sobriety birthday

Nine years ago today I posted on facebook that I was going to take a month off from drinking to recalibrate my relationship with alcohol. Then I started going to those meetings and related a lot to what I heard. I’ve been sober ever since.

The best thing about this year’s soberversary is that it feels like just another day. No weirdness. No regrets, no wondering if it’s right for me, and no weirdness that I’ve accepted that I can’t drink.

Undoubtedly it has extended my life. If I’d’ve kept on in January 2017 for another few years at the rate I was abusing alcohol it’s unlikely I’d be alive now to write this.

I may still yet have a fatty liver. My family doctor ordered an ultrasound to check for scarring but I cancelled it because it would’ve cost me $2700 in deductible and “patient responsibility” to get it done. The ongoing sugar and Coca Cola addiction has kept that liver scarring possibility in play. It’s embarrassing, but it’s not as severe as the alcohol abuse was. Theoretically I’m working on eating healthier, drinking more water.

I could rattle off a litany of clichés from those meetings that have helped me manage, but I won’t. Last year I quit the program for 3 or 4 months, but avoiding the steps from November through February didn’t improve anything, and I found myself more isolated without meetings, so I slunk back in, sobriety streak intact. Oh, hey, they said. How’re you holding up?

These days I work on my social media scrolling addiction. It has been a problem for multiple years. Doomscrolling, compulsive posting. Now I pause all three Meta apps in the morning, to create that extra step of having to unpause them to gain access. These past five days of using this method, my scrolling hasn’t gone down to zero, but it has been a fraction of the time I normally waste. Sometimes I just sit there, without it. Maybe I pick up a book. Theoretically I’m recreating scenarios in which my mind used to wander into the territory of a poem.

I don’t know what else might pop up as a problem in what my friend K. calls the ol’ addiction whack-a-mole. The sex drive settles way down as one approaches the half century mark. I’m almost never crazy with desire. Different than some eras of my life. Easier to manage.

Life is slower, simpler. My kids are almost grown. What happens when the older one still at home flies the coop, when the 16 year old graduates high school next year? I don’t know, but I know I’ll be able to deal with whatever life throws at me so long as I don’t drink.