Back to Day 2 - reflections on a relapse after 534 days AF

Hi folks,

I stopped drinking in Jan 2024 after a pretty rough ~8 years or so of letting it dictate my life. Last Friday I decided to relapse. The overwhelming feeling was that I wanted to have fun and cut loose with my wife on a Friday night the way we used to, and I wanted to get a boozy Saturday brunch like we used to as well. I felt like I hadn't really had a "Fun" Friday since I stopped, like Fridays evenings now are to be pushed through. Since stopping, I've felt overly reserved, small, less funny or not funny at all, antisocial. I wanted to pressure test all that and decided to relapse and see how things go.

Also, to preface - I've been really reading and taking to heart peoples' experiences on here with relapse. The risk that if I were to try this again, I could wake up 8 months, a year, three years down the line having fallen back into that hole that it took me 8 years to escape. I read those and really tried to convince myself it wasn't worth it, you know you're just like them, it could happen to you. But in the back of my mind, I think I always kinda knew I'd have to see for myself, and this was me doing that. Also want to touch on the concept of my day count. Building up that day count was a big source of pride. But as it got bigger, there grew a part of me that resented the day count, made me want to knock it down. My day count felt like stacking bricks in a wall - but at a certain point, I didn't know if the wall was protecting me or trapping me.

Anyway the first two drinks on Friday hit well faster and harder than the first two drinks used to. But then it was pretty quickly back to same old tolerance as I kept going. We went to an arcade/bar and just played around. It was fun, but I didn't get the feeling of carefree sociability, of coming out of my shell, that I had expected. My mind had either made that up, or if it ever was the case, it just isn't anymore.

Boozy Brunch on Saturday was great, we ate outside in the sun, beautiful day. It was fun and it was getting closer to that old "Fun" that I was looking for. It felt great... but this is when I caught sight of something I hadn't noticed before. I objectively observed the feeling of numbness it was giving me. I was absolutely carefree and feeling great, but not like a healthy peace-of-mind carefree. This was a dark and sinister numbness, and I saw that it was *this* feeling, not the happy-go-lucky fun feelings, that kept me addicted all that time. The dark numbness. Having stared it in the face in the daylight after going almost 18 months outside of its grasp, I now knew my enemy. That full, all-encompassing DGAF numbness is something I don't want to experience again until I'm on my deathbed. It felt like that's where it would be more appropriate to feel it - the moment before passing when there's no more work to be done. Otherwise I could get stuck in it again.

So that's my experience and what I came away with. I gave myself ~20hr window for all this, hit my cutoff as intended, and I'm back on the wagon. In that timeframe I had probably 20 drinks - really went for it to capture the old feelings. I know for a fact that if I would've tried to stop at 2, that wouldn't have worked. I can't control this thing and I'm not going to try to. I'm back on the wagon and IWNDWYT.

TLDR - poked my head out, got scared back in