Oh Hello

Hello lovely people.

It’s been a hot minute since I posted so I guess you can assume how things have been going in the sobriety department.

When I last left you I had recently lost my mother and pretty much all over the place.  I had done a five day sober stint without much of my own choice because we had needed to evacuate our house to my father in laws due to a wildfire.  That was almost a year ago.

Losing Mom was rough.  I’m still not okay but I’m doing better.  There are days/weeks/months were I do okay and then just have a week long breakdown for seemingly no reason.

In January I decided to take control of my diet again and began restricting my calories.  This was good because it also meant cutting back on the booze.  It was bad however, because I cut back on my calories quite dramatically so I could still *have* the booze.

I was by no stretch of the imagination anorexic but I sure as shit wasn’t getting enough nutrients into my body.  I was probably averaging anywhere from 700 to 1000 calories in food. After a while I then I was starting to exercise a bit obsessively so I could have more calories for booze.

When I was in my 20’s I was a pretty severe bulimic, so I really try to watch myself on the whole eating disorder front, but I didn’t even really see this as a problem this past year while I was dieting.

I ended up losing almost 30 pounds until we took our annual trip to Vegas in June and all bets were off.  I ate all the food and drank all the booze and was really “enjoying myself”.

We got home and I was no longer able to reel myself in.  On the food or the drinking and exercise went out the window completely.  As of this Saturday, I have gained back almost 7 pounds.

All the while, I could tell I was getting out of control but I just couldn’t even *think* about going back to dieting or restricting my drinking.  This is probably a product of being SOOOO strict with my calories for 6 months, that once I loosened the reigns I just couldn’t pull them back in.

Anyhoo, there were periods of time where I knew I wanted better for myself.  A couple of nights here and there I would ask my husband if we could go spend the night at his fathers house.  That house now represents a safe space for me and not drinking.

I’m not sure if this will make sense, but I’ve been boozing it up daily/nightly pretty much for as long as we have lived here in our house, and I feel like coming home to this house every night and binge drinking is just what I do here.  I never knew I felt that way until we stayed somewhere else (my father in laws) where drinking just wasn’t even on the table.  It wasn’t an option.  Now when we stay there, I am not anxious about not drinking like I would be at home because I know it is just not possible.
Therefore, I have seen a few opportunities for us to stay there and jumped on it because I liked the way I could control the drinking while there and not even worry about it.  I mean, of course I thought about it, at couldn’t wait to get home the next day to drink … but for that one night that we were there, I felt like a normal person, not an irresponsible alcoholic.

We are going to be spending an entire weekend there not this weekend, but the next as our little town is going to have a large influx of tourists that we want to avoid.  I’m looking forward to it.

So knowing I could do that and coupled with the fact that I just keep gaining weight, I thought about getting back on the diet.  I made the decision for yesterday as my start point and decided that instead of going back to horribly restricting my calories to include a vast (yet still restricted for me) amount of vodka … what if I just ate like a normal person on a diet and didn’t drink my calories???  I know, crazy concept right??

So that is what I am doing.  This week I have incorporated two small glasses of wine so far just to ease into it.  I am justifying it by saying it’s better than a half a 1.75 liter of Vodka which was at least what I was putting away daily since we got back from Vegas.  I know it is still drinking, but this is what is helping me transition right now.

And I’m not saying forever.  My brain can’t do that and has never been able to do that.  It makes me panicky and right now I’m just trying to cling to any kind of sanity in this at all.

Anyway, last night I was in my bed reading by 7:30 and probably will be again tonight if not earlier.  The good thing about the nights I have spent at my FIL’s was that it has taught me that I will fall asleep eventually, I just have to let myself relax and not worry obsessively about not getting any sleep that night.

I would have dropped off around nineish last night had my husband not decided to come to bed and immediately start snoring like a Buzzsaw (I’m so envious that he can get to sleep so easily).  I finally fell into dreamland around 11:30 after coming up with the brilliant plan to put white noise on my phone and pop in my earbuds.  And I slept the rest of the night through and woke up feeling more refreshed than had I passed out drunk at nine and “slept” three more hours.

I know I have had these types of revelations before, but for the first time in a while now I feel that feeling that is so foreign to me most of the time.  That feeling of hope.