Sobriety: not for the faint of heart
If you were an active drinker…if you identified as a lover of red wine, or craft beers, or truly couldn’t imagine why you wouldn’t drink on a Saturday night…
…sobriety can be much more challenging for you than for people who just decided to give it up because it was never that big of a deal to them in the first place.
But it was a big deal for you. So yeah, it makes sense that it would be a big deal to give it up.
If you’re sick of hearing how wonderful + freeing sobriety is because that hasn’t been your experience…
That’s okay.
The truth is, sobriety is a wildly confronting experience. It is not for the faint of heart.
It’s work.
It’s practice.
Daily.
And most people who have very active relationships with alcohol will never do it - because it is hard work. The fact that you’re trying it…that you’re going for it? Well, honestly, I think it speaks volumes about you.
If you’re finding sobriety is leaving you with that glass-half-empty feeling…
It’s okay. sometimes I find it really hard, too.
It’s okay to hate it some days. It’s okay to want to glamorize your old drinking days. It’s okay to feel wildly annoyed that you can’t un-know what you know. It’s okay to feel resentful of people who can seemingly drink without consequence. It’s all okay. Feel those things.
We have this expectation in our society that everything should just be easy. We should stop drinking and magically feel better and all of our problems will disappear. But that kind of instant-gratification thinking is what got us into this mess in the first place. Remember that famous quote by Albert Einstein: ‘You cannot solve a problem with the same thinking we used when we created them.’ Well the same applies here. We used our instant-gratification problem solving to pour ourselves nightly drinks…the thinking that said “here, this glass of shiraz will make your shitty day better” is not the same thinking that we can rely on in sobriety…or we won’t stay sober.
You are learning to live in a different way…a way that your brain isn’t used to. You’re learning to become responsive instead of reactive. You’re learning to tolerate discomfort instead of drinking it away. You’re learning how to deal with feelings you’ve never truly dealt with before: like anger, rage, deep sadness, grief, disappointment and even joy. This learning takes time and practice. So even though it’s hard, we stick with it anyway.
Because life is too miraculous to give our hearts and souls and brains and bodies over to something that slowly kills them.