It always seems impossible until it’s done. My yoga teacher said that tonight. She was teaching us a posture that takes a lot of physical strength (moving up into chaturanga from lying face down for the yogis among you, essentially deadlifting your own body weight for everyone else). About half the class could do it. The other half, including me, could not move so much as a millimetre off the floor, despite putting so much effort in that I felt like I was on the verge of a stroke. But our teacher said that as long as you give it your all each time you practice it, and you regularly practice, you will get stronger and eventually you will do it, you will cross that threshold between not doing it and doing it and you will never look back. She said that when you get to that point the distance between not doing it and doing it is infinitesimally small and any one of us (I suspect not me) might be so close to crossing that line but we won’t know how close until we do it, until we give it our all as usual but this time, for the first time, our body actually lifts off the ground.
I’d already been musing about how I am getting better at yoga now. I’ve been regularly practising for almost two years and I can do all sorts of things in terms of both strength and stability, that I couldn’t do when I started, or even a year ago. And there is no magic to why that’s happened. I’ve not learned the secrets of the ancient yogis, nor have I lost large amounts of weight. What I have done is showed up at class pretty much every week and practiced for an hour. And because of that commitment and persistence I have got better.
It made me think of some the other things I have got better at since I stopped drinking, because I now have the time and commitment to stick at the things I choose to do. I am better at all the things I do regularly than I was two years ago. I am better at running, singing and writing. I am better at them because I do them regularly and I put effort into them. A lot of these things have not come naturally to me. I’ll take the physical ones as an example because that’s where I really did have the most work to do. When I started running and going to yoga regularly I was (I am still) overweight, I was less than a year post my third lot of major abdominal surgery in four years, I was getting probably six hours sleep a night tops. I was not and have never been one of nature’s athletes. But I STILL got better at yoga and running and all I had to do was do them regularly and not give up.
And yes, here comes my sobriety analogy. There are probably some people who make stopping drinking look easy. I suspect I may be one of them. And I think actually I have found it comparatively easy, being an all or nothing sort of person by nature. I have always found it easier to stop doing something completely than to try to moderate it (smoking, eating, spending on a credit card being three other examples, two of which I may still be wrestling with to this day…). But even people who are naturally good at yoga still have to go to class every week if they don’t want to lose their skills. And, crucially, you don’t have to be naturally good at yoga to go to class every week and get better and better – I’m living proof of that!
So if you are on the verge of giving up on this whole sobriety thing, if you are on your millionth day 1 and you don’t understand why you can’t make it stick, if you are thinking ‘oh fuck this I just can’t DO it, it’s just too hard’. If your life circumstances are making it feel completely impossible, or you’re surrounded by drinkers who don’t get it and don‘t support you. If YOU don’t get it, if that magical mind flip that some people seem to have just will not happen for you however much quit lit you read. If you are thinking ‘what’s the point, I’m never going to get to 100 days, or six months, or a year‘. Remember that everything feels impossible until it’s done. And remember that you will not know when it’s done until afterwards. Every. Single. Time you have another bash at sobriety, every day 1, you are getting stronger, you are putting the work in. It’s never, ever wasted. And you could be so much closer than you realise right now – the next day 1 might turn into day 2, day 10, day 50, day 100, day 200, day 365. I’ve seen it happen for so many people now. It can happen for you, for absolutely anyone. Perhaps quicker and easier for some than others but in the long term that’s irrelevant really. If you put in the work and you refuse to give up, you will beat this thing and there is nothing in this world that can stop you. So give it one more go. It might be the last time you have to.
