There is peace in not knowing everything. If you’re meant to know, it will come to you. Your brain is very much like bubbles reaching the surface. Each bubble moves in its own time. Another bubble has to disappear for the surface to become calm for the next bubble to come up. Your brain will reveal what it needs to. I spent time being thankful that I am safe and that nothing consequential happened during those moments. I also have taken time to ponder the hurt person I was in those moments so I can understand her. Because loving her is how I am now on day 1339 being sober. So I might not remem ..read more

Someone asked this tonight as they got closer to their one year sober. And this is what I wrote… For just a second, play out the last year, if you had not stopped drinking. Play out where you would be if you hadn’t stopped. Would your life be worse or would it be better? Because when I look at the succession of my life from the five years before I quit drinking compared to the four years since I quit drinking. I cannot even imagine if my life had followed the same trend of the five years before I quit. And I have been in a lot of hell over the last two years specifically. And I’m coming throug ..read more

I think the thing no one talks about in getting sober is showing up when and how or kids need. I learned this weekend that being the mom they need is less about what I think should be happening and showing up for how it is happening. I even found myself worrying less about what others thought I should be doing in these moments and letting go of an expectations other than my daughter or my son. It’s interesting to watch them struggle with each other because it is all tied up in the messiness of what their expectations are and what is happening and the discord that is present. This weekend, I fo ..read more

I see you. Getting sober is not easy though there are so many who portray it as such. It is dirty and difficult. Some may have their skin presenting issues with breakouts like you haven’t seen since adolescence. Some of you may not be sleeping for shit and see posts of those who aren’t encountering sleep issues or they’re not posting about it. Every time you see a post about some issue, I know there so many of you who are not posting that are going through the same thing. That is why it is so important to post your struggles and triumphs. Struggles to see that you are not alone. Triumphs to re ..read more

Big alcohol and drinking culture minimize the impact alcohol has on our bodies. Minimize how hard it is to actually quit There is so much shame that we end up thinking we have to do it on our own because we think it is our problem. We think that it’s our fault our body became addicted to alcohol. But it actually disrupts and cripples most systems in our bodies. Everyone makes it seem like it is so easy to quit drinking and it is motherfucking hard. People dismiss the destruction of alcohol because it is legal. Being legal and being safe or good for us are two very different things. When we qui ..read more

For my friends who are looking for an alternative to wine at the end of the day because they find that they really want that wine and nothing else seems to work … Spoiler Alert: You really still want something that helps you let go and check out. And your brain still thinks that is wine. No other drink is going to have that physical effect. So stop looking. You have to learn to do that on your own. Early sobriety is learning to do everything but drink. Whatever it takes. 1) eat 2) sleep 3) take a rage walk 4) get under a weighted blanket 5) get on a meeting (there are so many more than just AA ..read more

This feeling of monotony or boredom kind of changes when you stop looking for the chaos. And you get curious about why you like the chaos. Because when you see the end of your drinking outside of the time when you missed drinking, you see that it was frenetic. You work 40 to 50 hours a week just to go out on this Friday night instead of go home and rest. What the fuck kind of friends would have you do that when they watch you hustle as hard as you do to go out and spend $50-$100 doing nothing but sitting there and talking. But are you really talking? About anything important? Like the hell tha ..read more

I have historically been the person who pushes to get thing done. Let’s stop talking about it and just fucking get it done. In the last 3 1/2 years, I have become the person who looks for flow. If I have to force it, I usually walk away from it. As I wrote about this on someone else’s post, I wondered where my need to not have something slip away or to do something before it gets bad came from. And my initial thought is that my moments of peace growing up without a verbal or physical explosion were very tenuous and very limited. I learned that if I didn’t act fast or take advantage of the peac ..read more

One of the things I talked about in therapy tonight was looking back and holding past me with compassion. Holding the me that chose to drink instead of feel. Holding the me that was too afraid to touch into and experience the pain that led her to drink in the first place. To go back to the painful existence before alcohol entered my life. The constant fear. The constant abandonment when the people that were supposed to love and protect me, but didn’t. I didn’t know how to go back to a life without alcohol to give me respite. 901 days later; I know I’m the touchstone of my secure attachment. I ..read more

So, now you l are a couple of weeks away from Christmas. The holidays have died down. Your stress level is not near as high. And out of nowhere you feel like you should drink. “It’s not a problem.” “I’m not overwhelmed or anxious.”  “It matters how I feel going into a situation when I drink.”  And at some point, that may have been true. But we’re at the point where we have reevaluated our relationship with alcohol and we got to that point after certain events happened. For me, I had made some very shaky parenting decisions and driving decisions, and that scared the fuck out of me. I ..read more