Twenty Eight: 7. Sober 2

Becoming more sober with my lifestyle feels like an extreme sport.

I’m 28.

I live & work in a college town.

I specialise in marketing restaurants & bars.

I live half my life on social media.

In my down time, I travel to big cities with amazing food & drink cultures.

When I’m on the clock, I build community around amazing food & drink cultures.

I’m young & my life is oversaturated with literally everything worth being addicted to.

It’s a lot to handle.

Drinking less alcohol hasn’t been the hard part.

At least, not in the ways I expected it to be.

I don’t crave it. I don’t need it to function.

My body is better without it.

My brain disagrees, though.

I want it when I’m scared. I want it when I’m anxious.

Drinking is awesome when you’re confident & feel whole & are adding it to a positive experience.

Drinking isn’t awesome when you’re not confident & feeling broken & are substituting it for bad feelings.

Sobering up is less about looking at myself as the victim of alcohol & more about coming to terms with the fears, anxieties, or insecurities pushing myself into spaces of discontent & self harm.

Understanding why we choose to abuse it - & recognising the reaction to why are excuses - helps making conflict manageable & healthily drinking a posibility again.

Alcohol itself has been a part of my life since I was a kid.

Midwest born, it’s a part of the culture.

I saw it handled well, & I saw it handled not so well.

It didn’t concern some of my family, & it totally concerned others.

As a kid, the good & the bad seem directly tied to the substance.

As an adult, it’s easier to understand the good & the bad are actually tied up in what is happening in the heads & the hearts of people using the substances.

I’m allowed to feel comfortable & confident in advocating for myself & others in my community the redefining of our relationship with alcohol - rather than the complete abolition of it - because of growing up & letting my understanding of us evolve a little bit.

Every day, I’m taking stock of the fear & insecurities making me want to self harm with substances.

Every day, I’m taking stock of what others my age in similar situations or cultures may be feeling.

Being human is hard. It really does suck.

Alcohol is just one of the many things I’ve used & others use to make the hard stuff bearable.

Being human isn’t always hard, though. It can feel good.

Alcohol is just one of the many things I’ve used & others use to make the easy stuff even better.

Alcohol is just as easy to abuse as words & sex & food & work & religion & relationships & all other things we make good or bad through the way we use them.

As soon as I stop drinking, I want to abuse something else - food, social media, sex, all of it.

So I have a lot of patience with myself.

I also have a lot of patience with others my age or in similar situations or cultures may be going through.

I imagine going through this at 23 instead of 28 would be twice as miserable.

I had even less confidence then & almost no tools to tell others or myself to fuck off.

I imagine going through this at 33 instead of 28 is miserable in it’s own way.

I might have more confidence then but my lifestyle & priorities will be on another plain.

The part of this, right now, feeling most like an extreme sport is demanding of myself the stamina needed to endure the experiencing & processing & understanding & applying of self necessary to keep working on evolving into a healthier me.

When your body & your brain are on fire, it’s easy to feel like you forget everything you know or everything you’ve practiced.

Sometimes I feel like I’m reteaching myself basic things constantly just to keep running.

Reminding me how to breathe.

Reminding me how to see.

Reminding me how to feel.

It’s not a sprint, but it’s definitely a marathon.