Quitting drinking gets easier. I feel it all the time. It takes some work though, and I hope you’re willing to test yourself when you’re ready. If you’re like me and you drank lots and lots of alcohol for many many years, you have all those memories stuck in your head. When you have so many memories of doing something, I feel like your brain sort of sets that reoccurring task or event on autopilot. It sounds stupid calling an alcohol addiction a task or an event, but I’m not sure our brain can tell the difference between doing that over and over or how it just knows the route you drive to work or the way you fold your laundry each time. It functions kind of like a subconscious. At least my addiction did I feel like. I’d get off work and it was the first thing I did when I walked in the door. I grabbed a beer out of the fridge. Don’t mind the hungry pets, your full bladder or growling belly. Most of the time, I’d run to grab a beer and take it into the bathroom with me. What the hell is that about!? It’s sad. So about vacation. My husband and I just took a road trip and for months had a non-refundable trip to the Southeast USA. I won’t go into detail about certain things, but our vacation was a couple days after hurricane Helene hit. The very small portion of what we witnessed people going through was completely awful, to say the least. We had no right to feel sorry for ourselves after some of the devastation we came across, and even worse, what we didn’t come across. While we tried to find detours and figure out how to re-route our vacation, I had some slight struggles regarding the booze. It’s times like this that those little ping-pangs can come out of nowhere. The thing about letting emotions run your addiction, is this; When you come up with a reason to drink when you’re stressed out, then you can come up with any reason to drink at any time. Your alcoholic beverage you run to the minute you get home because you had a “stressful day” and you’re “trying to relax”, turns into drinking when you’re happy, sad, angry, bored, and any other feeling under the sun. This may not be true of everyone, but this is how I ended up operating. I was drinking so heavily for so many reasons, until suddenly it was for no reason, because I just didn’t need one anymore. Where does it end? So when I’m having a rough day for any reason and when I have these sudden thoughts of how I could just get drunk to “take the edge off” or “forget it all” – I remind myself this; Drinking doesn’t “take the edge off”, it most certainly puts it on. And you might “forget it all” for the time being, but you’ll remember it in the morning, and it’ll probably be worse than before. Most importantly, I feel like these moments when I want to drink alcohol cross my mind, I need to take that feeling and own it. I’ll take a time-out to recognize what made me feel this way and why. Then I take a few seconds to remember how it feels to be incredibly hung-over and what it’s like wondering if I need to apologize to multiple people for something I’m unsure of. How my head would pound to the beat of the negative thoughts I was thinking of myself. I practice little things like this, and I’m building memories of doing this over and over, so it for sure gets easier every time. Even if the entire vacation, for example, I watched my husband drink while I sorted out how not to.

Looking Ahead. . .

I’m still trying to figure out the best way to blog. How do I reach you? I’m not sure what will work best as far as layouts and ease of reading goes. I’m not even sure how people can find this. I am just still very much here for one reason. To help that one person who wants to quit drinking. To show you that you’re human and every single one of us has a crutch or an addiction, whether good or bad, and whether we realize it or not. To show you that it’s easier to quit drinking than you think. And to tell you that you’re worth it.