) to Edinburgh to watch them compete in the annual league game that takes place on this date and against this opposition. It's a little Christmas present from them to us although I believe it is only happening since the people that usually go with them have backed out and can't go for whatever reason. No matter. My first ice hockey game will be in Edinburgh and will be during this December after all. Fun fun fun. . .

Then I'll probably forget all about which day and date it is for another few days as we enter the new year and things start slowly to take shape. Since I don't go back to college and work until a week on Monday I will probably begin to count down the days in my head. I am enjoying my holiday at the moment but almost as soon as those bells signal the end of this year and the beginning of the new one I will start to become restless and be on the lookout for things to do. Work is good for this but college will be even better as we begin the new semester in late January. This will no longer mean that I am ahead with the workload and will have to begin all over again. There will be loads of things to be getting on with for another few months. Lovely.

There will also be a countdown in my head (it's actually started already if I'm being honest) until the beginning of February since I have my new quit starting on the Seventh. This will be the day I celebrate my collective anniversaries from my other quits: three years off the booze; two off the drugs, and one off the cigarettes and antidepressants. It will also spell the beginning of the next quit I have in the pipeline: refined sugar. It'll be interesting to see what I reach for in times of stress next. It can't be drink, drugs, cigarettes, or food. What else is there? I guess we'll find out. The idea is that the healthy adult in me will start to take the hits when I am stressed and parry them away with his adult tools and mature mentality. That is perhaps the theory anyway.

Around about this time my oldest niece will have her sixth birthday and so I hope to be there. I was there last year (well – her fifth birthday, not her sixth, you know what I mean!?) though and it ended up being a year of not seeing family at all. I have accepted, and will have to continue to do so, that people get used to certain situations and stick to them. My brother and sister-in-law were used to me getting in contact with them all of the time and not having to make any effort and I learned this year that when the effort on my part ends then so does all communication. I have to just suck it up and continue to make the effort if I want to see more of my nieces next year than I did this. Which I do. I'll just have to start making the effort again. That's fine though.

Not long after that we have my mum's sixtieth birthday and if I want to see her between now and then (March 22nd) then I will also have to make all the effort there too. Lindsay and I are talking at the moment about getting ourselves a little car. It'd be nice to be able to visit people like mum, who lives out in the sticks and not very close to any major bus routes, whenever we felt like it and it not having to be something that is planned out in detail in advance, which can often lead to us abandoning the idea.

Around this time Lindsay will be finishing her placement and so will begin working; I'll be close to turning forty and so we'll be flying off on my second sober trip abroad; the college will be getting into Graded Unit territory; everything will be a little more action packed than it is at the moment, not to mention a certain little football tournament that will be starting around the middle of June.

I like the holidays, and Christmas has indeed been one of the most wonderful times of the year, but I'll be glad when things start to get back to normal as well.

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Keeping track of the days.

1151

[Lunarer]

Re: The Sobriety Experiment: Chapter Two

Saturday, December 30th 2017 (Meetings in the Kingdom)


I'm going to go to the AA meeting tonight. I still like to keep my foot in the door. Sometimes I think this journal must read as though it is written by someone who just cannot make up his mind regarding the fellowship and is constantly in a to and fro, a tug-o-war about whether or not to attend and maintain his membership within the group. Someone who doesn't know if he's an AA member or not, despite being to hundreds of meetings over the last three years or thereabouts. I try not to think about it too much. Just go when I feel like it. I don't worry about seeming silly either if I go tonight and find it to my displeasure to the extent where I feel the need afterwards to come back to these pages and write unfavourably about my experience, only to return to a meeting in a couple of weeks. I guess

I am still unsure about it. Sometimes I walk out of meetings so disappointed that I all but swear to myself that I will never go back, that I have learned everything that there is to be learned from those places. Then I'll cast my mind to another part of the country. A city. Maybe things will be different in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Dundee. The thing is – those city meetings have been some of the most disappointing of them all. Then I fall back in love with the local meetings, the meetings in my own little county, or ''Kingdom'' as we call it.

I think of the future. When might I need AA in the future? I might not ever need it in the way that some within the fellowship say that we need it. That it – need it so that I don't pick up a drink, but then I still have to face the fact that while there have been some difficult times during my sobriety no one I am close to has died. There have been no tragedies. What about a string of tragedies? I can never know what is around the corner. I do have to be honest when I say that my recovery has been a breeze in the last year or so. There were some really difficult spells in the first year and a half as I fought with trying to sleep and get back into a healthy eating schedule, as well as my moods being really unpredictable from one moment to the next, but the second half of these three years, the last eighteen months or so, have not provided anything that I would consider to be incredibly challenging.

I may need to call upon the fellowship as I age though. Or if I move to another area where I have no friends of family. These are times when I notice people leaning on it. The rooms are filled with old people and we have many visitors. Just on Christmas Eve we were visited by a woman from Latvia who was in town for Christmas to spend time with her family. One day I will be old and, possibly, lonely and so may need the rooms as a place to go during times like Christmas just to remind me that people do exist beyond the television screen. So I shall try not to be too harsh on tonight's meeting if I should choose to write about it tomorrow morning if it happens to be one of those meetings where you actually have to be in the room listening to it to actually believe it.

Fingers crossed.

Still a long time until we return to normal a week on Monday and already I am finding the days to be getting a little longer. It's from the Second until the Seventh that I think will be the most difficult days to fill. I had already mentioned earlier in the week that I plan to return to a walking schedule in a bid to get the miles up this year and will begin on the First. I'll be trying to get off to the best start possible knowing that although it has been very mild so far this winter the bad weather will begin at some point soon. January is always a cold month. Walking on ice is very frustrating.

I haven't set foot on the bathroom scales yet but suspect I will be fairly close to last year's total weight and this is something that I'll be working on getting back down to where it should be. I'll be forty in a little under four months and so will be entering a new phase of body weakening when it struggles to keep weight off a little more than it does when we're thirty. I'll have to look after myself much better these next ten years than I have been doing the last ten, which shouldn't be difficult. I mean that I'll have to look after myself better these next ten years than I have been doing the last year. That still won't be too difficult. Self care has always been a bit of a problem.

One thing that will be happening in the new year is the trip to the dentist. I have the two hundred pounds sitting aside for exactly this. Anyone who had read this journal a couple of years ago but then hadn't been around for the last two years and chose this post as their post to return to would likely wonder how on earth I managed to get from not having enough money for food and having to go on late-night debt-collecting missions for money for cigarettes from one day to the next, to managing to keep aside two hundred pounds for something as non-essential as getting my teeth fixed and I have to admit that sometimes I have to pinch myself that it is happening too. It just all happened so gradually that I couldn't really say when or what it was that acted as the catalyst.

Anyway. Tomorrow is the last day of the year and so for tomorrow's post I'll probably write something reflective about the year gone by. It'll probably be a rather long-winded affair and will cover most of the stuff I've talked about this month already. I'll try to also cover some things I was talking about earlier in the year but seem to have forgotten about recently, or have elected not to talk about.

I'll probably moan a little about tonight's AA meeting as well.

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Heading to a meeting in his own Kingdom.

1116

[Lunarer]

Re: The Sobriety Experiment: Chapter Two

Sunday, December 31st 2017 (Feeding the Homeless)


You're not getting away with a long-winded and self-indulgent post reflecting on the year that has been 2017 but when I sat down to start writing this morning there were other topics I began to cover. What began as an introductory paragraph ended up taking so many words from me that I decided it best to reflect on the year just passed tomorrow instead. So you are spared for another day.

The season to be jolly is about over with for another year. It's been good although I find it unrealistic to think that a simple festive holiday season could help reshape and restructure mankind's thinking in such a way that we will actually ever find goodwill to all men and a real life Scrooge Christmas Carol story. It takes more than a couple of feel-good movies for that to happen. Actually – we never really see any changes at this time of year. Whenever I have been out and about in the days between Christmas day and now I have been amazed at how many people have been out shopping. What exactly could they possibly need to be buying? Bargains, as they see it? Discounts and sales, as they see it? Is this what it is?

The lasting image from my head of the time between Christmas Day and New Year this year will be a beggar in Edinburgh when Lindsay and I were at the Christmas Market indulging ourselves and wasting money counting his takings for the day. As I waited on Lindsay to finish at the stall I watched from the distance as this man counted out his coppers, one pences and two pences, maybe a couple of fives and tens – it was difficult to see in the dark – but I can't see how he can have earned much. I didn't give him anything but became just another one of the myriad of people who walked by that evening and every other evening.

One woman from my college class put a post up on Facebook the other day about how she had approached a homeless man and bought him something for dinner. The ''whole works'' apparently. She'd brought him a burger with chips and some chocolate for dessert, with a drink in the form of a latte to wash it all down. It was, in her eyes, a beggar's paradise. After all they don't ever eat, do they? So they should be joyous and grateful whenever someone presents to them something like this – the simple gift of human kindness!?

Let's just establish first that this woman would never do this. I can't be one hundred per cent sure, of course, but it is completely out of character for her in the time I've known her if she did. What would be completely in character for her would be to go out into the world one day looking for stories to stick onto her enormous Facebook homepage and this is what I fear has happened here. She's been out and saw a homeless person and then decided to fabricate a story about him. I may be out of line but I just can't see her doing this, buying all this stuff for a stranger. I've seen how hard it is for students at college to tap a cigarette off her.

In our AA Twelve Step program (and I'm going to try not to talk about last night's meeting too much but will just say that both of the meetings I have been to over the festive period have been good) we have this thing where we plan to go out – I think it's in the Just For Today (so it isn't really an AA thing at all then – and do someone a good turn. The key is to not have anyone else know about it. If someone else finds out about it then it does not count as being a good turn. The idea is that we learn to be genuinely altruistic (if such a thing can ever exist) by carrying out acts of kindness without others praising us for it. What this student peer of mine is doing with her Facebook thing is the exact opposite of this, and so the exact opposite of altruism. She's making a story up – but this still counts even if her story was true – and then telling the world about it in a Facebook post. She's only doing the deed so that people may know that she did it. This is not altruism. This is ego.

Apparently the guy never thanked her but ate half of the burger and then said he didn't want it or the chocolates. She said to him that he could take them home with him and he snapped back by asking if she was stupid – he doesn't have a home!! I don't know. I still don't think that this fits in with her personality but it might be a true story. Either way it is not in fitting with the Just For Today card we read out at some AA meetings as so begs the question of the motivation for doing the act in the first place. It seems as though the homeless only exist in our minds now as opportunities to show the world how nice people we are when we need a pick-me-up. It's a waste of human potential in my opinion.

It also ties in nicely with another thing that we try to teach in AA. We have already established that we should not be found out for doing kind things for strangers but it is equally important to remember that if we want to be altruistic and to love our fellow man and woman then also it does not count to do acts of kindness for those directly involved in our lives. For me to do something nice and kind for Lindsay is not altruism. It serves me. I get something out of it. This is a message that AA should emphasise more at this time of year.

You see, I think this gets completely lost at Christmas. The whole message has been twisted to now mean that you have to be nice to your family. Ideally we should be doing that every day throughout the year but I accept that it is completely realistic to expect us to forget to do it to out fellow man and woman, the stranger in the passing, the guy on the street. This is the part about the goodwill to all men. People seem to have forgotten that and think that it is goodwill to all members of my family, which really acts only to serve me.

If I want to get back into volunteering this year then it is working with homeless people I should consider. Forget the bullshit and greed that was the Charity Shop Cafe and try my hand at something else. Don't let that one experience deter me from giving up some of my time.

Just don't go posting on Facebook that I'm doing it.

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Stevie

Wonders how much that guy's takings for the day were and how far they stretched.

1216

[Lunarer]

Re: The Sobriety Experiment: Chapter Two

Monday, January 01st 2018 (Twenty Seventeen)


A year ago today was when we were supposed to lose the old WQD forum, the forum which may or may not have played a pivotal role in me getting sober, but it dragged on for a few more days before coughing and spluttering over its last breath. I moved over to the Ryver WQD site like most of the others but found it to be very. . . I don't know actually, very sucky!? Kind of. The layout was poor and has managed to somehow get even worse since and the members stayed exactly the same. Those who were serial slippers continued to be so and, even worse, those who had managed to get sober continued to stay the same, posting the exact same as they had done for years on the old forum. Those with insights and knowledge no addictions seemed not to take part much in the new forum and it truly did become just another Facebook. There was little hope but enough to get me through to March before I decided to expand my search, joining every addiction forum out there before settling on My Way Out, a small forum but one I've felt most at home writing in since mid-March of last year.

Something else that happened between this day a year ago and mid-March when I joined the My Way Out forum was that my appointments with Dr. Bacon started up. I had been referred to psychology services back in the summer (May) of 2015 when I was but three months sober and eventually managed to get a response from them on the January of 2016. After a quick assessment we agreed that the chances of me slipping back into my addictions were very slim and so I was re-referred to another part of psychology services. Almost a further year down the line and I found myself sitting in a chair opposite Dr. Bacon, my own clinical psychologist.

This was the guy I was to be spilling my guts to? He looks ordinary, I thought. He doesn't even seem that much older than me, I observed. One thing I was also not sure about was his gender. I felt far more open to discussing my personal life and failures in front of woman than I did another bloke. This is something that has completely changed in the past twelve months. Now I know that I don't know better. I trust the person to do their job. I do accept that I landed a prize in Dr. Bacon though as I feel him to be quite high on the psychological food chain around these parts. He mentors students long-term and expertly moves me away from my bullshit when I start it – something that John, Margaret and other counsellor types I have known would get caught up by and stuck with. Dr. Bacon very quickly taught me that he will get unstuck.

At this time I was studying a Level Six (National Certificate) in sound production at the college. In January we did a podcast (of which mine was apparently the best podcast handed in by an NC level student) before working with sampling and sound synthesis, inside the studios, digital djing, and remixing techniques before the course ended in June. We also has an additional radio unit and this is when I met my current lecturer. I was in two minds at the start of the year. Psychology was something I really wanted to learn about and had done for some time. I had considered applying to university and was looking to perhaps even move to Dundee (Scottish city not far from where I live just now) but was now beginning to enjoy my studies in the creative industries.

It looked like being a choice between either the psychology at Dundee, or continue studying in the creative industries. Of interest to me were sound production and practical journalism but after doing the unit in radio I had found something else. It would be a simple case of speaking to people. I felt that the radio course offered the best of all worlds. The lecturer made the most effort to sell the course to me. There were journalistic aspects to it as we learned interviewing techniques and were required to get out there and make ourselves known. There was studio work and we would be creating audio in the form of music and advertisements. There was also the allure of Sunderland University. Pass the two years at college and you are given an unconditional offer to study broadcast media at Sunderland, an English city a couple of hundred miles south of where I am. This seemed interesting too. In the end the radio had the biggest pull although I do have to say that I still feel regret about the psychology. It's something to think about further down the line. There would be nothing to stop me trying my hand at that once I am working and settled, besides perhaps an early death. That would certainly hamper my chances.

So I knew what I would be studying after the summer – I just had to survive ten weeks with nothing to do. I had, for almost a year, been giving up some of my time to a local charity shop and planned to continue to do this until further notice. Then came the changes. Staff left and new ones came in. Management was changed and the place started to get very business-like. The prices went up and the quality went down. This was all very disappointing but the worst of it came when I found out that our volunteers were actually coming from the dole queue. People on benefits were being forced to work there in order to keep their benefits. This was not something I could allow myself to be involved in. Sure – encourage people into work, but a charity shop of all places should not be supporting this, I don't feel. The ''volunteers'' there are nothing of the sort. It's modern slave labour. I left and will not eat from there again.

I had to find something else to do and so I contacted Barry the Bullet. He was a former employee of my window cleaning business but since it broke down and everyone left he continued to work it part-time himself. I went back out working with him and together we built some of it back up again over the summer. I phoned him many times over a couple of months and finally got through to him on the morning of the Walk the Walk charity marathon I was taking part in – an annual walk through Edinburgh for breast cancer. Walking was something I had started to do regularly ever since quitting smoking and worrying about the supposed weight gain that was inevitable after giving up the cigarettes.

After weighing myself on my day of quitting smoking (Feb. 07th – the same day I had previously quit drinking and taking drugs and the same date I will this year be quitting refined sugar) I was amazed to find that I had allowed myself to reach my heaviest ever weight of 12 st. 4 lb. This called me into action and I joined local healthy eating organisation Slimming World to help shed it. Within a couple of months I was at my target weight of 11 st. 7 lb and feeling all the better for it. I remained a member until I stopped attending a few months ago and won't pay the membership fee to rejoin so I am on my own this time if I weight myself in a little while and find that I am over my target weight again – and I AM over it, that I can tell you without the need for scales!!

Something else I did around this time was quit taking my antidepressant medication I had been getting from the GP for some time. I wanted to know if I was better and the only way to be sure would be to stop taking the Sertraline that I was prescribed. The GP was against me coming off these things and I was a little worried about the brain zaps myself so I started to wean myself off them carefully from January 01st until my smoking quit date five weeks later. I wanted to know if I could manage without them.

[Lunarer]

Re: The Sobriety Experiment: Chapter Two

Another thing I wanted to know if I could managed without was Alcoholics Anonymous. The only way to do this would be to stop going to meetings for a while and so I set myself a little mission: stop going to AA meetings for ninety days. This started in February, the weekend after I shared from the top table at the Tuesday night Step meeting for my second sober birthday. This was an interesting experience. Good and bad. What it did do for me though was teach me that I didn't need the fellowship. I could survive without it. This was an important step for me. I started going to meetings not when I was told I needed to, or made to feel as though I had to, but when I wanted to. My meetings per month ratio has never been high since, me not getting to more than three meetings in any month since then. I speak to people all the time who are still afraid not to go to at least three meetings a WEEK, and some of them have been sober around as long as me, and so I think it was quite a grown up thing for me to try, despite what members of AA would tell me.

During my time away from meetings I tried ACA (Adult Children of Alcoholics and Dysfunctional Families) but found it to be full of people with no answers as to how to get better and start recovering from what they suffered from, no insight whatsoever into their conditions, and found that working with Dr. Bacon on schema therapy was far and away the most likely to help me get to where I wanted to be. People say in all of these fellowships that it takes one to know one. That you can't know what it's like to be an alcoholic unless you've been one; that you can't know what it's like to have a dysfunctional family unless you have one; but I feel as though Dr. Bacon knows more about any of this stuff and how to recover from it than anyone I've met in any fellowship I've been to. The way we go about spotting patterns in my dysfunctional behaviour is far superior to the methods used by my former sponsor.

In the summer Lindsay and I decided that it would be possible to book a holiday. I'd never been on a trip with a girlfriend before and so was keen, but worried, about the prospect. I was working every week by this point though and so we booked a little all-inclusive trip and I got me a passport. Then we headed to Spain for a day in Barcelona and a stay in a resort. It was pretty attitude changing and I came back determined to get on with my college work and get it all done as well and as quickly as possible.

I wrote down all of what was required to finish the first semester. Four Assessed Shows, a couple of practical projects, and a three-part podcast series. I then told myself that this could be done in the month of November and went out and did it. There were three weeks towards the end of the year where I didn't have to even go into college for most classes as I was finished all of the work. A semester in a month. No one else has reached this stage yet. Some people still have it all to do when we return to college in a week. They have three weeks until we start the new semester.

With me receiving a student loan for this term and having to pay full rent Lindsay and I wondered if it might be better if I moved in with her and so this happened on November 10th. I had finally left the cave. That hellhole of a place that seemed to suck the life out of me for more than four years. I thought I might miss it when it was gone but I haven't really. I've missed not having somewhere I can go and hide from time to time but I think this is just my Detached Protector talking.

All in all it has been a very successful year. If there has been one thing I've regretted it has been the fact that my family haven't been around much at all to share it with me. My brother and sister-in-law I hadn't seen from sometime in March until Boxing Day and my mother I also barely saw. It's my nieces I missed the most though. I've learned this year that my family do care – it's just that they are poor communicators. I mean REALLY poor communicators! If I want to see more of them this year then I will have to make the effort. It's not that they don't want to make an effort back – it's just that they might not know how to. In this way I am solely responsible for how much or how little of them I see this coming year.

Right then, on with the day. I have yet to step on the bathroom scales but am going for a little walk first. I think I'll be somewhere around last year's heady heights but I hope not. Better care has to be taken this year.

And that was 2017 in 2000 words or less. . .

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Stevie

Looking forward to 2018

2329

[Lunarer]

Re: The Sobriety Experiment: Chapter Two

Tuesday, January 02nd 2018 (Waiting On Trains)


This is the start of the reduction in sugar in preparation for my big quit next month and so yesterday I began taking only one sugar in my coffees. I am no longer allowed any chocolates or sweets or anything like that – I'll get enough sugar from my meals. The biggest issue will be mints. The brand I use is made up of mostly sugar and so I will switch to sugar-free mints although I tend not to like them. Then again – I'm not a big fan of only one sugar in a cup of coffee and I'll get used to that soon enough. I don't think about cigarettes anymore and so in a few weeks I won't be thinking about sugar in coffee either. It's just another sacrifice in getting well, or trying to. . .

I had my big weigh-in yesterday morning after reading that people in Britain tend to gain around five pounds over the Christmas period. I think that feels about right. I knew I was a little heavier as I could feel it all over my body. Just little bits here and there. Twelve stones and two pounds. That's two pounds less than I was when I quit smoking in February – the heaviest I've ever been. On the old BMI scales and suchlike it means that I am either 23.7 (if I am five feet and eleven inches tall) or 24.3 (if I am five feet ten inches tall). I should really get an accurate height measurement done. Either way I am in the ''healthy weight'' area but I am as things stand a whopping nine pounds (four kilograms) over my Slimming World target. December has been fun but I'm glad it's over.

Scottish Sarah, my sister-in-law, wife of my only brother, would appear to have deleted both Lindsay and me from her Facebook friends' list following Boxing Day dinner at my mum's. I did feel throughout the meal that there was an atmosphere around the table. I can only assume that this is a case of hurt pride. She had made it perfectly clear in the running to Christmas that she was pissed off with me for not being as active an uncle as I have been in previous years and so I guess that this is an extension of this. My nieces are perhaps supposed to have had the same feelings as her and avoid me at dinner, or at least make things feel a little awkward (which if I'm honest I was actually expecting) but they don't seem to have the same grudges and everything went well. I think this has annoyed my sister-in-law. I also noticed that she was not too chuffed when we were talking about our trip to Barcelona and how we have planned to go away again for my birthday and so perhaps there is a little envy in there somewhere as well. She's possibly been too used to being the one with all the news while I've played the part of the family disappointment for so long now but the tide is turning? Maybe this is the way things work in her mind.

Rather than let things sit and fester I decided to contact my brother and ask him what was going on. Not a long and winding road, just the direct route to the problem. What's happening? He gets back to me asking me not to worry about that and that he will be making more of an effort in 2018 to see his friends and family, admitting that it was kind of all about university this year. It's almost like he's had a Scrooge moment this Christmas – realising that he's been spending all his time thinking about the money he might make in the future rather than his family. I'll bet he's not the only one.

I spent the last day of the year with Lindsay and her brother and his wife. I had been planning to get myself to an ice hockey game for a while but it had never happened. Every year our local team plays an away fixture in Edinburgh at the Murrayfield Ice Rink and so the four of us took a little drive across the bridge, stopping at a pub for something to eat first.

Football matches have one break of fifteen minutes and that is bad enough. Ice hockey games have two breaks and each of them lasts fifteen minutes. That's half an hour of sitting around. It's quite a break from the action. I notice during these breaks a couple of things. I notice that there are two types of people when there are breaks at ice hockey matches, and I learned which type I belong to. I forgot my phone. Left it on the sitting room table. It's an old thing anyway and so there is nothing to look at when I find myself with time to kill. Most people have new phones and so do have something to look at. The two types of people I feel there to be are: those who struggle with their own thoughts and so need constant stimulation, and those who can handle their own thoughts and company without feeling awkward.

I definitely belong to the latter group. I think I got so used to my own company when I was drinking that I don't mind it so much now, actually quite like it sometimes. At church the other week they were talking about this sort of thing. They used the example of waiting on a train. When we find the train to be running a little late we tend to do one of several things. Usually we begin by checking our watches and then shaking our heads, even though we are perfectly aware of the time and as though shaking our heads will make the train arrive any quicker. We then mention to someone else our irritation so as to have it confirmed and validated, okayed. None of this really helps. According to the story that the church was telling us one woman was asked why she is so calm when waiting on a train that is clearly not running on time. Why is she not annoyed.

Her reply is that this wait on this train is the only time during the day when she is actually left alone to think. It's the only time she gets by herself. I like this idea. The idea that every time we are found in a position whereby we must spend alone time waiting on something that is not under our control as being an opportunity to think about something. To reflect on something. It is a practice I have recently taken up and so when everyone goes to their phones at the break so that they can avoid thinking and reflecting I get the chance to do exactly that. There is something I want to write this year and I take a little time to start planning it out in my head. One or two ideas come to me. I shall have to get them down on paper at the earliest opportunity. Perhaps I should start taking a little notepad with me wherever I go.

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Stevie

Gonna get a little notepad.

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