It is an extremely rare quiet afternoon at the house today. The wife has gone to meet her mother and pick up our kids and she won't be back until this evening. It's very rare that I have this kind of silent time to myself and the feeling is peaceful, if a little eerie. There's a bunch of shit to do, of course. I just tried to fix the water line on the refrigerator and couldn't, so I'll have to call a repairman. Grocery shopping, hardware store, run, yard work - all coming later. But I wanted to take a minute pause and reflect on where I am today, and to be thankful for that.
Lately, I've been discouraged or frustrated or just generally negative a lot. Not drinking for the past four months has improved my life significantly, and I need to remember that. I suppose I'm in a liminal phase now: I'm still very much a newcomer, but I have strung a few days together too. It's easy for me to look forward and make projections based on expectations that I have and, I think, at this juncture for me, it might be a good idea to take a look at my expectations. One unmet expectation I have been holding onto is that not drinking would be easy by now. I feel pretty far removed from actually, physically wanting to take the drink; but I have been backsliding some in terms of feeling sorry for myself about not being able to. That's the danger about where I am in my journey. I'm far enough away from my last drink now that it's easy for me to forget how shitty it was, how bad I felt, how unhappy my wife was. All that seems like a distant memory now. So does the initial pride of stopping. For the first month or two, I was so happy and proud that I was really doing it, really not drinking. I discovered so much that I was missing out on. Too many little things to name even; laughing with my wife late at night before bed, an evening run to the store to get a pack of cigarettes or something sweet as the sun was going down, looking in on my kids with a clear head as they slept. These are things I must remember to appreciate.
It's warming up now, and they just opened the pool in the subdivision we moved into today. People are trickling over now with their coolers. I'm apprehensive about this summer generally. Beach trips, music festivals, shit I feel like I can't get out of. When I started this, I really wanted not to drink. I thought that if I could not drink for a year, I could explore trying to grow as a person and get past whatever was causing me to be so unhappy all the time. Things are better, but the unhappiness is still there sometimes; another unmet expectation. I was excited about making personal growth and I am working hard on it. I'm also falling back into other behaviors that are not conducive to being well. I find myself thinking a lot about drinking next year.
All of this serves as a reminder to me today to be very thankful for where I am now. It's gorgeous out. The sunlight is streaming through the windows. There's wind so it's not too hot and when it blows, the leaves rustle. I'm drinking tea. The progress I've made this year has been in incremental unexpected ways, and improvement has not always been linear. But I'm in a better place now than I was then. For that I am deeply grateful. I am not doing and thinking all the right stuff for the long run. I know that, and it's causing me some concern; but I'm not willing to do anything about it. I should at least be honest about that. So for now, I'm just going to breathe deeply in the gratitude I feel to be sober on a day like today and remember not to cling to my expectations.
Submitted May 15, 2016 at 12:08AM by KingoftheMelvins http://ift.tt/1V1TDKf stopdrinking
No comments:
Post a Comment