I wanted so bad to quit drinking. But after rehab and into my first year of sobriety I started to wonder if sobriety was all it was cracked up to be. I had gone to rehab, done my ninety in ninety, and worked through the twelve steps and I still had uncontrollable cravings. Funny thing though, when I got honest with myself it wasn’t alcohol I was yearning… it was validation.
I had suffered so much from my years of complete alcohol dependence, that I actually abhorred the thought of drinking again. I didn’t miss my old life, I was missing self respect, self confidence, and a sense of belonging. All the things that throughout my teen years and limited adult life I had depended on finding in a bottle I now had to produce on my own. It was a scary. I didn’t want to drink, but I was clueless about how to operate without it.
So even though I had gone through the rehab and endless meetings, I hadn’t quite figured out the difference between sobriety and recovery. The sobriety was oh so difficult to attain, but it was only the tip of the iceberg. Recovery was the mountain of ice hidden underneath water.
So if you are as my friend Erin would say, slipping out of the pink into the grey, maybe its not your drug of choice you are longing for but instead the recovery you haven’t yet discovered.
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Now that I have been through it, it's easier to see that what I was feeling when I wrote the post Out Of The Pink Into The Grey was completely normal for where I was at in recovery.
I was coming up on my 90 day mark and was smacked in the face with the reality of what addiction recovery really entailed.
There was no, presto chango - you are now the person you always wanted to be, going on. The realization sunk in that if I wanted to be a better person I had to work on it. Sure, that seemed like a bummer to me at first.
I had a tiny bit of sobriety under my belt and now that I had the basic idea of how to keep that going it was time to work on the rest. That's what I've been doing ever since.
erinsav
www.whatwinnersdo.com
that for many years my sense of "me" was a drunk and that I had to start over from scratch was both liberating and scary.
What a great post. You have given me a lot to think about here -- rather, a lot to get in my heart. I'm tired of just thinking. ;-)
Peace,
Scout
I have been thinking about this since I wrote it, I think I need to add a little more explanation for those not in the know.
Just beautiful.
and thanks for coming by and catching up.
Interesting point, I was actually hoping to hear a man who used to drink, who actually did something to stop that. I was expecting to see you more cheerful, after all you had a hard fight, and you are on the right road. My brother was an alcoholic for six years he used to hide and drink until he attended a drug and alcoholic treatment center, I know what he's been through to get rid of drinking, I was there beside him to give him strength. It's been one and a half year since he last tasted alcohol.
I am a man who used to drink, and who did something about this problem. The point of the post was that no longer drinking is just the start of the journey, that sobriety alone does not bring happiness. Many new to sobriety become despondent when they find that life is not a basket full of kittens just because they have become sober. It takes working a recovery program to break one out of their addictive past and problems before they can reap the rewards of sober living. This takes time, but the rewards are many.
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