Afterthoughts on day 50
After writing about my day 50 — I received quite a few reactions. One of them said — ”Don’t get too cocky; it’s just day 50. You need years, not days”. The person who said this didn’t mean to discourage or offend — I know him well, and he meant good.
And I honestly concur with that point. I need years, not days. The only thing is — I need days to get to years. As my addiction is habitual and not physiological or psychological — I take it one day at a time. Usually, I’d go and chill in the pub for hours. Listen to people, play cards, play darts, play pool, drink beer, get drunker and drunker, switch to shots later on, stagger home, maybe have more, and pass out.
That’s a lot of hours spent doing… nothing. Getting drunk. All the activities undertaken along the way of an evening of alcohol consumption are just side things to pretend you’re there to actually socialize and do something fun rather than purely get shitfaced. Gradually, as the number of days a week spent in the pub increased, this hours-long activity replaced my former hobbies, interests, and anything else I used to consider fun.
Hangovers in the morning weren’t incredibly motivating to get up and be overly active. During the week, it was more of a “soak in the shower until you can feel yourself more than a bag of meat and bones, chuck a liter of coffee down, combined with a few cigarettes, make every excuse possible to not to make and/or eat breakfast, swallow an acid reflux pill and fill up the chair for work until the feeling of hunger forces me to order a very healthy pizza”. Some weekend days were worse — play dead until your wife starts yelling or something happens that you really need to get out. If none of the above happened — keep it quiet and binge-sleep through some Netflix show.
Now, flushing everything that I was usually doing with that time before alcohol got the best of me took a couple of decades. Regaining those lost habits, interests, and hobbies will not happen overnight either. The sole fact that I’m now 20 years older, with quite a few extra kilos of what they call “life experience” has changed my views of life and sometimes not for the best. In the last couple of years — feedback from some people leaning towards an opinion that I’m a hopeless alcoholic made me doubt myself as well. Alcohol on its own, which has been affecting my brain for a long time, made motivation a hard friend to meet, anxiety almost a roommate, and somber thoughts a partner.
It takes a village. For both sides of this medal — have a drinking buddy constantly to get to this point, but also now, on this journey of reconsideration — it requires a village. It also requires you to be the settler chieftain to build that new village around you. It takes effort to reconsider your life goals. It takes time and mental and mood swings to get out of that permanent dip of somberness. It takes effort to see the good sides of yourself, believe in yourself, reinforce those good qualities in your own mind, and build on them.
It has been easy to try and pick up some old hobbies to fill up time, only to figure out that it’s really not that much fun anymore. On the other hand once you have a metric ton of spare time — there’s an endless ocean of possibilities to try new things out. Physical activities (making, repairing, and building) became new fun for me. Until about a year ago, I always thought I was the complete opposite of a “handyman.” Take a village, learn from people and try new things. You’d be surprised. I learned to fix cars in under 2 years. I learned to weld, I learned to repair car body damage, I learned how to build and renovate houses, basic woodworking, basic metalworking, and God knows what else. All these new skills not only help me to fill time but are also handy when it comes to general life. “Do I hire someone to do this for me, or do I reach out for advice and training and just do it myself?”. The latter is proving to be way more fun.
That said, since I’m 52 days AF now, in the previous couple of years, my reward for learning a new skill or applying a newly learned trick was a cold beer most of the time — now I deliberately skip that part and just enjoy the fact that I have done a better job now that I’m not sweating pure alcohol, my head isn’t pulsating pain and my hands aren’t slightly shaking. Even breaking that habit was difficult — my brain was wired to “a job well done, time for a cold one.” Now I don’t think about that anymore; it became more of a “job well done, let’s move on to another job.”
50 days is certainly not a lot. But it’s a stepping stone to those years in question, and I am proud of what I achieved so far in this short period. If you are on a similar journey — don’t get discouraged by people telling you that 50 days is just the beginning. It is just the beginning, but a beginning far enough from the start to be able to turn around and proudly flip the finger to anyone who doubted you, including yourself and your former friend alcohol.
