Stupid Excuse Files

I think I'm going to start a series that I hope won't last long given the nature of them.
The reason I gave myself to drink?

1/15/20 It's my night to cook and I am not sure I can do that sober...

I'm sorry, what??

Yup, that is what I told myself that late afternoon and I stuck to when I got home from work.

How pathetic! I cannot possibly not drink tonight because cooking is clearly a thing only drunk people can do! That is what it is translated to in the harsh light of day. So stupid.

Especially when you think about the fact that I started cooking after my second drink. I FELT ZERO BUZZ or intoxication. So how can this excuse possibly hold any water? It can't....and yet it did. 

When you are just looking for an excused to drink, you will believe ANYTHING!

Good night, sweet Mother In Law

 I'm not sober. Call this an excuse...it could quite possibly be, but I couldn't face it tonight.

My husbands mother has been sick for quite some time. She was in and out of the hospital with various different things until about six months ago, she was sent home on 24 hour end of life care. 

She was bedridden and taken off about 90% of the multitude of medications she took daily.

Within weeks she was thriving. She was out of bed, off the catheter and making trips to Target on her motorized scooter.

We knew it wouldn't last but we were so happy to get those bonus months.

She took a turn right after Thanksgiving. Disoriented and falling out of bed at night because she didn't know where she was...and soon turned into bedridden again with Hospice on staff.

I got the call I had been dreading today. My husband doesn't call my work phone unless we have pre-arranged plans to have him drop off the dogs to me. We exchange emails and texts and that is it. 

I knew that when this happened, it would be a phone call at work and I got that call today around 11 AM. When the receptionist told me my husband was on the line, I immediately dissolved into tears and said to anyone around me that it was him and he wouldn't call unless...<insert sobs here>

My work girls rallied round and I had three people telling me to breathe and be calm as my heart went into overdrive before I picked up the phone.

He said his dad had just called and it looked like it was time, he was heading over there and did I want to go?

I don't do well in situations like this, I never have. I prefer to remember the person as they were and not how they were on their death bed. I was the same way with both my grandparents and it's just how I process. My husband knows this about me and he told me that was fine and he'd keep me posted.
About an hour later I was still a big weepy mess still, but I had just started my lunch break when my boss rushed in to say my husband was on the phone again. 

She had passed surrounded by her family (minus one son who is stationed in Asia) and went very peacefully according to my husband.

My husband seems to be doing really well, as he thinks he did all his grieving in the last few weeks, but I'm kind of scared that it will manifest itself in the next couple of days.

I tried to tell him we should skip our trip but he says there is no reason. He says that the only reason he would have was if she hadn't passed and they thought she was ready to right before. He said that he feels kind of relieved because of all the waiting and anticipation that he had been doing for over the last six months.

I get that....I don't work that way.

I really lucked out in the in-law department as she was an incredible woman and took me in as her own daughter 20 years ago when she didn't have to. I loved her deeply and she will be missed.

Baby Steps?

So I didn't update last night, but I didn't drink.

I was going to sit down and write an entry, but then I realized I wasn't really thinking about wanting a drink. I didn't want to start writing and make myself start thinking about wanting a drink, so I put myself to bed instead.

I did have a lovely dinner with my friend that I hadn't seen in a while.

My sleep was very disjointed. I would start to feel sleepy, like I could start to drift off and then I would jerk myself awake. Either one of my limbs would involuntarily spasm or I felt like I couldn't breathe just long enough to make me gasp for air. This is not unusual for me with sober sleep after a long period of non sober sleep.

In my experience, I should sleep a little easier tonight.

Of course, all my doubts are now starting to creep in and they are giving way to the "excuses" as to why I should allow myself to drink tonight.

Everything from: "I feel like I'm getting sick and I need to burn it out of my system." and "My boss isn't going to be in tomorrow so there will be less stress therefore it won't matter if I'm a little hungover." to "My judgemental sister in law is going to bring the dogs home and into our house on Monday (this is last minute news) and I need to super deep clean…I don't know HOW to nor do I WANT to do that SOBER!" and "Fuck it, I just WANT to drink tonight!"

Believe it or not, the cleaning one is the excuse I consider most valid. In my first days of sobriety (I love how I say that like I do this often) I like to be very gentle with myself and running around my house scrubbing and vacuuming without some alcohol in my body just makes me want to cry. I know that these are stupid reasons and they all stem from the reality of the last excuse I gave. I just WANT to.
The thing is, I'm ALWAYS going to want to, that is the curse of it all.

Meh.

I can drink but I hate meds??

 First of all, wow. Just wow.

I was certainly not expecting the outpouring of support that I got in the comments of my last entry. It may have been unexpected, but let me tell you, it was NOT unappreciated!

I read them all at work today with tears running down my face. I had to stop at some points and regroup before I could continue reading them. 

My husband is 100% supportive of me, but he's heard this song and dance so many times before that he's just kind of like: "Okay, sure honey." and waits for me to keep on drinking - which I normally do.
If I'm honest, I'm a little nervous to blog now that I know people might read it, but the whole point of this thing is to be honest from here on out so - marching on!

Something I didn't mention in this blog is that I have been on various anti-depressant medications for over 25 years. Later, I might delve into the depths of a not so perfect childhood but that is for another day. Let's just say not liking myself has been a lifelong issue.

Over the many years I have taken these meds there have been countless times when I have forgotten to take it for a day. The day after I forgot, I would be so riddled with anger and/or sadness. Crying for no reason, snapping at my husband over stupid things and just feeling a rage that I couldn’t explain.

On those occasions it made me realize that I obviously still needed to be on the medication full force since I had such a poor reaction when I didn’t take it. I was going to have to take this little pill for the rest of my life. 

A couple of years ago I felt like the meds weren't working anymore, and now that I was in my 40's I didn't like the idea of being handcuffed to a daily pill. BTW, the irony in an active alcoholic saying that is not lost on me at all.

I discovered CBD oil and that had really helped control my anxiety. I slowly began to wonder if I could see about at least lowering my dosage of Celexa.

I did some research and found that quitting any kind of SSRI cold turkey is not recommended. There is a something that can happened called Antidepressant Discontinuation Syndrome that is VERY unpleasant. Symptoms include but are not limited to:

Catatonia
Chills
Depersonalization
Diarrhea
Difficulty Walking
Dizziness
Fatigue
Headaches
Impaired concentration
Insomnia
Irritability
Lightheadedness
Muscle pain
Nausea/vomiting
Paresthesia
Psychosis
Shock-like sensations
Suicidal thoughts
Vertigo
Visual disturbances
Vivid dreams

I don’t know about you, but none of those sounded very fun to me, but neither did having to take meds every single day.

However, in my research, I also found out that what I thought I knew about my body and mind needing this medication as evidenced by my missing pills wasn’t necessarily true. I thought that because I felt so icky and mean and sad after skipping a pill meant that it showed how I would be in everyday life without it. What was really happening was that my body was experiencing a slight amount of Antidepressant Discontinuation Syndrome.

Was in possible that I could feel good without these pills..eventually?

So for shits and giggles on July 12 2018, I cut my daily dose of Celexa down from 40mg to 30mg.
It took over a year but currently I have been completely off my 40 mgs of Celexa for 130 days, so like...four and half months.

It has been hell.

Every taper was followed by two to six weeks of rage and uncontrollable tears for no reason. It would then stable out again and I would start the next taper.

I'm happy I'm off the meds, but I haven't seemed to have stabilized since my last 5 mg pill 130 days ago. I have good days and bad days but it seems more bad than good.

I feel like the drinking and hangovers are compounding this and that if I could just get to the pink clouds again, I would stop being such and ever-loving bitch to my husband and start to feel like a human being again.

I know that the withdrawals from the meds cannot be helping the anxiety that a hangover brings and vice versa. 

But not drinking seems to cause me even more anxiety.

When I wake up in the morning with a pounding racing heart and a feeling of dread, I welcome the thought of not drinking that night. It seems like the best idea in the world, especially after having that small taste of sober life last year. But as the day wears on with all the pressures at work and the unending anxiety, I cannot help but start to crave that first drink after arriving home. The one that tells my brain: "Okay, you win, we are going to drink tonight...you can calm down now." and it does.

Damn. This shit is hard.

And just FYI, I am not really looking to go back on meds. I feel like I've worked too hard to get off of them and I really don't want to go back there again.

Anyhoo, that was a buttload more than I intended to write tonight.

In case you are wondering...and it should probably be obvious from what I just wrote, I am not sober tonight. 

My short term goal that I hinted about last entry is to stop drinking on Sunday (those weekends are so hard tho!) and stay sober the rest of the week to make me less anxious for our flight on Friday night. I am pretty sure that amount of days sober will help me not freak out on the flight (have I mentioned I hate flying??) but then I will be in a place where I have never been sober and am not sure I want to be so I'm pretty sure I will drink that weekend.

Who knows, maybe I will feel so good from not drinking next week that I will continue while on our mini vacay...

I'm not going to bet on it, but that WOULD be the ultimate test...

Yeah, don't hold your breath. 

One last thing before I sign off. After I wrote that last post and was honest getting all that off my chest, even though I didn't think anyone would read it, I got the first full nights sleep that I have had in a long time. Granted I had been drinking but that never makes a difference. I didn't wake up in the middle of the night in a panic attack for no reason and though I did wake up once when my husband or the dogs moved, I fell right back asleep until my alarm went off and it was wonderful.

I totally attribute that to getting all that off of my chest last night, whether it is true or not. :)

I think I might be ready to try again?

Soooooo, yeah. It's been a minute since I updated and that is for a reason.

I went from having lots of sober days to none again. I kept a calendar but I left it at work, I will update it when I get to it. I gave up.

And I guess I didn't hit my bottom and if I'm honest, I'm not sure I have yet either. I'm not sober tonight, and I haven't been for over a year...

But I WANT to be. I really do. The last few days I have been reading sobriety blogs and am so glad to see that even the best ones have slipped up every so often. This shit isn't easy, but any stretch of the imagination.

I want to get back into the sober life. 

I feel like in this last (and pretty much ONLY) shot at sobriety I tried, I was all for it at first and then got caught up in the Instagram world of sobriety..."I had five hundred followers...they are not going to watch me crash and burn!" and it worked for a minute. I was working for my followers...but not for me. I even fudged some posts because I was not sober, but it seemed everyone wanted to root for me being so.

I can't do that any longer. I need to be honest. I need to tell you that I am planning on being sober next week to kill my anxiety for the fact that we are flying out to Vegas the week after and I will probably drink for those next couple of days because...well, I've never been sober in Vegas. And then I will try to be sober again.

Even I, in my vodka soaked state, know that is a fucking lie. You only want to quit the booze for a few days so you won't have a panic induced heart attack on the plane and once you are home safe, you will continue to drink.

Yet there is hope in the blogs that I am reading and even re reading my own. I have a small sense of hope, but my crippling (booze induced) anxiety makes me feel like I will never be able to escape it...mostly because stopping drinking makes me feel so fucking anxious.

Am I ready to try again, or am I just making excuses as to how, when and why I will be okay with either not drinking, or drinking? 

Either way, I'm not a fan of myself right now...

Update and observations on sobriety

I'm still here and I'm still fighting.  I have had a couple of slips in my attempt at sobriety, but overall I like to think that I am doing well.
I've been sober more days in the last three months than I have been in the last 20 years.  That is something right? 
I also have not let the slips derail me completely.  I have simply gotten back into the sober game the next day and not given up.  In the past it would have just been an excuse to keep drinking.  "Oh well, I fucked up.  Might as well get drunk tonight as well.  Since I have to start my count all over again, I might as well start a streak of drinking again.
Not to say those thoughts DIDN'T occur to me, I just was able to squash them down with actual logic.  Having so many sober days under my belt have shown me how good I feel while NOT drinking, so it's kinda easy to get back on the wagon after.
That's the other thing.  I haven't even really enjoyed my slips.  The drinking that I remember enjoying so much isn't actually the reality and it hasn't been for quite some time.
It's so funny how our mind tricks us into remembering our drinking sessions as so much funner than they actually were.  I mean, I know at one point in our drinking careers, they were fun or why would we have continued right?  But after a while for me it just literally became a habit.  Go to work, come home, drink and pass out.  Lather, Rinse, Repeat.  There was never a question of whether I WANTED to do it or not.  I just did it.  I had done it for so long that of course I must want to.

Having said that, here are some observations on my new found sobriety:

1) This one would seem like a given, but please remember that I have been drinking almost every single day for the last 20 years.  Waking up without a hangover is nothing short of amazing. Seriously! When I wake up in the mornings now I am refreshed.  I only hit the snooze button half of the times I used to and I have even (gasp!) worked out in the mornings!  This also translates into the rest of my day as well.  I get to work in a good mood and am a lot more productive in my work day.

2) The time I spend with my husband is quality.  Let's face it, my husband has put up with my shit for far longer than I would have.  He became sober around 13 years ago due to a health issue.  He didn't want to, but he had no choice.  We met and bonded over our mutual love of drinking 19 years ago and although I swore I would give up the drink when he did, I didn't.  I honestly can't imagine how he has done it.  He usually went to bed before I did at night because he didn't want to deal with drunk sloppy me and he shouldn't have to.  He has always claimed my drinking doesn't bother him as long as I'm not belligerent and as long as it isn't a threat to my health, but I know it had to get to him.  How could it not?
Now our nights are actually filled with conversation as we prepare dinner together and talk about our days.  We still spend our "unwinding" time apart, me on the computer writing and him no the back porch playing Candy Crush and chilling with the dogs, but we communicate so much better.  Oh, and the fact that I remember all of the conversations is a super plus in our relationship! 

3) I love sober sleep!!!  OMG, I feel like I have never been so rested in my whole life!  At the very start it was really hard to get to sleep.  I hear this is normal.  You spent so many nights just passing out that your body doesn't remember how to get to sleep normally.  But once it remembered, it has given me the most restful sleep of all time!  Seriously, I cannot wait to go to sleep at night!  I sleep solidly and as stated in #1, I wake up super refreshed.  I used to pass out for 8 or 9 hours a night but never feel like I had gotten a good nights sleep...because I hadn't.  Drunk sleep is shit.  Sober sleep is where it's at!

4) Remembering shit is awesome.  I was a black out drunk.  Even when I didn't feel like I was that drunk, I would wake up and not remember large chunks of the evening.  My husband would tell me that I seemed just fine the night before and when I told him I didn't remember, he would be shocked.  Over the years I got fairly well at hiding my blackouts by omission.  If he mentioned something from the night before that I didn't remember, I would just pretend like I did and try and figure out the details later.  The worst part was when I would have conversations with other people that didn't know I was a drinker and then not remember them.  Thankfully for me, most of those conversations were online and I was able to pull up the chat transcripts the next day for better or worse and determine if I had promised anything to anyone such as meeting for brunch or giving them a ride somewhere.
I cannot tell you how nice it is not to worry about that.  It sounds stupid to put that in writing and only a blackout drinker can relate, but it's so true.
Also eating food at night is and remembering it is fantastic.  I used to eat at the very end of my drunk and never remember it.  I would eat solely to soak up the booze so I didn't stink in the morning.  Talk about wasting calories!  Between the booze and the food I didn't remember eating, it's not wonder I had gained so much weight at one point!!

5) I'm and avid reader again.  Ever since I COULD read, I did.  I devoured books like candy and was always hungry for more.  My mother was constantly complaining about how much money she spent at the book fairs at my school.  After I took up drinking, reading at night was a no go due to the previously mentioned blackouts.  I would still occasionally read on my lunch breaks at work, but it wasn't the same.  I couldn't allow myself to get swept up in a story only to read it in a 15 minute increments.  It wasn't fair.  Audio books did become a thing in my recent past because I could put in earbuds at work and listen, but while that wasn't against the rules, it was frowned upon so I tried not to take advantage.
I now eat an early dinner(and remember it) to retire to the bedroom so I can read at night around 8:00PM.  In my drinking days, I would have just been hitting my stride at that point and couldn't imagine stopping my drinking to go read.  Now I crave it.  To the point where I am starting to have to enforce a cut off time for my reading.  I get so involved that I'll read well into the night after my husband has joined me in bed.  I will find myself looking at the clock and finding it is 10 or 11 at night and realize I have to get up for work in the morning and I need to get to sleep.  Oh, what a delicious problem to have!

6) This one sort of piggybacks on the above, but I no longer really watch TV.  It was an activity that I usually only did while lit and it was an exercise in futility.  I say that because I wouldn't start watching TV until I was pretty well wasted and then would only remember half of what I watched the next day and have to re-watch it, possibly more than once.  If that sounds foolish and dumb, it's because it is. 
If I stuck to 30 minute shows I would usually be okay, but the hour long dramas, forget it...and I did!  I would check my netflix Q and find that I had watched and episode but only partially remember it.  I would start it again and Marty would walk in and say: "Didn't you just watch this last night?" and I would feel that horrible shame and either ignore him or come up with a reason I was re-watching it.  "I needed to see her face when she made that decision...it's been bugging me all day." or something equally asinine. 

I'm sure that I will start watching again eventually, but in my sober mind, it is an activity that I did while drunk and I'm not ready to start integrating the two.  I hope that makes sense.  At any rate, with my reading, I haven't missed it at all.

Okay, I'm pretty sure I could go on for days, but I'm going to close this out for now because it's getting close to the time I need to go read in bed.  ;)

3 weeks and ...

So all was well last week.  Hubs was out of town and I did very well, not giving in to the temptation to drink to be "naughty" because he wasn't home to police me.  Not that he ever has in the past, but that is how my brain works.
So all was well, I got out of work early on Friday and picked him up at the airport.  For some reason, it just felt right to have drinks that evening.  Partly, because I wanted to see if I could just have drinks that night and that be it. 
The short answer to the long story is no, I couldn't. 
I woke up hungover, and feeling like crap.  It's amazing how fast that feeling comes back.
That night we had a date and didn't get home until late so I just went to bed with no drinks.  That was the plan and I stuck to it. 
The next day we visited with family for most of the afternoon.  When we got home I told myself I would just have a few drinks again and then not have any the next day so I wouldn't be hungover on Tuesday when I had to go back to work.
I think you already know how that went.
Yeah, I drank both Sunday and Monday.
The thing is, I didn't even really enjoy it!  I felt like I was doing it just to prove to myself that I still could and that makes no sense.
In the end, all that happened is that my anxiety came back full force, my heart rate went up to an unhealthy count again...I didn't take my blood pressure because I didn't dare, but I'm sure that shot up back up as well.
In the short of it, I thought I was doing what I wanted to do, because isn't this what I've done for so many years??  Isn't that my normal?
But I ended up missing remembering eating dinner and going to bed and reading and getting good rest.
I hemmed and hawed that Friday night before taking that first drink.  I would start to and then stop.  Tell myself that I didn't HAVE to do it.  I knew I wouldn't be happy with myself for doing it, but eventually, I did it anyway.
Once I broke the seal so to speak by having that first drink, it was much easier to agree to drinking the rest of the weekend. 
Last night I didn't drink.  It was pretty easy since I was out with friends until late for a weeknight.  I just got home and went to bed.  The fact that that girls were all drinking wine, didn't bother me.  Drinking in a group of people hasn't been my thing in a good many years.
Today is my new second day sober.  I learned a lot about myself and what I do and do not want out of my life this weekend. 
It's easier this time around to not drink because I don't have that fear of the unknown like I did when I first quit almost a month ago after 20 years.  That's not to say that it is easy...just easier.  There wasn't as much blind fear about the fact that I was coming home tonight and not drinking.
Sorry this entry is all over the place.  I am trying to write this fast and get it out while the husband is cooking dinner. 
So I'm done with drinking again.  Hopefully for longer than last time.  I wish I could take this weekend back, but I can't.  I can only move forward.