A few hours until I’m at 3 days sober

Yay. I am proud but I’m also tired. It’s a lot of mental work…. Really truly trying to get myself to accept that I can’t outsmart myself from drinking excessively.

Drunk me does whatever the fuck she wants. There is no negotiation.

I can buy myself 6 cans of wine, so that I have enough to be drunk and stay that way. Cause god knows I don’t stop at tipsy. But drunk me doesn’t stop at drunk, either. Buy 6 cans? Wake up with 2 left.

But I don’t even know that when I wake up, not yet. I wake up with a racing heart. Scrambling for my phone to see what time it is, if I set my alarms, if I overslept. Next it’s the panic of what happened since sober me left my body. I remember the end of wine can #2, but not opening more. Looking at my phone, I apparently texted and FaceTimed people. Certainly making no sense. Oh, I was a bitch. Oh? What was I even talking about? What does that even mean?

Even I don’t know & I don’t remember.

Oh I cried a lot, too? Cool. Great.

Embarrassing.

It’s almost always embarrassing. Embarrassing even more just laying there wrestling with the decision to ignore what drunk me has done, by not asking questions and just hoping for the best, or slowly trying to solve the mystery of my own life… while not giving away the fact that I wasn’t consciously present for it. Embarrassing.

How can I ask about what I did, without them knowing?

Why do I ever, EVER, think they don’t know?

How come the times I’m apparently most hurtful, I performed well enough to appear coherent? Thus, truthful? Even though I was completely blacked out?

How can you defend your drunk behavior? How can you rationalize it? I’d say about 5-10% of the time there’s seemingly some truth to what I said/ got across. But that’s not much!

& if you make the choice to pretend nothing happened, you walk around having hurt a loved one and acting like nothing happened. Because for me, for sober me? Nothing did. Not that I knew of. Not until you asked why I hadn’t apologized 5 days after the fact. The answer? I have no recollection of even talking to you.

No ma’am. No sir. I do not miss that shit. I do not miss it at all.

It’s kind of strange right? If I was drinking, I’d be getting drunk. Otherwise, what’s the point?

However, once I’m drunk… I’m gone. I don’t even remember the full experience that drunk me had. I just suffer the consequences of her bitch ass the next time I’m sober.

yet…. Sober me chooses to drink again. And again. And again and again.

So I guess that’s why I’ve never identified with the sentiment of drinking to be numb. Because that’s not my experience. When I drink, I am just gone all together.

Maybe my reasoning is much less poetic than seeking to numb a pain. Maybe my reason is it’s a way to exist without having to be there, but still being awake.

So that’s been my life. Sober long enough to suffer the previous drunken state’s consequences, to drink again, to wake up in a panic and do it all over again.

I guess drunk me makes my sober life so much worse and unbearable, I just drink to escape it. While continually making my life even more insufferable for sober me the next time. But every time I took a sip, I was thinking “fuck this, I don’t want to be fully present anyway. If it makes my life worse… oh well, that’s tomorrows problem”

But every “tomorrow” becomes “today”.

I crafted a sure fire way to hate my life but keep living it.

Breaking a step in that cycle is the only way for anything else to possibly happen. For my life to possibly be different.

So here I am. Sober and still suffering the life I created for myself. But you know what? I woke up today, knowing what I did last night. That’s something, for me.

Here’s to 70 sober hours.