Getting sober with no face to face support

More of my journal and emails documenting my journey in sobriety. To read from the beginning of my story scroll down to the bottom of the page and work your way up. Please feel free to comment on anything I say or contact me if you want to ask me any questions.


21st March 2008

I´m 7 days sober today and I´m up and down like a yo-yo. This is what I´m doing to cope: If I feel bad I check that I've remembered to eat (this is hard for me as I haven´t eaten a proper meal in a year). I´ve been told me that sweet things are good for cravings because my body is missing the sugar it was getting in the alcohol. A sugar fix definitely eases my cravings a lot. I´m eating plenty of chocolate – I never even really liked chocolate before now!!


I had a fantastic day yesterday and felt no anxiety. I felt calm and peaceful. Today is not quite so good but I definitely DON´T want a drink. The alcoholic part of my mind would really like me to have one but I refuse to listen to it.


I smile a lot even if I don´t feel like smiling. I try and find something to make me laugh out loud each day. I listen to calming music and concentrate on my breathing. I imagine myself as the serene and peaceful person that I want to be and I remind myself that the craving will pass and I will have got through another hour of my day. All this stuff I´m doing does not come naturally to me, but I am terrified of the idea of drinking again. I MUST stay sober at all costs – I can´t go back to how I was before.


Most importantly of all I talk to other recovering alcoholics on the phone and I visit websites and forums dedicated to recovery and know that I'm not alone. I reach out and email people. Other A.A. members reach out to me and it touches my heart to feel their compassion. They understand everything because they have ALL been where I am now. I read a bit more of the Alcoholics Anonymous Big Book on-line and remind myself that this is a path well trodden by others. A.A. has worked for so many people and now I have finally admitted that I too am an alcoholic, I'm going to use all the tools it provides to make it work for me. I seem to be in no fit state to grasp and understand too much of anything right now. I feel confused and disorientated much of the time, but I am so, so happy to be sober.


22nd March

Today I´m singing silly made up songs to my animals, it makes me laugh and I know they´d laugh too if they could!! It´s nice to know that I can be silly and carefree now I´m sober. The silly carefree feelings alcohol used to give me in the early days had long gone by the end of my drinking only to be replaced with an ever growing sense of despair, bitterness, self loathing and resentment.

WHY would I ever want to go back to that??!!


The various websites and forums are giving me a lot of inspiration and hope and whilst I´m writing emails; my journal; or reading, I´m not thinking about having a drink. The hours just seem to fly by now I´m getting involved in contact with other people just like me. It´s like finding a readymade family, a family more understanding and compassionate than my own!


22nd March


Hi Kelly, Thank you SO much for contacting me. I´m so grateful that people are reaching out to me. About half an hour ago I was happily singing whilst washing a weeks worth of dishes (the housework has been the last thing on my mind this week). All of a sudden the jitters crept up on me and threatened to spoil my peace of mind. No way am I having that!! Then I realized that I hadn't eaten anything yet today (its 4pm here). I quickly made a sandwich and now peace reigns again. Living alone I often end up talking to myself and my animals (and answering for them!), so whilst I was making my sandwich I talked to the alcoholic part of my mind and told it in no uncertain terms that it wasn't getting what it wanted. I said we've tried it your way for as long as I can remember and look what a mess we've made of things. We're trying it my way now, so quit bothering me!



I have a confession to make. I have alcohol in the house. It hasn't bothered me for this whole first week of sobriety and it's not bothering me now either, but . . . . . . . . . I think that if I do end up having that first drink it won't involve a hell of a lot of rational thinking. The alcoholic part of my mind could just kick in at any time and ruin everything I´m fighting tooth and nail for. I don't want a drink, but IT will always want one. I'm going to get rid of that wine as soon as possible. The reason I've kept it is because I thought that if I do decide to drink then it´s better to do it in the safety of my own home than to go to a bar. Now I just don't want it around me. It's early days yet and I'm aware that I'm very vulnerable.



Anyway, I'm not even washed or dressed yet, not that I could care less, as long as I'm sober! I've got a week of housework to catch up on so I guess I should go and get active. I've spent so much time reading, writing, and dealing with the effects of withdrawal that I just haven't done much of anything else. I've still got a lot of the Big Book to read but now it's time to clean this house (I did more cleaning than this when I was drinking!!) Thanks for the invite to contact you. Writing stuff down really helps. I don't feel so alone and desperate now.


23rd March

Mike, THANK YOU!! You were the first real contact I had with A.A. Hearing your voice for the first time gave me hope. I was drowning in a sea of misery and alcohol and you threw me a life jacket. Every now and then I need to blow the whistle to ask for help and you´re there when I need you. 8 days later my head is still above water. You were the person that made me laugh out loud yesterday (more than once in fact). You were the person that made me smile inside and out. You´re very special and I´m glad to have you in my life. You´ve made me feel that I´m a person worth saving. I´m glad to be alive today.



23rd March

Kelly, Thank you so much for your email. It brought a lump to my throat. Yes, I guess I am naturally positive, but like you I had noticed - especially in the last year of really out of control drinking - the destructive negativity creeping in. I also became very anxious and nervous without a drink in my hand. I read the ‘Doctor’s Opinion’ today in the Big Book and kept thinking. Yes, that’s me. There is just no escaping it. I’m an alcoholic. I have to keep saying it to myself because, it’s quite difficult to take in initially don’t you think? I’ve actually found it a real shock to discover that I will never be able to have any control over alcohol. But on the other hand it’s good to know that it wasn’t me just being weak and having no will power. For years I´ve being saying to myself, tonight I won’t drink so much, I won’t let myself get out of control. The next morning I would always be so angry and confused as to why I had allowed myself to get out of control yet again. I would be full of self loathing and anxiety, and then I would drink to get rid of those feelings – it was a vicious circle. It just went on and on with no end in sight. Yet I still couldn’t see that alcohol and I were just not meant to be together – I thought it was my best friend. With friends like that who needs enemies??



I’m glad you´ve managed to achieve something in your life. You’ve got a good career and I’m so pleased that you didn’t allow this disease to rob you of that. Me, well, I’ve done a lot of really menial jobs. When I was 21 I ran a fast food takeaway for 3 years (the stress was so bad I was drinking whisky out of a coffee mug in the mornings just to get going!!).


Maybe when I get my head a bit straighter I could do an Open University course or something. I do feel that I´ve wasted my brain somewhat. I’m an underachiever, but I needn’t have been if I wasn’t so busy hitting the bottle and doing recreational drugs! I still feel positive about the future though. Can’t do anything about my past now and luckily the future is only going to arrive one day at a time, so I’m not going to get stressed about it! Like you though, I really wish I´d woken up to the fact of being an alcoholic years ago. My life would have been very different now. No point wallowing in regrets though. What’s done is done. Whatever my past has been, I have a spotless future!


Tomorrow I´m going to get on with reading the Big Book. I read some during the first couple of days of sobriety but I’ve got a bit immersed in reading the forums and haven’t read anything since.


It will get easier to do this praying stuff as time goes on I’m sure. If I need to have faith in a higher power to stay sober then have faith I will!!! If the system works then I’m not going to fight against it. I NEED to be sober.


I let myself get hungry and tired today and then ignored it and carried on sitting up here on the computer. In the end I got jittery and anxious so I must watch out for that in future.


24th March

I had about three months of sobriety 3 years ago and it nearly killed me. I was in HELL because I only stopped drinking to try and save my relationship. I wasn't particularly interested in saving myself. I had no idea that I had no power over alcohol and that my life had become unmanageable (It has ALWAYS been unmanageable!!). I still thought I drank because I wanted to and was resentful for others trying to control me. I felt self pity and resentment. I wasn´t even attempting to change what was going on in my head. I let my thoughts rule me. I didn´t even realize it was possible to change them.


This time round it´s VERY different. I know it´s going to take a lot of effort on my part. There is no magic switch that can just turn my life around without me putting some effort in myself. I need to change the way I think. I need to change my attitude. I now realize that it is possible to change the thoughts that go on in my head. I don´t have to sit around full of self pity. I can banish those thoughts. They do not belong in my head. It´s the easiest thing in the world to sit around and feel sorry for myself, but what a waste of bloody time! Haven´t I wasted enough of that already? When are my feelings going to change? When I change them.


I´m grateful every day now. Was I grateful when I was drinking? NO. But now I´m learning how to control what goes on in my mind and that´s SO much easier now I´m sober. I will not let negativity or self pity into my life. I have no friends here, I´m barely on speaking terms with my family, I´m unable to get to face to face meetings, and I have no job. Do I feel sorry for myself? NO!! I´m the luckiest person in the world. I have my self respect back. I´m sober. I have other A.A. members who I can phone and email. I have another day to look forward to in which to grow as a human being. I am rich indeed.


Reading the posts on various on-line forums is one of the first things I do each morning now. It´s such a fantastic uplifting start to my day. I often have to read them again later as there is just so much in them on which to ponder and take in. If there is one upside (for me) to being a recovering alcoholic, it´s this incredible journey of self discovery. There is a quote which says the unexamined life is not worth living. If I wasn´t alcoholic would I be trying to become more self aware? Would I be delving so deeply into the richness of my mind? (what´s left of it!!) Would I be baring my soul so unashamedly to myself and others? Would I appreciate the simple pleasures in life or the beauty of living in the moment? Would I be really THINKING?


These things make another day of sobriety something to treasure. Another day of sobriety feels like a gift to me and not something to be endured. Being a drunk for 25 years took endurance. Today I am released from that pain and hardship. Today I am truly alive. Today I will not drink because it will steal from me all that I have gained.


I must get on with reading the Big Book and working the Steps, because I truly have the belief that this can lead me to the place I was always trying to find at the bottom of a glass . . . . now THAT´S what I call ironic!!!


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The sober ramblings of a chronic alcoholic . . . .

Choice . . . don´t give me too much choice - it confuses me! 10 minutes to set up a blog page . . . . um, maybe for YOU - it took me hours . . . what template to use? What photo? Favourite films - OMG what are my favourite films???!! Books? I´ve read about 3,000 and I´m being asked to choose which are my favourite?? As for trying to get my Zazzle panels right – well, you can see I failed miserably there! I´ve been told that I´m a perfectionist – that a lot of alcoholics are. I couldn´t see this for ages, but I´m seeing it more and more now – it´s a pain in the bum because everything takes soooooo long . . . . and I always fall far short of anything like perfection!

Anyway, now I have my blog page more or less sorted and what do I have before me? A blank page . . . . . what shall I write? . . . . is this like life – do I only get one chance to make a first impression? Then I remember that I´m an alcoholic, and that for most of my life I´ve made the wrong impression – don´t sweat it girl, you´re sober today and you have a story to tell . . . . and some nice shiny new products to sell – yes, I DO want you to take a look at my shops and maybe even buy something – then you can look at it and say to yourself “Hey, that crazy alcoholic lady made this – ain´t that da bomb!” Not that I can believe for one moment that anyone actually speaks like that, but maybe you do, and I´m not gonna judge you for it :-)

I´m not just here to tout my stuff (cool, cute and wonderful though it is – and how you´ve lived without these things in your life up to now is beyond me). I´m also here to share my journey in sobriety with you. I had no idea I was actually going to do that until I started writing today – but now I know it´s absolutely the right thing to do. When I first got sober I started to correspond a lot with people and also use forums for recovering alcoholics – so, I have a LOT of rambling to share with you! I was planning on trying to make it into a book . . . . but somehow or another I just haven´t got around to it yet. It´s no use to anyone sat on my computer though, so I´m going to share it with you, and if the most useful thing it does for anyone is entertain them – well, that´s not a bad thing.

I just want to point out that I do NOT speak for AA. This is just my own experience and any opinions I express here are mine (and possibly mine alone!).

Ok, I´m going to take a deep breath and dive in here. It´s baring my soul time and I have a little bit of fear about it . . . . but, here goes . . . .


The greatest misconception about me, as a chronic alcoholic, is that alcohol is my problem. You could certainly be excused for thinking that. If you knew all the problems alcohol caused me, and – more importantly - those around me, it would be natural to assume that when I stopped drinking, my problems would be solved - but alcohol was not my problem, it was my SOLUTION.

Acute alcoholics develop alcoholism through excessive drinking – but I´m a chronic alcoholic and I was “suffering” from alcoholism before I even took my first drink. I´m not a chronic alcoholic because I drank obsessively and abusively. I drank obsessively and abusively BECAUSE I´m alcoholic.

I suffer from alcoholism when I´m sober. Drinking relieves that suffering, and for many years it was alcohol that helped me to survive life – without it I would have, no doubt, committed suicide. I had a sense from early childhood of not fitting in. I didn´t feel a part of anything – I always felt apart from everything and everyone. Nothing really made any sense to me and I didn´t feel comfortable in my own skin. I didn´t like myself even as a small child and I was painfully shy, withdrawn and deeply unhappy. I was suffering from alcoholism BEFORE alcohol even came into my life.


March 2008

When I was 8 years old my cousins thought it would be funny to see what effect alcohol would have on me. I guess most normal kids of that age would have taken one sip, declared it disgusting and then drank no more. Not me. It was homemade wine and no doubt it was pretty grim, but that´s not what I remember about it. What I remember is that all of a sudden I had found something that made me feel good about myself. I didn´t feel shy or tortured. I didn´t feel inadequate, and all of a sudden I felt like I could talk to my cousins and not feel like a silly little kid. Without realising it, I had found the answer to all of my problems. At 8 years old I drank and drank and didn´t stop until someone stopped me. I drank until I fell over. I loved it.

For the first time ever I had escaped from the unbearable feelings I lived with every day. It was like a switch had flipped and all of those feelings just vanished. For those few hours of drinking I was not unhappy in my own skin. For the first time ever - I liked me. I had found a magic potion.

Fast forward to March 2008. I´m 41 years old, and I´m trying to find the courage to end my life. I have NO IDEA that I´m an alcoholic. I´m aware that I´m drinking much more than I used to but I´ve always been a drinker – drinking has been a part of my life since childhood and I´m unable (and unwilling) to see that I might have a serious problem in regards to the amount of alcohol I´m consuming. My life is so horrible that I feel the need to drink more to cope with it all – but I´m not coping at all. I want to die. I´m living alone in an isolated village in a foreign country, with no real friends, no job, no income, no transport, and 7 animals that depend on me for their survival. My life is unmanageable and I feel powerless to do anything about it. I just can´t live like this anymore but I have no idea how I can get out of the situation. I hate myself and I hate my life - but I´m too frightened to die. I´m also too frightened to live. I´m frightened of everything. I have terrible crushing phobias that make it almost impossible for me to use ANY form of transport as I´m terrified that I´m going to be in a horrible accident . . . . and I can see it in ALL it´s gory detail. Every journey in a car is pure hell for me, so I´ve given up going anywhere – it´s just not worth the agony.

I have a strong desire to cram at least 100 painkillers down my throat and then stick my head in the gas oven – because I am deadly serious about ending my life and I don´t want there to be ANY mistakes. I have seen for myself the failed attempts at suicide – it is not pretty. But I just do not have the guts to do it – I´m consumed by the fear of messing it up. Who will look after my animals if I´m successful in my attempt . . . . and who will look after them if I mess it up and end up a brain dead vegetable??? Either way they´re screwed – and so am I.

I have pains in my kidneys and liver (at a guess) and I´m sick every morning. I can´t sleep or eat, and I cry a lot. I´ve lost around 25lbs in body weight in less than 12 months, without even trying. But nobody knows there´s anything really wrong with me, because when I step out of my front door I´m dressed nicely and I´ve already had a few drinks to make going out bearable. I´m still reasonably sociable when I drink with others - but I´m alone and desolate inside. I look like I´m having fun – sometimes. But by the end of the evening I´m sat at the bar crying, confused and desolate. My mask is starting to slip. When I get home a sort of madness descends upon me and I´m terrified. Only more drinking keeps it at bay. I feel that I´m losing my mind. I drink until about 5 or 6am and try to snatch a few hours of sleep. It´s almost impossible because my mind just won´t shut off, there´s constant noise and chatter, and crazy scary thoughts which make me terrified of myself and everything around me. I lie rigid with fear wishing I would die there in bed so that I don’t have to face another day – and another night.


When I get up a few hours later, all I want to do is drink, but if I drink in the morning it might mean I have a drinking problem, and I just can´t face that possibility. Drinking is all I have left that feels good. I feel dead and empty inside, but at the same time fearful, paranoid and emotional. I drink coffee until noon. Then I feel it´s ok to drink beer. If I don’t drink in the morning, I can´t possibly be an alcoholic – right? I drink a couple litres of beer during the day, and then, if I stay in, I drink at maybe a couple of litres of wine (mixed with lemonade because I think it makes me drink less). Sometimes I´ll go out in the early afternoon with the intention of just having a couple of beers and then coming home. I´m always confused when I´m the last one to leave the bar at around 2am. Whilst I´m drinking I get anxious when the glass is less than half full, and I have to get another one lined up ready. I cannot afford to take the risk that the barman will be unavailable to serve me immediately when I´ve finished my drink – it´s got to the stage where my drinking has to be continual and uninterrupted once I start or I start to have a panic attack. I have some small idea that this may not be normal, but I don´t pay much attention to it, because as far as I´m concerned it´s the rest of my life that´s the problem – not alcohol. But, when I drink, I´m loud, and overly friendly. I get myself into situations that make me confused, paranoid, and full of self loathing the next day. I have blackouts - I don´t remember how I got from one place to another and I don´t remember conversations I´ve had and things I´ve done. I become almost too scared to go out – I can´t trust myself. One day I go out at noon to get some groceries, and I don´t come home until 5.30am. Despite my BEST intentions to just go shopping and not to stop for a drink, I somehow end up drinking for 17 hours – and come home without any groceries.

Life gets worse and worse until it becomes no more than a living death. One day in March 2008 I decide that I must stop drinking. I don’t want to stop, but I have no idea what else to do – I´m desperate. I cannot imagine a life without alcohol, but I cannot go on with my life as it is, as I feel that I´m teetering on the edge of complete insanity . . . .

. . . . and that´s enough for now I think. I don´t want to bore you rigid with my first post, or have you crying into your coffee!

More soon I think. Thanks for taking the time to read me :-) Oh, by the way - how long do you think it´s taken me to suss out how to copy and paste my post into this blog . . . . . .




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