Member-only story
What’s The Worst Thing About Not Drinking?
When you think drinking is the problem, and your problems just start when you quit.
I am at the point now. It’s Friday night, and my anxiety is hitting its peak. I know drinking won’t make my situation better but will make it worse. I feel lost and bipolar at times. There’s no other way to explain it. One minute I feel like I can attack the world, and the next, I feel like giving up. Alcohol at least gave me a temporary relief from this life I’ve been trying to escape.
It’s not hard to stop drinking; well, it is, but it gets real when you realize it’s no longer an option. Quitting is the easy part after the 3rd day or so, at least for me. Then around the week or two mark, the wave starts again, but this time I didn’t “hang ten” and ride the wave, I let the wave crash against the shore, and I feel like I am caught in the undertow being pulled out to sea.
Every night I went to bed saying “this is it” and woke up the following day with hope. But as the day went on, the hope faded, and the voices began to talk, and I’d begin to listen. Let’s do it tomorrow; it’s Sunday, it’s a new week. Yea, I will do it then. That one promise of tomorrow would turn into a one-month bender before I’d give myself another break. Rationalizing myself into the insanity farm, I was a master…
