Nice night. Early bed. Surprised how tired I was in a nice way after my exertions yesterday - not very, but up at 5am and no kip in the afternoon. Finish papering the summer house this am and take the car back to Ingrid before 3pm.
Jumpstart lesson 3 - telling people. Or not telling people.
Mindfulness and meditation really help here too. Ignore the inner judge, the elder brother (cf The Prodigal Son). If you want to day dream or fantasise, just let it happen - pay attention to what the day dream says, see where it leads, but don't beat yourself up because you do nothing about it; maybe it's not really such a great idea anyway, or what you really want. If getting too excited and speedy, slow down, pay attention to what you're doing right now, do it carefully, slowly, with full attention. Take pleasure in the simple things - the weather, all sorts, nature, riding my bike, using my body, having a nap or a snooze when I feel like it, and not feeling guilty about it. Doing nothing all day, and not feeling guilty about it. Cooking a proper meal. Organising my own birthday party, and not caring if no one turns up. Reading good books. Writing a poem. Painting a picture, or chipping away very slowly and carefully at a lump of flint. Mending things. Tidying up. Sorting out and throwing useless stuff away (or even better, giving it away if you can). Doing something for someone else, for the sake of it. Not over-offering or committing, not taking on something that you suspect you'll quickly get pissed off by, but not being afraid to give something new a try - it might work out better than you expect.
B replied to mine, saying I should use her resources and not think willpower is the way. I don't. I need all the help I can get.
Finished the papering and worked out how to get the bench in and out of the summer house easily. Nice steak and kidney pie with Pol for lunch, then back to Sweffling and Fram. Feel very happy.
Peeing a lot. Feels like my kidneys and liver are working overtime to clean me out. Feel very well.
Jumpstart lesson 3 - telling people. Or not telling people.
Dear B
Thanks for Lesson no 3.
Right now, I'm doing what makes me feel better i.e. not drinking. I live alone, which is a huge plus (not physically alone, I live with a family with small children, who are all a delight). The point is, I don't live with anyone who holds my heart to ransom - that used to bother me, but now it feels like a plus. All this is sui generis, for its own and my sake, no-one else's. And that makes it hugely easier. If I fail, I'm the only loser. If I make it (to 30, 60, 100 whatever days) then maybe it's a gift I can offer to my children (first), and exes. No one else really matters, at least right now. and that in itself may be a result of many years obsessive drinking. I know my heart and consciousness has shrunk, to the point where really my life revolved around arranging my daily drink intake, and the devil take anything that interfered with that.
That said I'm a naturally honest and open person. My instinct whenever something happens to me, good or bad, is to share it with people I'm close to, or even complete strangers. Catholic guilt and confession in part. Just getting it out there, making a joke of some shaming episode, just lessens the pain I feel. So far I've told my sons, but not my daughter, whom I'm very close to. She's about to have a third baby, and I don't want to throw any more complications into her life right now. Maybe, by day 30, if I get there, and she's had the baby OK, I'll tell her. The truth is, she, along with my exes (what is this about my relations with women?) is the one whose good opinion I most care about, and whom I least want to disappoint. For her sake; I want her to be proud of her dad. For mine, because I don't want to let her down, to promise something which I then don't deliver on.
So far, if it comes up, for anyone else I'm having a sober October. What's the catchy phrase for not drinking in November?
I have told an almost complete stranger pretty much everything (how I got drunk at work and stole a bottle of whisky, got sacked blah blah blah). It satisfied my Catholic urge to confess (see above) but I had no skin in the game. He doesn't really know anyone that I know, and I don't really care what he thinks now, or what he might think if I go back to drinking. And, of course, ditto here and you, and anyone who reads my not yet anonymised blog. No question, spilling the beans everyday here and on my blog and in my journal (nice paper, fountain pen, and I can read my own writing, not always the case when writing some inspired nonsense after an evening's boozing) is a real help. And interesting to read back over my journey, maybe sometime in the far future.
Thanks for your links to other resources. I probably won't use them, here and me is good enough for now. You referred to signs in one your blogs (God give me a sign and then the crashed van round the corner). It's a long time since I asked for a sign. Partly because I don't believe in asking the cosmos for stuff - if I need it, it'll be given to me - partly because what the fuck do you do if no sign appears. But mainly because I have long had the feeling that the whole bloody thing is one big sign, or a series of signs, if I pay any attention at all. Successions of programmes on TV or radio referring to alcohol or addiction, bike accidents serious enough to hurt and get my attention, to show up how not good I am, just blundering into first an article on Medium about alcohol, which linked to totad (and that got me straight away, as well as another reference to AA not being the answer, on my first day sober. I'd already decided to stop, but it was my usual "I'll take a couple of days off", or seemed to be, but actually I think it was a deep down shift - that I really wasn't enjoying this anymore, and that I really, really wanted to kick booze into touch, for ever. No ifs or buts. That was / is the essential for me, that heart felt wish, that "I'm so fed up of thinking about drinking, it's just fucking boring", even if I had zero confidence in my ability to actually give it up. So the 7/30/100 day thing was a god send - however hard, it's not forever, and then we'll see. When we're confident we're thinking straight, and the lounge lizard or wolfie (why shouldn't a lounge lizard in a DJ with an oily manner not just be a wolf) has shrunk, or slunk away, or just dissolved (from all you say, that's not going to happen), then I can re-assess.
The thing is, I think I know all I need to know. The bit I was missing was the real autonomous decision / desire to stop.
It's taken me 50 years - or 30 - to get to the point where I do not need or want to drink. The last 15 years have been a sort of boot camp, a preparation for October 7th - Day one. All those failed AA attempts, all that meditation, all that reading and thinking about me, my life, the people I love, and finally, in the last 4 years, a whole hearted embrace of alcohol - no moderation, no restraint, no divided self, no inner voice carping away about my failure and uselessness (so, OK, I am a useless failure - who cares about that, apart from me?) - yes it led me into some shitty places and experiences, and I very nearly got myself killed more than once - but instead of running from a nightmare that I've had all my life - whenever I saw a drunk, a tramp, someone right at the bottom, in the gutter, I immediately felt that's me, that's where I'm going - I just said fuck it, if that's where I'm going, if that's what I want, then that's what I'll get. So before it was always the fear of that nightmare that held me back from the brink (but not sadly from fucking up two marriages, and probably having a less "successful" life than I might have had). When I abandoned the fear, I started to see an alcohol based life for what it was / is; not much fun. Often depressed, or unconscious. Feeling physically shit. And living alone inside my little alcohol filled bubble.
I went on holiday to Greece (Naxos, a sort of heaven on earth to me) in September. I was dreading it, because I knew I would just drink, and feel ill, or worse. I did have a nice time, saw all my old friends, only made a smallish idiot of myself once or twice, spent a silly amount of money. I came back and realised a week or so later, that I had turned the whole thing into a form of hell (not sure which Dantean level it was) - that the whole time, I had really felt ill and unhappy and only half alive / aware. And that was all because of alcohol.
My big challenge is, because I'm basically pretty fit (second day of my holiday I canoed for 30 kms on the open sea - apart from sunburnt upper thighs, no ill effects at all) not drinking for two days makes me feel wonderful, physically and mentally. And yes, rainbows shooting out of my arse. And it just keeps getting better. So the memories of the horrors fade awfully quickly. And the lounge lizard (at any rate, always before) just slides up and says, "see, you're not really an alcoholic, you can drink when you want to, you don't want this boring, sober, sane existence" and I do. And in no time I'm back in the bucket of booze. So your image of the car freewheeling down the hill, gaining momentum every sober day, and your daily updates and lessons, but mostly the car - looking at the road ahead, focusing on whatever it takes to avoid booze, letting the momentum build, not staring in the rear view mirror, no if onlys, not relying on the fading memories to keep me off the booze, but just the target - 7 days, 30 days, 100 days - and maybe something else, around the bend or over the hill, works for me.
with love and gratitude
David
PS you did ask
==========
and the other reason I have rainbows flying out of my arse, is no more alcoholic depression. Every, or most, days after drinking the night before, and especially if I'd gone over my self-imposed limit (a half bottle of Scotch or the equivalent - yeah, it's a limit) I felt really down. Because I practice mindfulness and meditation I knew this was just a physical / psychological response to the alcohol. That is, although I felt the world was going to end, and not in a good way, and I was fucked and hopeless, I knew these thoughts were just a response to the feeling, the alcoholic depression, and they would pass, or be drowned by another half bottle, and another the day after that. I did use to suffer from deep and sometimes months long depressions (they may have been alcohol induced, but I took the resulting thoughts seriously, and round and round they went, spiralling down, sometimes it seemed like forever). But with the passing years, and many years now of regular meditation, that deep, long lasting down seems to have disappeared. So now I've been sober for 10 days, and have had no alcohol induced lows, at worst odd bouts of boredom and unmet desire (for something, anything, for which a drink was always the first if not only response), I'm as high as a kite, and only anxious that a real low will hit me out of nowhere, and I'll try and anaesthetise myself with booze again.
The (slight) downside is a huge increase in energy. My brain fizzes, I'm twitching to do stuff all the time, feel very speedy and edgy at times, can't switch off. Which is another reason for drinking - just to knock that stuff on the head, give myself a break, pass out in a warm fuzzy haze. To coin a phrase, I just used to get "bored of thinking, about drinking and not drinking, and practically everything else under the sun". One problem for me is that I come up with schemes, pipe dreams, plans, but they are so far removed from my day to day reality, and I know I'll never do anything about them - I might start, but I never finish, because, in part, of drinking - so I just drink and get stoned to either daydream, without any intention of actually doing anything, or simply to forget, to stop planning and fantasising.
==========
and the other reason I have rainbows flying out of my arse, is no more alcoholic depression. Every, or most, days after drinking the night before, and especially if I'd gone over my self-imposed limit (a half bottle of Scotch or the equivalent - yeah, it's a limit) I felt really down. Because I practice mindfulness and meditation I knew this was just a physical / psychological response to the alcohol. That is, although I felt the world was going to end, and not in a good way, and I was fucked and hopeless, I knew these thoughts were just a response to the feeling, the alcoholic depression, and they would pass, or be drowned by another half bottle, and another the day after that. I did use to suffer from deep and sometimes months long depressions (they may have been alcohol induced, but I took the resulting thoughts seriously, and round and round they went, spiralling down, sometimes it seemed like forever). But with the passing years, and many years now of regular meditation, that deep, long lasting down seems to have disappeared. So now I've been sober for 10 days, and have had no alcohol induced lows, at worst odd bouts of boredom and unmet desire (for something, anything, for which a drink was always the first if not only response), I'm as high as a kite, and only anxious that a real low will hit me out of nowhere, and I'll try and anaesthetise myself with booze again.
The (slight) downside is a huge increase in energy. My brain fizzes, I'm twitching to do stuff all the time, feel very speedy and edgy at times, can't switch off. Which is another reason for drinking - just to knock that stuff on the head, give myself a break, pass out in a warm fuzzy haze. To coin a phrase, I just used to get "bored of thinking, about drinking and not drinking, and practically everything else under the sun". One problem for me is that I come up with schemes, pipe dreams, plans, but they are so far removed from my day to day reality, and I know I'll never do anything about them - I might start, but I never finish, because, in part, of drinking - so I just drink and get stoned to either daydream, without any intention of actually doing anything, or simply to forget, to stop planning and fantasising.
Mindfulness and meditation really help here too. Ignore the inner judge, the elder brother (cf The Prodigal Son). If you want to day dream or fantasise, just let it happen - pay attention to what the day dream says, see where it leads, but don't beat yourself up because you do nothing about it; maybe it's not really such a great idea anyway, or what you really want. If getting too excited and speedy, slow down, pay attention to what you're doing right now, do it carefully, slowly, with full attention. Take pleasure in the simple things - the weather, all sorts, nature, riding my bike, using my body, having a nap or a snooze when I feel like it, and not feeling guilty about it. Doing nothing all day, and not feeling guilty about it. Cooking a proper meal. Organising my own birthday party, and not caring if no one turns up. Reading good books. Writing a poem. Painting a picture, or chipping away very slowly and carefully at a lump of flint. Mending things. Tidying up. Sorting out and throwing useless stuff away (or even better, giving it away if you can). Doing something for someone else, for the sake of it. Not over-offering or committing, not taking on something that you suspect you'll quickly get pissed off by, but not being afraid to give something new a try - it might work out better than you expect.
B replied to mine, saying I should use her resources and not think willpower is the way. I don't. I need all the help I can get.
Finished the papering and worked out how to get the bench in and out of the summer house easily. Nice steak and kidney pie with Pol for lunch, then back to Sweffling and Fram. Feel very happy.
Peeing a lot. Feels like my kidneys and liver are working overtime to clean me out. Feel very well.
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