A $50 bar tab...

Sorry I've gotten a bit slack about posting.  Not sure if anyone cares but I used to write religiously two times a week and now it's fallen back to once.  Partly I think this is because I'm busy putting energy into getting our new house running smoothly and getting life going in our new city.  Also I think I was getting a bit sick of having to be a bit low and negative on here all the time.  Things weren't really fun there for a while with the house sale and relocation, and I was struggling with some pretty strong emotions that just weren't shifting away.

Also another reason for pulling back on the posting is, I think, that the more time that goes on and the more intrenched my 'non-drinking' habit becomes the more it becomes the norm.  Everything isn't so shiny and sober-new any more. New occurrences and instances just aren't happening as often as they used to.  It's all a bit same-same now, so I'm not compelled to share as much.  I may wrap things up here soon.

But I feel like a re-cap so let me summarise:

I used to drink a shit-load of wine.  At home mostly.  Found it hard to stop drinking once I began.  Glasses were filled to the rim and the top slurped down immediately.  Averaging a bottle a night, sometimes less, sometimes more.  Would do deals with myself over which nights I could binge and which I'd go easy ('coz I'd like to go to the gym the next day').  From the outside it seemed like a socially acceptable normal-if-not-a-little-enthusiastic drinking habit.  But I knew differently, that on the inside it was very very dysfunctional and becoming more so with every passing year.  I was obsessed with wine.

Hit my lowest point (a 'high bottom' compared with other bottoms some might say), when I hid a nearly empty bottle of wine from Mr D at the back of our pot cupboard so he didn't know how much I'd had while he'd been out with the boys at scouts.  That was it for me.  I knew that was the beginning of a very slippery sloop. That the sly wine-drinking fox inside me was beginning to dominate more and more.  So I kicked that fox to the curb and haven't touched a drop since September 6th last year.

Since then I have never been seriously tempted to drink.  I have wine and beer in the house, even buy it for Mr D and other family members who I know love to drink.  I have been to parties, four bloody weddings (can you believe that??!!  Four bloody weddings and not even one year sober yet!), red-tie dinners, quiz nights, celebratory lunches and dance parties.  I have celebrated Christmas and New Year,  birthdays, new jobs, house sales and wedding anniversaries.  I have dealt with the stress of selling a house and relocating cities and the grief at leaving a wonderful community of supportive people.  And never once have I seriously considered picking up a glass and sipping wine.  I do not want to go back to being that boozy woman that I was steadily losing respect for.  I do not want to go back to that.

But I was extremely surprised to discover as the months went on that my steady heavy drinking habit was me actually choosing to live life by squashing down emotions, or pushing them aside constantly.  If wine is present in my body and affecting my brain I found it easier to cope with everything!  I liked having a little mental buzz removing myself ever so slightly (or sometimes majorly) from reality.

Therefore what I have struggled with most is re-learning how to live with everything stripped bare.  How to truly live sober.  It's sobering being sober.  Life is stripped back.  Emotions are laid bare. There ain't no hiding from anything no more.

It's fucking fantastic.  Make no bones about that.  I love being sober.  I respect myself, I really enjoy going out and socializing sober and coming home sober and cleaning my face sober and putting on night cream sober and sleeping soberly (deeply and heavily) all night long.  I love it.  So even when I do whine and moan about being sad or stressed or grumpy or angry, it never means I'm wanting a drink.  I'm just feeling - really feeling - that's all.

The quiz night I mentioned before was actually last night.  A work function for Mr D's company.  Some were boozing pretty hard. Some weren't.  I didn't give a toss that I wasn't.  But I did have a chuckle to myself when I won a spot-prize of a $50 bar tab!!  Ha ha!! If only they all knew.  I've given it to Mr D to take his team out for a drink next week.  That felt good.

Love, Mrs D xxx