Trained to resist my self

Resisting my urges became second nature early on. It turns out I’m an exacting person. One with powerful desires and urges and ideas that I never figured out how to handle and wasn’t taught how to by my parents. (To say the least.)

I trained myself to accept conditions (inner and outer) that weren’t what I wanted or needed.

I wanted quiet, and I had to live in a noisy world. I wanted shade, and I live in a world where nice day equals heat and glaring sun.

Day 90, thoughts on human attachment

Day 90. Life is still good. And it’s spring!

I don’t know how I got much done before, wrecking my own brain several evenings a week and waking up parched and pissed at myself. Now, even when I feel the tension rise in my body, it’s obvious that the answer isn’t to douse it with alcohol. I often don’t know what the answer is, but I’m getting better at hanging in there with the uncertainty and just riding it out.

The tension is always either

How I repel from discomfort — looking back in time

I’ve had a few different ways of repelling from the four discomforts. They’re differently damaging. Alcohol is the first one where I was putting my body in danger, and that finally got to me. As I’ve said elsewhere, the health risks were never enough to get me to actually quit abusing alcohol. But once I gained enough clarity and strength to do this, I’m grateful for the immediate invisible health benefits.

Binge eating

The first substance I used to numb my feelings was food.

Day 80

Day 80. Life is good.

I was on Amtrak yesterday and walked by a guy sitting next to his a guitar with a bottle of beer on his tray. It looked so nice. I used to drink those on trains. (Amtrak is unimaginative when it comes to craft beer, so I knew this one well.) It was also 11 a.m., so I wasn’t exactly envious of the guy.

All day I felt sort of beer-oriented, as I sat at my table writing and sipping my ginger cranberry tea and my dark creamy coffee. You know what’s cool? A gool ol’ fake beer would have been just fine.

4 drinking events that were hard to let go

During my fits and starts of trying to quit alcohol over the last couple of years, there were a few situations or events where I could not imagine not drinking. I felt like I couldn’t give those up. Thought-experiment style, I would try to work a deal with myself in which I could keep them. I’d moderate around them. Sure, it might take a little effort to back away again from the alcohol afterwards, but it was worth it and I could do it, right? I’m not sure why these in particular were so hard to think about leaving behind.

When I started out on this new, finally successful “quit,” I still couldn’t picture life without them. But over the last few weeks I’ve started to be able to. I want to record these ideas, in case when the time comes, it’s tough.

Day 70

This is becoming quite a pile of days. Trying to pull my thoughts together to describe what day 70 feels like. I’ve been sticking with my daily writing and boy oh boy are the thoughts flowing out, tumbling and stumbling over one another. I’m doing my best to capture them to hold onto them as they run, even if making some sense of them is for another day.

Here’s a snapshot of day 70.