For this week’s post, I’d started writing “My Drinking Story”, to recap how I got here. Turns out it’s a bigger story than I’d planned, so I’ll pick it up at a later date. Also, with everything I’ve been going through over the past few weeks, It feels more appropriate to revisit one of the lessons I’ve run into over the last year: Stopping drinking doesn’t fix anything on its own. Also, practicing kindness to one’s self can be as much of a process as stopping drinking.
Some of us who stop drinking may be fortunate enough to not have to learn that and life will go back to “normal” quickly after getting sober. However, it’s been a revelation that has taken me a long time to come around to. When I first started thinking about quitting, it was hard not to be drawn in by the success stories of all those people who quit before me. Stories about the weight they lost, the hobbies they acquired, the relationships that were improved, how much money they saved, the ample free time that they found in any given day. And, oh boy, was the idea of more free time appealing!
Stopping drinking cannot fix problems drinking didn’t cause.
Yet, whenever I’d stop drinking, life was the same just without drinking. I still felt wiped out, depressed, stressed, distanced from loved ones, etc. I didn’t get why this was happening until someone on the /r/stopdrinking subreddit pointed out: Stopping drinking cannot fix problems drinking didn’t cause. That is, while stopping drinking freed my mind from the alcohol trap, stopping by itself couldn’t solve problems. This applies not only to stress level and depression, but also free time. In reality, it wasn’t that I was lacking in free time while drinking, just that I was filling that time with drunkenness. Thus, what could have been time spent reflecting or processing or recuperating was filled with the staticky mess that is my mind while drinking. All that means is that when I stop drinking, I don’t “have” more time, I just have more of my day where I’m actually present. It makes sense to me as I type it, but I think that’s only because I’ve lived through this experience multiple times now.
Drinking cannot solve problems not drinking didn’t cause.
As I reflect on my drinking career (and it has always been a job), one of the themes at the core is a desire to escape un-diagnosed depression. It’s especially clear now that I’ve been diagnosed and am working through courses of treatment and learning to cope through other means. The idea of alcohol as an “off-switch” is still very much in my mind and it still frequently rears its head at my worst moments. When that happens, I need to take a bit of a converse approach to my earlier statement and realize that “drinking cannot solve problems not drinking didn’t cause”; drunkenness really is only a cure for sobriety for me and sobriety isn’t a condition I want to be cured of at this time.
In conclusion, it’s been a long journey to get where I am today. I spent a long time drinking and have really only spent about 5 years earnestly trying to get sober. There’s a lot to recover from and a lot of vital adult skills that I’ve put off in the name of intoxicated escapes. If nothing else, this lesson and its challenges are a reminder that I need to be kind to myself as I go through this process… work through this process. Everyone is different, so what takes some people no time to get through in recovery, might take me a few years. What takes me a few years to get done, might take you a couple of weeks.
We are all different in our lives and our journeys through sober explorations are no different. Yet, there is one similarity: we should all practice kindness to ourselves. In fact, while the first lesson I mentioned has been critical in my recovery process, it’s been overshadowed by my need to be better at practicing kindness to myself. This is not only part of my working through depression but also part of my general life improvement work. It’s very hard to get ahead when the voice in your mind is telling you you’re never good enough, or not as good as that person. So, with work, I’ve been asking myself to change that dialog and put effort into talking to myself in a way that I’d talk to a friend or want a friend to talk to me. Sure, there are ways in which I can get better, but it might take more time than “NOW”, today, next week, etc.
As you think about your relationship to alcohol, I encourage you to put some effort behind being neutral towards yourself, rather than chiding yourself with things like, “I drink too much” or “I can’t control myself when I drink”. These things may be true, but are they as useful as saying something to yourself like, “I wonder why I like to drink as much as I do” or “There are parts of my life that I’d like to have better control over, and drinking seems to compromise that goal.” They’re small changes, but they represent a shift from criticism to curiosity which, to me, is a form of kindness. Entering into a situation without making assumptions isn’t easy but it allows us to really explore the roots of something. This doesn’t only have to apply to drinking, either. As I’ve been working on this with respect to drinking, I’ve also found myself taking the mindset elsewhere in life, including eating, doomscrolling, accepting boredom, and so on. Perhaps this is another aspect of life improvement that’s spawning from working on not drinking.
Is there anything about your own journey towards or through sobriety that’s enlightened broader aspects of your life? Feel free to reach out and share your advice or lessons learned. Next week, I’ll share my story of my drinking career or at least part of it.