Tags
365daysofsober, Bad Day, change of life, drink, drinking, nohangover, sober life, sober. 365days, sobriety, wine glass
Well here I am on day 50 of being sober and I am as surprised at this as I can imagine many people are (or would be if they were aware that this has been reached)
I have gone from drinking at least four/five bottles of wine a week plus alcohol filled nights /days on weekends and replaced these with other things such as sober days/nights out, alcohol free drinks and soft drinks, online and book research for ideas I have, spending lots of time with lilbit and my family and actually going to bed and sleeping properly!
I think I can safely say that the benefits of being ‘sober’ have been huge and although I know they totally out weigh all the great things about drinking, I still cant help but miss it. As I have said in previous blogs I do struggle on certain days and at the times of day I would normally open the wine and this happens on the weekends especially. Fridays are normally pretty hard, I look at all the social media sites or talk to people at work and most of them have drinking in their plans for that night or over the weekend..I feel like Friday comes and I don’t ‘reward’ myself for the week of working hard and I get pissed off with myself for not being able to drink to it being the weekend! Then on Saturday’s it does not seem to matter what a lovely day I have had, around 5ish I am waiting for my Saturday evening to start, waiting for something to change to take me into that Saturday night feeling. Without alcohol my weekend nights (and more often than not my week nights) do seem a bit lost, like they are missing something important. (My weekends on my countdown chart are all red and amber – It isn’t easy to give up something you have relied on to get you through a week without having some hard days though, so there we go).
But saying all of that there is one big thing which has changed for me, which I have found a complete relief and would never want to go back to and that is what I will call the ‘morning fear’ – its the morning after when I wake up and have no clue how much wine I drank, what time I went to bed and how many episodes of Sons of Anarchy I am going to have to re-watch!
When I have a drink at home I would sometimes get to the point where I have fallen asleep on the sofa or if not just before I fall asleep I miraculously go to bed myself, whether or not I would remember which one of these happened the next morning is generally hit or miss. But one thing I would definitely not remember would be how much wine I had actually drank. If I only had one bottle in the house then I would know that it would all be gone, no question there! If however there had been 2 or 3 bottles then I can never be sure until I came down to see the damage done. I would lie in bed in the morning (sometimes early hours after waking up with dry mouth) and wonder how much I actually got through, did I remember opening the 2nd bottle or dare I say it the 3rd… The thing is if I found 2 empty bottles I would tell myself it was not actually two bottles I had drank, Id tell myself that I had poured a really large glass before I went to bed which I poured down the sink or I would convince myself that the first bottle was only a third full when I started it not completely full……there are plenty of ways to make it seem that you did not quite drink what the empty bottles are telling you.
Not having this morning fear has been the best change for me so far..not coming down to find red wine stains on the carpet or table, not panicking about how much I had to drink the night before and the consequences of that binge. I just wake up and feel OK, I do not have last nights make up still on or greasy hangover hair and I do not have to come down stairs and throw empty wine bottles into an overflowing recycling box and pour remaining wine down the sink telling myself that was the last time I drink that much, that I will never ever do that again! I do not have my four year old asking me if I feel bad because I drank too much wine… I literally just get up and get on with my day..and that one thing has quite honesty changed my life.