7 years sober today. Unbelievable that I now chose to spend my Friday nights getting up at 4.30 am to go climb in the dark to the top of a mountain so that we reach the peak at sunrise.
OffDry recently wrote in her 7 year sober post :
“You can change. You can change at depths you don’t even know you have. You can become a radically new person, and look at her in both bewilderment and wonder.”
Oh how I look at myself with both bewilderment and wonder when I revisit my 2 year sober post, which you can read here and where you can see a picture of me hungover in my still drinking days, which is a stark reminder – like my spirit of drinking past (excuse the pun!).
So the 7 year itch is usually synonymous with “cycles of dissatisfication where a decrease in happiness and satisfaction is seen” (thanks wikipedia). And with 2020 being for Australia the year of bushfires and, like the rest of the world, Covid19 it would seem fitting that this challenging year would come at a time associated with potential internal dissatisfaction.
But for me that hasn’t been the case. Yes I played the ‘what if’ game when the news of Covid first broke and my old addict voice piped up that as a nurse I would be at potentially higher risk and therefore might die; ergo – why not drink? But it was brief and passed quickly replaced with the thought of why would I risk adding to my health risk in that way having spent so long taking care of myself after so many years of self-abuse? Talk about self-sabotage!
And carrying on the Charles Dickens ‘A Christmas Carol’ analogy one step further – if this is my spirit of non-drinking present what might my spirit of non-drinking future look like as I continue on my sobriety journey? Unlike Scrooge I have already learned from my past and made the changes I felt necessary for my family & I. Both my children have now lived half of their lives with me (well to be accurate, us) not drinking. I have moved half way around the world, change jobs 3 times since arriving, dealt with Covid19 so far and all without the need or desire to drink. Why would I give that up?
Why not turn the idea of drinking and the perceived losses associated with it on their head. What exactly are you giving up if you carry on drinking?
