Message in a Bottle Part 3

Two years ago at Christmas, I wrote this:
Christmas would have been so different if I hadn’t drank. I feel down, anxious and helpless. Today would have been day 45, I would have gone on my annual Christmas run with joy in my heart. Once I drink, the negative effects last for days. I ran this morning and derived no pleasure from it, I felt ashamed, self loathing and deep rooted sadness. I wanted to sit down in the middle of the street and cry.

My family are big drinkers and watching them do it today is making me even sadder. My brother suffers from depression and just looking at him drinking bottle after bottle of beer makes me want to weep.
But, every day is a new start, and tomorrow I’m hoping the post-drinking blues abate and that I start to get some of my sober clarity and peace back. 
This time next year when I post on Christmas day, I want to do so with a year of sobriety under my belt. I want to re-read this and remember the pain and discomfort that drinking has brought back so quickly. I want to have worked through how to cope with my low moods and be a stronger person for it. I want to be 100% sober and comfortable with a new lifestyle. Drinking ruins so much, it’s just not worth it. I’ve written it time after time on here this year and keep slipping. One day, I’ll no longer slip, I’ll wobble along sober but will no longer fall.
This post is like a little message in a bottle for what I hope the next year will bring. It will be my 2014 Christmas Day treat to read how far I’ll have come. I can do this, I know it’s within me to. I just need to keep the faith in myself, which I currently don’t have back, but with a few sober days under my belt, it will come. 
Here’s to ending 2013 sober and starting 2014 on the right foot. 
Once again I celebrate Christmas so grateful for my sobriety. I am calm, happier, relaxed and full of gratitude. Of course “wolfie” is still at the door at times in the wink of a wineglass or the momentary madness of a “was I really that bad?!” thought. 

I blogged a few weeks ago about dark days I was experiencing. Like everything, these were temporary and I feel on the up again. Most pain has a lesson, and for me it was that the depression I felt then felt similar to the hungover depression I chose to inflict over and over. Actually, I didn’t choose. I was powerless to the drink that caused it. 

Sometimes I underestimate the strong grip I currently have on sobriety, and just how precarious it really is. I must never put that in jeopardy.

Good luck to all those who are newly sober, or trying. I will pray for you this Cheistmas x 

Surfacing

Thank you to everyone who reached out following my desperate last post. I was so down in the dumps I didn’t even have the energy or inclination to reply. For that I am sorry.

Once again life has turned a corner. I feel normal again. I did what I needed to do for my own sanity and took myself out of my ever-chaotic life to get space and perspective and look after myself.

It has worked. I was suffocated and now I can breathe. For now.

And so the carousel turns again, and I’m back to that cornerstone of sobriety: the importance of self care. When I first got sober, I remember believing that my own sobriety was built on four pillars: self-care, spirituality, relationships and solitary space. When just one of those pillars becomes off balance, the whole structure can topple. Time and time again this has been proven to be true, and time and time again I forget to learn the lesson.

I’m lucky in that I don’t have the responsibilities of a family that mean I can slip away and take some time, but it required bravery at work to put my foot down and to display some weakness, which I hate to do, but has been so worth it.

I’m inching towards 2 years sober and every day I’m further down the road of being human. And that’s what’s so hard about sobriety- we have to learn over and over again in different ways to experience the world in technicolor. To accept the shades of grey as well as the dazzling light. It’s not an easy path, but I’m so bloody glad to be on it.

Happy Friday lovely bloggers!