I'm on day 4 of another attempt to stop drinking. Aiming for at least 7 days this time around since past record of alcohol free since starting seroquel is 6 days. Already my motivation is flagging. I feel like the alcohol is fully out of my system but I am still all doped up from the prescribed meds. Why do the ones that I'm supposed to take make me feel bad while the ones I'm not supposed to take make me feel good? Granted the long term effects of alcohol and drugs is bad but at least I got so
Working hard on sobriety, but hating it. Did the Cost/Benefit analysis exercise with SMART recovery, where you list out the advantages and drawbacks both of drinking and not drinking. Surprised at how dumb drinking seems to be. Most benefits are short term and most drawbacks are long term and make the benefits not worth it. So why do I want vodka more than air right now? Went to AA meeting again just to be in a sober environment where I am not alone. Came back more triggered than when I left. N
Very excited to have gotten an offer. Pay is a little low but considering region and company size it's about what I would expect. Benefits are amazing too. Main reservation is that it's not in my first choice industry. I applied to help a fellow alumnus get applicants in the pool so it kind of just flew my way. Sadly due to depression I hadn't been doing much to get a job in my preferred region/industry and this is a decent opportunity. More than that I'm pretty tired of the job hunt with interv
Past couple nights drank 5/night. No motivation to be sober once the sun goes down. Always feels like I can drink for one more night. Going to meeting tonight, not sure if I'll drink after that or not. One thing that is getting better is spiritual side. Met with a priest for spiritual direction, which is kind of a misnomer since it's more like spiritual sanity checking, but I guess that's tough to market. Anyway he was pretty helpful in getting me off my anxiety trip around spirituality. I was
last night only had 2 drinks. Compared to 5-7 for the past couple weeks, this was a decent sized step. Woke up earlier than normal, had scary dreams. Right before waking up I was dreaming about drinking and really wanted a beer for breakfast. This is not normal for me - I normally never drink before lunch time at the earliest. I woke up shivering but neither hot nor cold. Right now I feel really shaky. Sudden twitches in my neck and hands. Feels like I was recently electrocuted with a very low
Lately I've been thinking about some stuff and sometimes what feels like the great insight that cracks the whole problem turns out to be no more than my strong opinion for a fleeting moment. Today I've been all over the emotional spectrum, mostly down in the dumps though despite doing some good things for my diet and preparing for job interviews. Normally i get a boost when I do something constructive. I'm writing down my current hypotheses here to review later. 1. to quit drinking I have to hav
pdoc: How much you drinking? me: 3 beers a night pdoc: WTF you moron? me: Ok okay, i'll quit ....Later that night... beer: DRINK ME! me: take off! beer: sure, whatever you want vodka: DRINK ME me: no Whiskey: Drink me me: I don't even have you in my house, you hoser W: I'm in the store me: Well that changes everything don't it vodka: DRINK ME me: Shit yeah son Beer: Me too! me: goddam you're in the store too. Beer: you're out of ice cream me: That I am. And you're drunk. conscience: WTF Man? m
Severely depressed today, had the day off of work was supposed to be finding places to start building networking contacts, but I have no idea what I did before about 5:30PM. Tried to make it to a SMART recovery (secular CBT based sobriety method) meeting but got lost on the way and was late. I thought I was going to be early, too. Grr. so hard to be on time anywhere. On the bright side I was productive after that point, switched gym membership to one that was closer to my apartment. I prefer th
I'm getting more consistent with meditation. Through meditation I become more aware of what's going on in my mind, which is to say less zoning out. Physically this is calming, but attending to the mess between my ears is not a comforting experience. I think one must face the mess though before it can be cleaned up. My internal dialogue feels like one of those news shows where two people argue over each other and shout the whole time. I'm yelling at myself for making some mistake and then I yell
So far today had some success getting things done. Just basic household chores but that's more than I got done yesterday. Starting to feel better for a few seconds at a time, but then I fall back into depression. It's like swimming underwater and poking my head above the surface every so often to take a breath. One thing about this experience is to highlight how effed up my thinking has been lately. Hopefully I can keep moving toward the surface. update - started to get panicked, heart rate more
I can only hope that what I'm going through now will be worth something later. Pressure can create a diamond, but also can simply crush. The word damned means lost, but in time came to signify the torments of hell. Also, the bad people are trying to get to me. They want me to do something but I don't want to do it. It's not bad for me but it's bad in my opinion. That's all I know at this time. They don't want me to say anything and I will probably get hurt for saying this. Yet this running arou
Today thought about how useful is it to even get upset. It doesn't really do much good, if anything it makes your problem worse because energy spent bitching about it could be spent doing something. Yet people still do it. It's an impossible double bind, sort of like forcing somebody to relax. The harder you try to do it, the more impossible it becomes. I learned this from job interviews. You look more credible if not nervous, so I try to force myself to calm down. Doesn't work. Doing nothing ju
Two is an understatement. Still got the suicidal thoughts but another strain which wants to fight. Fight the circumstances to make my life better, fight the bad thoughts so that I could even feel happy when in fact my life is okay. It's kind of like that native American proverb about the two wolves in the heart, I guess. Except my wolves speak English, there are more than two of them, and at least one is a puppy. On espresso. The depressed side seems to be controlling my actions right now as I
Today spent a good deal of time thinking about suicide, then trying to talk myself out of it. I don't plan to go through with it but when I get too off I start thinking about methods more. Then I feel even worse because I can't even make a decision about a suicide method. Right now it seems like everything is bad, even though that is not really the case. I can reframe things that I need to try several interviews to find the right match or have faith that there is a reason why no job interviews
Seems the harder I try to quit alcohol the more scrambled my brains get. It's really hard to focus on anything right now, which is why I haven't been able to write here for a few days. Mood is all over the place from abject despair to optimism that I could get my life together. Either way I've gotten detached from my emotions because they are changing so fast it's like one of those days where it's alternately cloudy and sunny from minute to minute. I am drinking less but can't seem to keep myse
Rejected for my dream job at the not so dream company. Well crap, back to the drawing board. I put a ton of effort into this though and was really planning on getting this job so both my ego and budget are suddenly deflated. Not having anything better to rely on, I'm back on the bottle, but I only had one drink last night. Over the weekend though I had about 20 drinks. Crap crap crap I used to not understand how people could put away a fifth of vodka every day but now I'm not so far off from tha
Got some work done, and my depression is lightening lately. It's still noticeably there but the difference is I can step back and say, no the world is not ending. So far, 3 days since last drink but haven't dealt with any cravings either. Mainly only letting the stuff in my system clear out.
Yep, I'm a nerd. Can't help that. Trying sobriety again. Couldn't manage the grief process without a bit of liquid comfort but I'm now two days without alcohol. My goal is to go 30 days dry and then see if that helps with mood. I don't expect that will come without some bumps in the road but I've done this before. Maybe I'll shoot for 30 days not consecutively but with as few slip ups as possible. The challenge is to manage mistakes without it derailing the effort. From the AA method of you have
It was my grandfather who passed. But I just fucking saw him... He didn't seem at all unhealthy. Maybe that is why it's such a shock. It fucks me up bad. He was one of only a few safe persons to me. My mom and I don't get along. My grandpa though, I loved him unconditionally. He was one of the few people I've ever felt was on the same wavelength as me, even though we had different opinions on some things. He gave me so much although I was pretty much useless to him. He seemed to understand me
Lost someone important to me. Not unexpected but still a shock. I didn't drink last night but today hasn't been so well. I haven't told anyone IRL because I didn't want to sound like I was making excuses for all the pressure I am under (basically trying to do a 40hr/wk job in 60% of the time) but I was not feeling well today. I just sort of zoned out, brought a good performance to a job interview but that's all it was: an act. They were impressed. Problem is the job is lower level than the acume
Haven't been writing here because nothing that I needed to capture has been going on. I'd gone back to previous drinking habit of 4-5/night. Last night I was too busy though and only had 1. It seems that I won't drink as long as I have something better to do, which is pretty obvious but when you're trying to change a habit some of that obvious stuff isn't noticed. I've been badly depressed lately and even thought about going home sick because I couldn't focus. I made it through though by doing
Last night I caved in and drank. I made a deal with myself that if I got everything done on my to do list that I would allow that. Magically I got everything done, which is a rare thing for me. Usually my limit is about 3 things and I get distracted. This morning I noticed I feel more solid, like I'm on planet earth as opposed to yesterday where I felt like I hardly existed in a physical sense. I know that it is just a perception but perceptions can be quite persuasive, and I was tired of it. I
Day 5 of operation liver break is mostly wrapped up, now my first weekend. Without alcohol I am feeling altered, even though I'm technically sober. Right now I'm having racing thoughts and cannot concentrate for long enough to write much without it descending into tangent after tangent. Sometimes I'm ecstatic, and other times I am very frightened. One thing though is that I don't feel suicidal for a change and that has led me to see what the benefit of being suicidal is: Invulnerability. Carin
Still being kind to liver, guess this makes 4 days now, woohoo. Paying the price psychologically, whatever. I'm so used to this territory I hardly even care anymore. It would be nice not to have a tape looping in my mind telling me to kill myself but I'm not sure I want to satisfy it by drinking myself to death. Sometimes I do, I guess. Good interview today. Interviewers seemed to like me, I guess the question is down to whether they find anyone better or not. My experience didn't really match
