by Lotta Dann
Thankfully, I calm down in the final lead-up to the big day. On the eve of my soberversary I’m feeling quiet and content again, and the stupid drinking-voice inside my mind has been silenced once more. Corin is pottering around packing his bags (he’s leaving early in the morning for a week-long work trip following the prime minister to Russia and Japan), the boys are racing around raising merry hell as per usual, and I’m in the kitchen flipping meat patties. I’m thinking back over all the change that has occurred for me in the past year. I can’t believe one year ago I was still boozing and about to make the biggest decision of my life: to remove alcohol completely and wrap myself in a warm cloak of sobriety. This time last year I was probably down on my hands and knees reaching into the back of the cupboard to hide a wine bottle from Corin. I shudder at the memory as I lay the burger buns out and start adding cheese and lettuce to each one. I think about my brain as I do these simple actions, how it is clear and sharp, there is no blur or fuzz or mind-bending going on at all. I’m right here, right now, fully present in the moment. Fuck, it feels great.
I add the meat patties and a squirt of tomato sauce to each burger then call everyone to the table, thinking this time last year I was stuck in my miserable, lonely, drinking hell. This time last year I was a sad, hopeless boozer. Today I’m not.
Roll on tomorrow.
Mrs D Is Going Without (Day 365)
Had a lovely soberversary.
Rode for an hour on the bike at the gym watching Channel E with headphones on.
Went to posh deli for lots of foodie treats with the Little Guy in tow (he chose marshmallows and one big green apple).
Had a long hot shower back home and took my time choosing clothes, laying outfits on the bed (I never do that).
Went online and bought some secondhand cassettes to listen to in the car, which has no CD player (The Beatles, Paul Simon and The Cranberries—best I could find).
Had lovely long phone call with my baby sister.
Did puzzles with the Little Guy on the floor.
Went to scooter park with all the kids after school. Bought nice takeaway coffee.
Ordered Indian takeaway for dinner; me and the boys all ate too much but was it yummy.
Kids watched cartoons before bed—big treat.
I finished up on the sofa watching the final of my current favourite reality TV programme with a mug of green tea and a piece of coconut ice.
Thought about how my life is like a pencil drawing. Now all sharp edges and clear. Before with wine it was like something had been smudged all over the top of it.
It was an interesting day, emotionally. Actually, I just felt calm and quite at peace.
Yes, there are hard times, those sharp edges cut sometimes, but I like it like this. It’s challenging and interesting and . . . well, frankly, I just don’t want to go back to being that boozy mum who was so reliant on wine.
Mr D left a present in my top drawer when he went away—texting me from the taxi en route to the airport, telling me to go look at it. A lovely brooch, silver with wings. He wrote me a card which says, ‘On your one year anniversary. I’m very proud of you, you are an inspiration to us all. You got your wings now.’
Yep.
I really appreciate this gesture from Corin (and the brooch is really stylish and cool!). I love that he’s proud of what I’ve done giving up drinking; it’s a huge validation for me that I’ve done the right thing. I’m not sure what I’ve done to deserve such a great guy and I shudder to think what my life would be like without him. And it appears my blog readers are falling for him too!
Comment from ‘LovelyLady’
Oh my . . . I was okay until the part about the gift. Now I’m all misty.
You’ve got a keeper there! And one more time CONGRATULATIONS!
Comment from ‘NeverDrinkingAgain’
Well done, Mrs D. I’m glad to know you :-)
Comment from ‘AnnaBeth’
How great to be sober a year! How great to have the support from your hubby! How great to see clearly now! I live seeing things clearly now. It’s a wonderful experience and gift. I’m so happy that I got to discover this part of my life . . . a sober part. You are an inspiration Mrs D. Thank you for your feedback during my journey!
Comment from ‘Milly’
But Dear, you already have a set of wings. I’m so proud of you.
Thank you for this year, you’ve been one of my best blessings.
Comment from ‘SoOverDrinking’
How he loves you! That note made me cry! He’s so proud of you and look how well you’re doing :-) You must be proud of you, too! I like the image of you wearing a pin with wings, as a reminder of the wings you have grown for yourself, drawn in for yourself. Hooray and congratulations to you.
A year. Man, that’s a long time!
Comment from ‘Sunny’
Love the note and present from Mr D. Made me cry too! Thanks so much for sharing your journey with us. May you long continue.
Comment from ‘BugsyMalone’
Happy Soberversary, what a lovely day you had. Lots of love to you Mrs D, love the pencil drawing vision x
Comment from ‘Miriam’
Your husband is a wonderful man.
And it won’t always be so edgy.
Comment from ‘FacingUpToTheFacts’
Well done Mrs D. And Mr D too!
Comment from ‘MarkyMark’
You know that post I wrote a while back about crying at random times, well, reading about your husband’s gift caught me off guard and now I gotta go get some tissues. :-) He did good. And you did good, too.
Comment from ‘Anonymous’
Well done, Mrs D! You are an inspiration. You make me laugh, cry and, most of all, proud to be in such cool sober company! Keep on doing what you’re doing!!
Comment from ‘Anonymous’
Congratulations, Mrs D . . . you are an inspiration in so many ways!
Comment from ‘Clara’
So pleased the day worked out well for you after your anxiety leading up to it. Well done. I know it’s a cliché to say ‘I can never thank you enough’ but it’s true in my case. Finding your blog really set me on my way.
Comment from ‘AdiosAlcohol’
What a wonderful way to celebrate one year and what a sweet, thoughtful husband you have. Those sharp times can be really hard—no doubt at all—and I appreciate your honesty here. I also love that you appreciate all the good stuff, big and small . . . very inspiring.
Comment from ‘Kathy’
Good gravy, what a wonderful day!
That was jam-packed with fabulousity!!
I, too, just celebrated one year away from the horrors of alcohol and the ruinous scenes witnessed by my children.
My anniversary was like a wonderful Academy Awards show, where I won. My son was there and I think it gave him a little closure on the pain.
Congratulations on this wonderful achievement!
Comment from ‘Giordana’
Congratulations!!! Sounds like a wonderful celebration and I think Mr D was so sweet to give you something so special! You are wonderful!
Comment from ‘TooMuchDrink’
Belated congratulations on receiving your wings. One (plus!) year is an achievement to be proud of.
Yes. Yes it is.
27
Reaching one year sober feels monumental and inconsequential at the same time. Yes, it’s a lovely milestone and it feels great to have so many sober days under my belt. But living without alcohol is a daily, ongoing lifestyle choice. I have chosen to never escape reality by blurring the edges of my mind. So even though the hard-out cravings have all but gone, and the big realisations have sunk in, I’m still left with the reality of the situation. And I’ve still got a busy life to lead, and a brain to keep tabs on.
But here is where I consider myself incredibly lucky, for I have my amazeballs blog, my personal, private,
online diary, which also happens to offer me incredible warmth and support. As my second sober year progresses, despite being busy finishing the thesis, blog posts keep forming themselves in my mind and flowing out my fingertips onto the keyboard. I can’t stop myself from regularly turning to the computer when I need to vent, celebrate or simply flesh out my thought processes. I blog for me and in doing so I share with others, that’s just what I do.
Mrs D Is Going Without (Day 436)
Rather than whittle on about how I’m stressed again (Master’s thesis) and emotional (kid dramas) and tired (lots of solo parenting) I’m going to try instead to articulate why I think it’s better to go through tough feelings sober and raw, rather than reaching for a wine or five.
I could use all the well-worn phrases like, ‘I just feel more connected to my feelings’ and ‘I feel a lot more whole’ and ‘I can understand more clearly’ but I remember reading shit like that before I got sober and those words just washed over me. They’re such well-worn phrases that they’ve almost lost their meaning.
So why is it so amazing?
Well, I had a major emotional upheaval earlier this year and had to pack up my life and leave a community that was rich with love and warmth and support. It was so hard and, boy, did I cry. I cried and I cried and I cried. I cried so much it was ridiculous. I couldn’t stop the tears. I cried saying goodbye to my sons’ school teachers. I cried saying goodbye to my neighbours. I cried all over my friends. I cried doing the dishes. I cried in bed at night. I cried driving the car. I cried so much I stopped even trying not to cry and was just an openly crying sooky mess. I cried as we left and I cried as we transitioned and I kept crying even after we arrived.
And then I stopped crying, and I kept moving forward, and . . . well, it’s all gone. Not gone like I’ve pushed it away but gone like I dealt with it. I didn’t hide the problem like filing away a bill I didn’t want to pay. I paid it and it went away. Now I feel really at peace and resolved about the whole move. Not that I don’t care about having to leave those people anymore . . . but clean like I expressed to myself and the world my sadness. And unbelievably that alone made it better. Nothing changed except how I expressed my feelings but just doing that made it better.
So (I’m working this out as I write) just expressing and honouring how you feel about something, cleanly and wholly, makes it better even though you can’t change the thing itself.
Now when I think back to that time of the relocation and all that emotion and all those tears, I feel clean. I feel really clean about it. It’s hard to explain but it feels great. Resolved. Done. It feels like I totally honoured my feelings by expressing them so openly and in a way that kind of cleared them.
Okay, even now it’s hard to explain, this is a bit convoluted, sorry.
But to try and apply this logic to general sober life now, fairly regularly I get in funky moods . . . grumpy, stressed, sad (but I am a fucking full-time mother of 3 demanding boys and a bloody supportive wife trying to write a difficult Master’s thesis, sorry, just had to rant there). But instead of pretending I’m not grumpy, stressed or sad (which wine consumption used to help with) I actually just let myself be grumpy, stressed or sad and . . . well, overall it feels much better. Much better. Cleaner. It just feels cleaner. Better.
It’s hard to articulate, and once again I don’t think the words are doing the feeling justice. So don’t just take my word for it. Try it, you’ll understand too.
Luckily my convoluted thought processes are resonating with my readers, and I’m blessed to continually receive lovely cyber-hugs.
Comment from ‘Fiona’
I think you explained that perfectly! I totally got it! I loved your term . . . ‘clean’. I can really relate to that. Dealing with what we are feeling creates a clean slate . . . rather than not dealing with our feelings which leaves our minds and heart feeling polluted and chaotic. Loved this post.
Comment from ‘JoggingGirl’
I understood and related to every single word Mrs D. It’s almost like until we accept, feel and process an emotion, we’re doomed to keep repeating it and re-living that hurt. Just like the bill that we don’t pay and hide in the drawer, it still ain’t getting paid until we deal with it. And in the meantime, they send MORE bills, then they start making phone calls, then they turn off the lights, and that one little bill we didn’t want to deal with has turned into an eight-headed monster that we for sure don’t want to deal with.
Comment from ‘LovelyLady’
Real life is just so much better all around than drunk life. Soooo much better.
The more that I explore my thoughts and try to explain them on my blog, the more I start to understand what I’ve done and what I’m doing. With the benefit of time and hindsight I can see that getting sober and living sober are two very different things.
Getting sober was all about white-knuckling my way through a period of cravings, resisting urges, identifying addictive thoughts (‘I deserve a wine today’ actually meant ‘I need alcohol to feed my addiction’), and dealing with shock horror! emotions (holy shit, I feel grumpy, what do you mean I just have to feel grumpy and not drink alcohol to smooth the feeling away?!).
Getting sober involved spending a bit of time feeling boring, then a bit of time realising I’m not boring, then realising that drunk people are boring, then realising that not everyone else gets drunk all the time, then accepting that there are drunks and normies and boozers turning sober and I just fit in the middle of a big spectrum of drinking types and it doesn’t really matter anyway.
I got sober, and now I live sober.
Living sober means I’ve started figuring out the other little things that make me feel good about myself and my life. The really little things.
Living sober means having an overall underlying state of calm, interrupted by phases of emotion that are annoying but manageable. Living sober means realising that phases of negative, tricky or uncomfortable emotion come along and are annoying, but that they pass. They come, and they go. Living sober means every time I face a tricky phase and wait for it to pass without drinking, I feel good about that. I feel great, in fact. Great in a low-key, lovely, normal, stable, reliable, respectable way.
The more time that passes the less I see living sober as merely being about not-drinking. It’s also about being willing to always deal with stuff raw. I can totally understand why people relapse all the time, because bad shit does happen and it’s hard! Uncomfortable or hurtful or tricky shit happens. It might happen on day 5, or day 55, or day 555, but it’s going to happen, and alcohol can take the edge off it for a time. The biggest trial for me in choosing to live sober is deciding that no matter what bad shit comes at me, I will tough it through raw and not reach for any temporary liquid smooth-all.
Of course, good shit happens too! Parties and weddings and celebrations! And I don’t want to miss out on any of it. I still want to go to bars and laugh with my friends and go to weddings and cut it up on the dance floor to cheesy pop tunes and I want to huddle outside on the balcony at parties and rant madly and I want to do all of that without the wine messing me up.
And I do. I always try to think hard about the scene I’m entering into, I think about all the elements that are there, the people, the setting, the atmosphere, the food, the music, the friendship, the giggles, the gossip etc. and I focus on those—those are the things that make an occasion special. It shouldn’t have to matter that the glass I hold has lemonade, not champagne, in it.
At the start of my sobriety, social events were tricky because I felt so flat and odd and out of sorts, obsessed with the fact I wasn’t drinking. But now that I’m used to not-drinking, most events are totally fine.
Mrs D Is Going Without (Day 450)
Sober events. You have good ones, you have bad ones. You have fun ones, you have flat ones. It would be a lie to say sober events are always great. Sometimes they’re shit. I’ve had sober weddings that were so awesome I
danced for hours and felt on a natural high for days! I’ve also had sober weddings where I felt a bit flat and disjointed and like a bit of a boring loser. I’ve had sober dinner parties where I laughed so much my cheeks ached, and others where I felt quite removed from the jokes and like I just wanted to go home and crawl into bed.
I’ve been to parties where I was so nervous to be sober I chain-smoked cigarettes all night, ones where I raced around fetching other people drinks like a weirdo, ones where I fixed a false smile on my face and had no fun at all, and ones where the fact I wasn’t drinking was totally irrelevant and I had great chats with great people.
Sober events rise or fall on a peculiar convergence of factors: my mood, my outfit, the crowd, the vibe, the location, the music, the atmosphere, the food, my energy levels. I’ve learned that just because the last event I did sober was great doesn’t mean the next one will be. Nor will the last sober event being shit mean the next one will be.
Sometimes they’re just not great, and I wake up in the morning feeling flat and like it was only really a 75 per cent night and then the ‘is it because I’m a boring sober person now?’ thoughts creep in. Then other times I wake up feeling like the night before was 150 per cent fun and ‘Get me, I’m the coolest sober chick in the world, who needs booze?!’
(Driving home is always great whether the event was boring or fabulous. That fact remains the same. Oh, how I love driving home. And don’t get me started on the feeling when I wake up in the morning. Sheer bliss.)
So if you have a shit sober event, don’t think you need to drink to make the next one more fun. It’s not about the drink, it’s about all those other factors. I don’t think any amount of booze in the world is going to make a boring party more fun. It’s just going to make me drunk at a boring party.
I love all this thinking and writing and figuring stuff out. I love how the words form in my mind and flow easily out of my fingertips. And I love the feedback, I love my constantly shifting online community so very, very much. But I’m starting to feel weird that I have this big blog which I keep secret from most people in my ‘real’ life. It feels strange not telling my friends and family, especially now that I’m through all the really hard work of the early months, my Master’s thesis is finally finished and delivered, and things are flowing a little more smoothly for me now.