Actually 18 months – year 2 check in

18 months sober today!! Feeling really good about that, but also reflective. At the start of this year I wrote a blog on Soberistas called Note to self, my plan for year 2. At the time I was thinking ahead about the things that might derail me on my sober path, that might lead me back to drinking. Now I’m 6 months into year 2 it doesn’t actually feel like that at all anymore. The things I’m working on now are not so much sober tools, or strategies to make sure I don’t drink, but much bigger changes that I have no choice but to make now I’m fully present in my own life. Which are wonderful and terrifying, exhausting and exhilarating all at the same time.

I’ve not made any dramatic life changes (yet) but my attitude and the way that I live has shifted so much and continues to change all the time. I realise now just how much of my former behaviour was about avoiding discomfort. I found it so difficult and painful that I would do almost anything to escape from it. Meditation has helped with this so hugely (although still whenever I talk about this my inner critic pipes up ‘ooh a sober person getting into meditation that’s original’ 😂). But fuck off inner critic because I think sitting with discomfort for most people is a learned skill, and until this past year I just never took the trouble to learn it. It was just easier to keep drinking the wine and numbing the pain, or even the mild discomfort. Until it wasn’t. Now, by keeping up a simple daily practice of a ten minute guided meditation every night before I go to bed, I am somehow training my brain to be able to recognise and tolerate discomfort like never before. To be able to say ‘yes there you are’ to it but to not automatically have to rush off to numb it or fix whatever is causing it. Still totally a work in progress but a million miles away from where I was 18 months ago.

Another big thing for me over the last year or so has been recognising my other unhealthy behaviours, learning what genuinely makes me feel good and is good for me (exercise, connecting with family and friends, nutritious food, meditation, singing, writing and travel) and what I think makes me feel good but actually just gives me a quick, short lived dopamine hit and then makes me crave more of it (caffeine, sugar, refined flour, shopping and social media). And working out how to manage the latter – at first I ricocheted between ‘I’ve clearly got an addictive personality, I must give it all up and do only wholesome things forever more’ and ‘fuck it I gave up smoking and drinking I can have coffee and cake and spend half an hour down a social media black hole if I want to FFS’. Now I see the way forward as being somewhere between the two. Yes the things in the second list are not especially good for me. Yes I will always have to watch myself with them and the way I am with them will not always be entirely healthy. But does that mean I shouldn’t do them at all ever? I don’t think so. But of course this doesn’t mean that I can take a similar approach to drinking. I know that would drive me utterly insane. I first heard my mantra for this from Holly Whitaker on the Home Podcast but I think it comes originally from Gabrielle Bernstein: ‘you need to know what you can and can’t fuck with’. I think I can still safely fuck with white bread, Haribo and Instagram. Not so alcohol (or cigarettes or any other addictive drugs for that matter). And there is a lot of peace that comes with that knowing.

So that’s where I’m up to at 18 months sober, still and will always be a work in progress, and my life doesn’t really look that different to a year and a half ago from the outside. Same home, same husband, same kids (well as much as little kids can be the same a year and a half on), same friends (although so many awesome new ones – I feel like the luckiest person in the world in that respect), same job, broadly the same interests (but so much more time to devote to them). But my insides couldn’t be more different. If there is one thing above all that makes me completely sure that I will never touch a drink again, it’s just not being able to bear the thought of giving up the now me and going back to the frightened, lonely, lost, miserable person I was on 19 February 2017. I wish I could travel back in time now, give that person a hug and say ‘it’s ok, you have no idea how strong you will become and how happy you will be with being you’. I wouldn’t have believed it, but it’s true because here I am, 18 months sober, grateful AF.