The pink is fading…

Welp, so much for those pink f*cking clouds.

So I’ve been in a bad mood pretty much all the time for the last few days.  I’m not sure if it’s the not drinking thing or the fact that I’m going to be flying home in less than two weeks to pick up my mom’s ashes.

It’s probably a combination of each, if I’m honest.

I’m crying all the time, and if I’m not leaking from my eyes I’m internally FUMING about something that probably isn’t that big of a deal but it’s infuriating to me (nothing specific, just whatever pisses me off at that moment).

I’m not a good flier on a good day, but I haven’t flown in a few years and I’m really not looking forward to it.

Planning this trip has not been fun.  This will be the first time in EVER that I’ve gone home and not stayed with my mom.  Every time I had to do any sort of booking for this trip has resulted in me dissolving into tears when I realize I’m not going to see her.  Ever again.

To make matters worse, the one bright spot of the trip was seeing my best friend and she is now in the hospital.  She is parallelized from the chest down (with use of her arms) due to a botched back surgery a few years back and has a slew of health problems as a result.

She was recently sent to a hospital over an hour away from where she lives because it is the only one that had staff and beds to take her due to COVID and all the nurses quitting or getting fired for refusing the vaccine mandate (not trying to get political — also, covid should have never been politicized in the first place — but when I heard that, I was very sad.  I thought ppl in my home state were smarter than that — especially people whose main job is to make sure that people are safe and healthy) and it sounds like that particular hospital has their head up their ass as a whole and they are making life hell for her.

Example: She was admitted for many things but one was edema – lots of fluid filling up her body.  Her blood pressure was low (it has always run low) so they immediately started pumping her full of additional fluid.  To the point where she couldn’t breathe and literally thought she was going to die.

Are you f*cking kidding me????

I was pretty sure for a little while that she wasn’t even going to be alive for me to visit when I get there.

I digress.  The short of it is that now in order to visit her I will have to travel an hour and a half each way and put myself and my compromised husband at risk by visiting a hospital where there are lots of covid patients.

Re-booking this trip is not an option (though I really wish it was).  It’s been re-booked more than once and I need to get this done.

So yeah, there is a lot going on right now and I’m sure that the whole not drinking thing is just amplifying my bad thoughts and emotions.

If I were to step away and analyze it honestly, I know I would see that I would probably be so much worse if I were actively drinking through this.  In addition to everything else, I would be dealing with poor sleep and hangovers.  And I know my drunk self well enough to know that I would be absolutely inconsolable after a nights worth of drinking and would be screaming and crying at my husband every single night.

But who wants to be rational about that??  Not me.  I want to sit and whine that it’s not fair that I can’t have my “go to” for the last 20 years when I’m going through this.

So yeah.  That’s what’s going on with me.  But it’s been 21 days since my last drink.  Three weeks.  If I make it through today and tomorrow without a drink that will be the longest stretch of consecutive days I’ve had in the last 20 plus years.

So there is that.

2 weeks yesterday

So I hit two weeks alcohol free yesterday.

14 days without a drink.

I haven’t had a stretch this long without booze since 2018.  That was my longest stretch since I started my drinking career and it lasted three weeks.  Before that, I don’t even know, but I think I can safely say that it was before 1999.

I’m pretty stoked about this because I am still experiencing the pink clouds right now so it hasn’t really been too much of a struggle.

The first couple of days were pretty rough but once I started sleeping solidly through the night, I have been really digging this whole not drinking thing.  I mean, not the act of not drinking, I still miss the act of drinking … what I am really enjoying is the lack of anxiety, the change for the better in my attitude (a few mini meltdowns for no reason aside), and being present, among other things.

The best thing out of everything though is waking up feeling rested.  Waking up and not wanting to cry because I still feel so freaking tired.  Waking up and immediately cracking a joke to my husband, who is so floored by the fact that I’m even coherent that quickly after waking.  Normally, I am still in the monosyllabic phase of talking even after I’ve had my shower in the morning — putting together full sentences, let alone a joke, that soon after opening my eyes from slumber has just been unheard of for the last two decades!

So yeah, waking up in the mornings is no longer a horrific chore.  I mean, would still prefer to sleep in, but I no longer need to bury my face under the covers and hope that somehow I miscalculated and that it is actually Saturday instead of Tuesday.

And dropping off to sleep lately has been a cake walk (I am not issuing a challenge universe!  *cue me knocking wood*) and I couldn’t be more pleased.  I’m working on a future entry based solely on sleep and my love/hate relationship with it over the years, so I will leave it at that for now.

I have had my emotional moments of course but they seem to be more fewer and far between than I remember them being back in 2018.  They are present though and I do find myself flying off the handle into a fit of undeserved rage at the stupidest thing and dissolving into tears for no apparent reason, but as of right now the good things are outweighing the bad.

I know that these pink clouds are eventually going to wear thin.  I know that there is so much more ahead than just sunshine and roses.  I am unfortunately well aware of P.A.W.S. (Post-Acute Withdrawal Syndrome) as I’ve only recently come off of that from ditching my anti-depressant after 20+ years.

While I tapered off that med (celexa/citalopram) for over a year, I was still hit with P.A.W.S for an additional year to various degrees.  It’s not fun and I’m not looking forward to it.

So for now, I’m going to enjoy every little bit of these cotton candy clouds and keep going.

Over a week

I can’t believe it.  It’s been over a week since I have had a drink.

I haven’t had a stretch this long since August or September of 2018 when I managed to eek out three whole weeks in a row.  Before that, I’m not sure I’ve had a streak this long since …. wow, I want to say 1999.

I feel great for the most part.  Finally getting some decent sleep and my anxiety has dropped to insanely low levels.

I’d love to tell you that my house is spotless and organized, but I’m still not very motivated to do much.  That’s might not be much of a newly sober thing though as I’ve never been highly motivated even before I started drinking. 😂

I took my blood pressure for the first time in like two or three years and it is pretty normal.  No where near as high as it had been when I was in the major throws of drinking (so, most every day for the last 20 years).  That is a definite bonus!

My eating has been out of control though.  And I’ve allowed it.  I knew that there would still be a calorie deficit given how much vodka I used to drink, but I think it’s time to rein it in because I am sick of feeling full all the time.

So starting Monday I’m back on myfitnesspal and counting calories.  I’m not going to be super duper strict, but I have to stop shoveling food in my face every five minutes.

I’m also planning on starting back on the treadmill as that will help as well.  Hopefully the weather will start cooling off soon out here so it will be a lot more bearable to hop on after work.  Currently we have been having heat wave after heat wave and we don’t have air conditioning in our house.  That is an excuse of course, while it is hot, I’m just really f*cking lazy.  More so than ever right now.

I wonder if I’m taking the whole “be gentle with yourself” a bit too seriously.  I mean, I know for the first couple of days there was nothing I wanted to do other than eat and lay in bed if I couldn’t drink.  I kind of feel like I’m over that hump, but I’m still milking it because it’s comfortable.  Hmmm…that’s something I will have to contemplate this weekend.  It might be time to start doing some things that aren’t as in my comfort zone.  I mean, I’m not looking to go skydiving anytime soon, but maybe help my poor husband around the house a bit more.

I did cook dinner last night.  It was only spaghetti, but for some reason cooking is always a trigger for me.  I guess it is because I have almost always been drinking when I cooked for the last two decades.  It usually makes me feel anxious to think about cooking or baking without drinks.

Last night I didn’t even think about it.  I just knew that Hubs had been taking on the task of dinner for over a week now and that it was my turn.  I also knew that there was ground turkey in the fridge about to go bad, so I just pulled out all of the ingredients and started in without giving drinking a thought.

In fact I didn’t think about the fact that I didn’t think about drinking until a couple hours after the dinner had already been prepared.  I guess that is a good sign.

Day 4 of LAE and lots of realizations

Day 4 of the Live Alcohol Experiment and the first weekend day.

So far so good is where I’m going to start.  I got a mostly solid 8 hours of sleep last night, broken up only by having to get up to pee 3 times (goodbye toxins!) and Hubs taking the dog out around two.  On all those occasions I was able to get back to sleep with relative ease so Imma call that a win.😀

According to the scale this morning, I am down almost 4 pounds since Wednesday (that would be 3 full days) and trust me when I tell you that I have not been counting my calories in any way shape or form.  In fact, I’m pretty much allowing myself to eat whatever the heck I want (there has to be some sort of reward for taking away my beloved booze right?  I mean other than better sleep, better health, a better relationship with my husband…hmmm, I digress).  Also, I am about 3 days out from starting my period so I should be in the gaining water weight part of that and I’m still down almost 4 pounds!

The day 3 lesson of LAE was a pretty short one but it made a lot of sense.  It was all about how our sleep cycles suffer when we drink booze and why it takes a few days to regulate again when we try to sleep without it.  I mean, I knew that when I drank I would wake up in the middle of the night without fail and not be able to get back to sleep for quite a while (usually not until right before the alarm was set to go off), but to actually understand the science of why this happens was quite fascinating to me.  

I’m not going to lie, when I realized that the first weekend of this experiment was to fall on a three day weekend, I almost backed out.  I literally said to myself: “Welp, can’t do that!  Three whole days of day drinking?  I’d be stupid to miss out on that!”

The reality is of course, that the three day long hangover would be miserable and by tomorrow, I wouldn’t even be enjoying the day drinking part.  Merely doing it because somewhere in the far away past, I used to enjoy long boozy weekends.  However, if I’m honest … I haven’t enjoyed day drinking in quite some time.  I mean the first few drinks? Yes, absolutely!  But after a couple of hours it just gets tedious.  I feel gross and warm and uncomfortable.  I get bloated, my stomach hurts and I inevitably get emotional for no reason and pick a fight with my husband.  I eat A TON of food right before going to bed (hello empty calories!) and wake up with not only no memory of eating dinner and going to bed, but also none of the last couple hours of the night.  Then I have to get up feeling super anxious, trying to be casual around my husband and see how he reacts to find out he is mad at me or not (that is an award winning performance right there, let me tell you).  Creep onto Facebook and see if I posted anything offensive or messaged anyone and possibly started a fight for no reason whatsoever.  And the stupidest part yet?  I would do it all over again that day because I could!  Ridiculous.  And yet this has gone on for decades.

Wow.  Typing out that last paragraph really admitted a lot about me and my drinking.  To you guys, and to myself.

Anyhoo … Today has been good.  A lot better than I thought.  Hubs just left for practice and he won’t be back for a few hours.  This is when I would normally dig in for my real heavy drinking to start.  Instead, I’m going to take a shower and then lay down on the bed and play some games on my phone.  Not the most productive, but I don’t have to be today.  The only thing I have to do today is not drink.

Tomorrow we will be heading to my father in laws house to spend the night.  As I think I’ve written before, that is a safe non drinking spot for me.  I know that I can’t so I don’t even really think about it.  Hubs suggested this when I first told him about the experiment and how I was worried about the long weekend.  I think at this stage, I will be okay if we didn’t but I certainly don’t mind going.  We usually get some yummy take out and all watch TV together.  It’s the closest thing I’ve had to family since the last time I got to spend time with my mom before she passed and it’s quite enjoyable.

So that’s it for now.  I probably won’t update until after we get back from my FIL’s house.  Thanks for the words of encouragement in my last entry.

The Alcohol Experiment

So this happened yesterday.

I’ve been pretty excited about this, as I signed up for it a couple of weeks ago.  I was pumped about going a whole month AF and how good I was going to feel.  I chose this time frame, as I tend to do because it will lead up to the trip back home to Maine that we are taking in a month.  I’m really hoping it will help calm my anxiety so that I won’t be as petrified of flying.

The closer it got, the more I drank of course and the more nervous I was to know that I would have to go 30 days without a drink.

To the point that yesterday during the afternoon at work I had worked myself into a frenzy.

It didn’t help that my husband was threatening to quit his job due to circumstances that had happened that day. In addition, my best friend was messaging me from the hospital in Maine telling me how her lungs are filling up with fluid (the very same thing that happened to my mother before she passed) and she was having trouble breathing and telling me that it was just going to get worse.  And all the while this is happening, I am at work with a bunch of suits skulking around analyzing our office since they plan to buy it and put us all out of our jobs by the end of the year.

I mean, it was comical how all this literally happened within hours of each other and all I wanted to do was go home and drown it all out with vodka.

Thankfully, I had told my husband about starting the experiment and he was of course 100% supportive.  On the drive home from work, he asked what I would like to do when we got home.  He was making himself available if I wanted to go for a walk, or watch TV or maybe get in some exercise … anything to take my mind off of drinking.

In the end, I opted to lay down and do my first day of “homework” in the Alcohol Experiment book.
After that something amazing happened.  Because I wasn’t sitting in my bedroom soaking my emotions in alcohol like I normally do, my husband was able to talk to me and explain and vent a bit about his work situation that day.

This is significant because my husband tends to shut down and stuff all of his emotions inside until he eventually explodes or implodes, depending on his mood when it finally happens.

Because I made myself emotionally available to him, he was able to use me as a sounding board and his mood improved after that.  I know it’s not a permanent fix to his problem but it made me feel both good and bad.

Good, that I was able to help him but also bad, that there is a very good chance that I have caused him emotional distress for many years by shutting myself off with booze and not giving him a chance to do what couples should do — use your partner as a sounding board/therapist to get things off of your chest (he has very few friends outside of me).

I choose now to feel good that I was there in that particular instance and work on being there more in the future instead of dwelling on the negative.

I was in bed by seven reading and he joined me shortly after.  We talked and giggled about the dog passing gas under the covers and it felt so good to be present and just be stupid with him instead of passing out cold before he came to bed or continuing to drink long after he had gone to bed as usual.
And I actually managed to get about 6 hours of sleep total.  Usually my first AF night in a bit is very little and very choppy sleep so this pleased me, as did waking up hangover free.  Six hours of sober sleep is way better than 12 hours of drunk “sleep” any day!

Anyhoo…here is my homework from Day One:

 

 

 

#recovery #thealcoholexperiment #anniegrace #thisnakedmind

Things you can accomplish on a Sunday…

 

For the last 20 plus years, Sundays meant drinking as much as possible before I have to go back to the real world on Monday.

I’m going to couple that statement with the fact that I have always felt like I could never accomplish anything around the house without drinking.  Like I could never actively complete any chores sober because I just wasn’t programed that way.  I had always done the things while liquored up and that is the only way I knew how!

I used that excuse to a fault.  That was my go to when I was pressed about trying a semi sober weekend: “Well, I simply cannot because I need to get all these things done and I can’t do that sober!  To a ridiculous amount, those types of things raided my brain and I felt that they all were justified.  “I don’t know how to do that sober!!” I would lament in my head and sometimes out loud, and it never sounded stupid because it was honestly how I felt.  There was an actual fear in my head to try any of those things without drinking.

I would like to show you how I spent my Sunday.

This was my closet when I woke up this morning:

You can only imagine how it got that way yes?  It was far too important to get trashed than clean my closet, every single time I even thought about trying to tidy it. It’s been this way for years in differing levels of slothfulness.

Here is how it looks right now:

So that is what I did on my Sunday.  I feel so happy and accomplished.  There is still a lot to do on it, but dang it feels good to have done that much without any alcohol aid. 

New world

• Remembering to wash my face and brush my teeth before going to bed.
• Not waking up at two or three AM with a racing heart, a throbbing head wondering if I had been an absolute bitch to my husband the previous night.
• Waking up at three in the morning only because I have to pee (feeling just fine, thankyouverymuch!) and then being able to get right back to sleep once I get back in bed.
• Going to bed early to read and play on my phone, sipping tea and relaxing.
• Eating dinner at a decent hour with my husband while laughing at an episode of Bob’s Burgers and remembering every detail.
• The fact that my husband seems so pleased and happy right now even though he has always sworn that my drinking didn’t “really” bother him.
• The fact that I’ve lost five pounds in as many days.
• Knowing that I’m not going to dread social events (an evening movie date with my husband mid week for example) because they are cutting into my very valuable drinking time.
• Feeling rested, actually rested when I get up in the morning.
• Knowing that there will be more to my evenings eventually (now that my trial run is coming to it’s completion) than drinking, watching youtube videos and playing facebook video games.
• The knowledge that if a friend called and said they needed me, I could jump in my car and go see them no matter what the hour.
• Having my husband let me help him film his hobby (it’s over tough terrain and he normally wouldn’t “trust” me – for good reason) for the first time.

And quite possibly the most important:

• Feeling so much less anxiety and general sense of fear about everything.

These are just a few things off the top of my head that I have truly enjoyed feeling and knowing since Monday when I stopped drinking vodka.

It’s so bizarre to me that it’s really only been five days.

Last night I got out of work super early, around one in the afternoon.  On a Friday that is normally a reason to start right in on the drinks, especially since my hubs was already home as he worked from home yesterday.

I got home and decided to lay in bed for a bit and think.  I wasn’t really stressed, but my mind was saying “GO DRINK!!!” while my body was saying “Nah bro, we got this.”  To make more sense of this, I wanted to drink because it is what I have always done for the last 20 years.  My mind was just tuned into it.  “It’s what we do!!!  Especially since it’s Friday!”  However, my body was kind of put off at the thought of drinking vodka like normal.

I mean, I had actively kind of given myself permission to do it if I really felt the need but I didn’t.  In fact, when I thought about drinking vodka, my body kind of gave a disturbed shudder.

This is kind of how I’ve felt about my normal drinking for the last couple of weeks, but I kept going anyway.

I know.  It’s so stupid.  Why would I continue to drink when it isn’t even what my body wants??  A twenty plus year habit?  Like, it’s all I’ve known for the last two decades so I just go on auto pilot.  But I was sick of it.  Sick of the taste, sick of the way it made me feel, sick of being a fucking slave to it for so long, but I couldn’t let it go.

Fast forward to last weekend.  I was feeling that very feeling every single time I took a shot.  I knew that I had a trip coming up to get my mothers ashes and that would be stressful enough without the added hangxiety of my drinking.  To top it off, this month is the anniversary of her death last year and I have been crying at the drop of a hat.  For some reason, I had had enough.

I let the thoughts that usually swirl in my head and I bat away, come to fruition.  I don’t want to live this way any longer.  It hurts, in so many more ways that one.

That is what started prior to Monday…and I’m so glad it did.

I will make a part two to this because my husband is calling me to watch a movie and I am happy to do so…