Embracing reality through dreams

I had a dream the other night that I was in a bar. A couple of my friends were there. I was under dire anxiety and pressure being surrounded by alcohol. I didn’t drink though. That’s right people. I’m even sober in my dreams. I woke up thinking that I had slipped up and drank until the reality that it was only a dream set in.

The bar felt oddly familiar. I spent a small portion of the morning trying to figure out what bar it was. Then I realized something. It’s not a real bar. I’d been there before in a previous dream. It’s my dream bar which is an oxymoron since I’m an alcoholic.

There’s a lot of paranoia I’ve found that comes with being newly sober. I often fear that something really tragic is going to happen soon. Like a death of a family member or friend, and I’ll start drinking again because of it. Eventually something like this is going to happen, and controlling my urges to drink under fire is going to be one hell of a ride. The past couple nights I’ve had the urge to go to the bar. Tonight, and for the rest of the week I won’t be able to surrender my keys to anyone. My father will be away and my mother will already be asleep for work. It scares me. I’m going to call my girlfriend or anyone who’s available if the urge becomes too strong. I’m scared but excited. This will be a good test for me that I was going to have to face eventually anyway.

My next tattoo session is coming up soon, not this weekend but the next I’ll be sitting down ready for a needle to be shoved into me. America! I’ve been looking forward to it all damn summer, and its taken me all damn summer to get it scheduled. I like the waiting around though. It comes with the grand ideas I have for ink. Not to toot my own horn but my tattoo ideas are nothing but the best. They have to be after all. I’ve probably written about this before but I often think about how many tattoos I’ll have 5 years down the road. Maybe a lot. Maybe not too many at all. It all depends on if I continue to have good ideas strike me. I’m assuming I will have a lot though. My ink ideas are connected through my writing, and I don’t see that getting stale anytime soon.

Back to sobriety. Life is growing boring right now because all I do is work and sleep. For the most part anyway, and that’s another reason why I used to drink so much. To me there was nothing better to do, but I’m embracing the boredom. I’d rather be bored than put through a shit storm. Which has been the trend for the past two years. So another goal of mine currently is to take this time where things are settling down and reflect. I’ve grown immensely as a person and I will always be proud of that. Self-love is still very foreign to me, but I’m learning to love it as I love myself. I’m a pretty rad dude yo. I’ve always been this rad. Even in middle school. I just didn’t know it yet. That’s a lie. Nobody was rad in middle school. Not even Morgan Freeman.

Along with the fact that most of my friends drink, people drink in the shows and movies that I watch. It’s not a huge factor, but it’s still a factor. It’s like one of the handful of the times I was trying to quit smoking. Every time I’d see somebody on T.V. smoking it was a struggle to shrug off that urge. Smoking is a different beast of addiction compared to alcohol that I will tackle one day, but as people who support me keep telling me: “One thing at a time, one day at a time.”

For the record if I quit smoking the same time as I quit drinking I would’ve gone insane…..more insane. I’ve smoked for 5 years now. The first couple were in high school on and off. I would never buy a pack, I’d always bum them from friends. Eventually I started buying them so friends wouldn’t have to share with me. It turned into a pack a week, a pack every four days, now a couple years later it’s a pack to a pack and a half a day. It’s rough, and obviously I wish I’d never started. Boredom plus family history got the best of me once again.