Make It Go Away (day 47)

Plenty of people have probably stopped reading my blog because all of a sudden in forty-seven days I have become ‘the sober blogger’ and I am sorry and I hate it, too, because in some ways (and of course not in others, but still) I literally tripped and fell and got sober but also I don’t hate it at all. I need sobriety like I need air and if I cannot write about it I will stop breathing in all the poetic metaphoric ways that kill you off long before you die your actual physical death so like it or not here we are.

Also, also, and furthermore, I must tell the following story because the facts of the case are all true and I can’t promise it will “help” anyone else (that whole concept freaks me the fuck out but that’s for another day I suppose) but I know it will help me because I will be able to remember it. I will be able to reach back and say, yeah, yes, I did that right there.

Let’s be honest, there is nothing special about forty-seven days sober except everything. I mean, I am doing it and to get beyond six weeks to damn near seven feels like home and also a literal out-of-body experience. Yesterday was HARD af. Had a lot of shit come down on me at once (life, I think they call it, as in life is gonna life at you, sober or plastered, either way) and it was rough scene after rough scene.

By the time I got home after work all I could think was Fuck, a drink is exactly how I would have ended this particular day if I were still drinking. But I had this wild glittering sobery thought as I drained the spiral pasta for dinner and it was this: wine would make this day even exponentially nauseatingly worse. Because I know me drunk. I would have used the shit events of the day to justify my inhaling wine because it was a really hard day! *pouts* and wine was the medicine I deserved. I would drink so much to numb the pain that I wouldn’t be able to breathe through it to get to the other side. The other side being the internal mental meadowy-picnic-like place where I can see as softly and warmly as a goofy little fuzzy puppy sipping water from a babbling brook in the sunshine that I’m gonna be okay. Because I’ve got me. And no matter what, I am not ever leaving me. With the alcohol thrumming through my veins, I’d never get to that place or that part.

Instead I’d have picked a fight with the husband, blamed him for what was happening to me (nothing he could possibly control, it’s a work thing), gotten righteously angry, cried, felt misunderstood, and quite possibly threatened in so many words or insinuations to end the marriage. Then. THEN. Then, tear stained and rage-petrified, I would sleep like shit. Then wake up feeling like total shit and have to work all day feeling like upset-world-collapsing helpless hopeless terrified jittery trash.

But. I didn’t let any of that happen. I drank sparkling water and I breathed and I made pasta and I even smiled about the absurdity of this life and my beloved said kind wise words like ‘you have time to decide what’s best for you’ and ‘we will get through it no matter what’ and all such things that make him the absolute kindest rock star rock solid support in the universe. And I slept like a perfectly angelic little green silky caterpillar inside her warm and mysterious milky cocoon just waiting and life-ing and readying for a brand new day.

And so here we are.