Thursday
Apr212011
Ask Schmutzie: When Is It Most Difficult?
Thursday, April 21, 2011
I asked you to ask me questions about my sobriety. This is my fifth response to your questions. Check out my first, second, third, and fourth sets of questions and answers.
When is it most difficult?
— cenobyte
Tonight. Tonight it is most difficult, and other nights like tonight.
If you read through all of my posts about sobriety, you'll see that I've said it before, but I'll say it again. I changed a major portion of my life to quit drinking. I summarily and without explanation quit going to the pub I went to most nights for almost ten years and stopped hanging out with 95% of the people I saw most often. I went from seeing lots of people most of the time to seeing almost no one most of the time.
Quitting drinking was such a remarkable life change that I rarely notice how much of a homebody I've become. Being sober feels busy after spending the last ten years forgetting most of what I did. There are nights, though, ones like tonight, when the Palinode goes out with friends and I happen to be feeling particularly vulnerable for no particular reason. I feel smacked upside the back of my head with grief.
I have a ton of things to keep me busy — design work, reading, phoneography, etc. — but I feel like I don't know what to do with myself. I feel wide open, vulnerable, and so very aware of my singularity, my separateness, my aloneness in the universe. I feel that hard reality that no one can feel this life with me, not truly.
I think being drunk with groups of people that I was drunk with a lot made me feel bonded to a whole, however falsely, for those hours that I was there in that state. Some days it can be an exceedingly lonely experience to make the decision, yet again, to say no to it all, to choose to sit with this sense of isolation rather than burrow into a fuzzy sense of togetherness.
There are sober people I can connect with if I need to, but it doesn't fix the truth of being locked into a body in a universe that demands this hard decision of me every day. I am happy to make this decision not to drink as many times as I need to make it, but on nights like tonight I get to feeling a little pathetic, a little tired, a little threadbare.
I may be happy to make this decision, but I don't want to make it, and I wonder when it will stop feeling like I am continually waving goodbye to so much of what I find familiar and comforting.
So, when is it most difficult? Tonight it is most difficult. I feel stretched thin and limp. I am tired. I feel existentially isolated. I am lost.
And I am reminding myself that it gets better, because it does. Every morning proves to me that it gets better than the hard night before, even if it is sometimes only a little bit.
When is it most difficult?
— cenobyte
Tonight. Tonight it is most difficult, and other nights like tonight.
If you read through all of my posts about sobriety, you'll see that I've said it before, but I'll say it again. I changed a major portion of my life to quit drinking. I summarily and without explanation quit going to the pub I went to most nights for almost ten years and stopped hanging out with 95% of the people I saw most often. I went from seeing lots of people most of the time to seeing almost no one most of the time.
Quitting drinking was such a remarkable life change that I rarely notice how much of a homebody I've become. Being sober feels busy after spending the last ten years forgetting most of what I did. There are nights, though, ones like tonight, when the Palinode goes out with friends and I happen to be feeling particularly vulnerable for no particular reason. I feel smacked upside the back of my head with grief.
I have a ton of things to keep me busy — design work, reading, phoneography, etc. — but I feel like I don't know what to do with myself. I feel wide open, vulnerable, and so very aware of my singularity, my separateness, my aloneness in the universe. I feel that hard reality that no one can feel this life with me, not truly.
I think being drunk with groups of people that I was drunk with a lot made me feel bonded to a whole, however falsely, for those hours that I was there in that state. Some days it can be an exceedingly lonely experience to make the decision, yet again, to say no to it all, to choose to sit with this sense of isolation rather than burrow into a fuzzy sense of togetherness.
There are sober people I can connect with if I need to, but it doesn't fix the truth of being locked into a body in a universe that demands this hard decision of me every day. I am happy to make this decision not to drink as many times as I need to make it, but on nights like tonight I get to feeling a little pathetic, a little tired, a little threadbare.
I may be happy to make this decision, but I don't want to make it, and I wonder when it will stop feeling like I am continually waving goodbye to so much of what I find familiar and comforting.
So, when is it most difficult? Tonight it is most difficult. I feel stretched thin and limp. I am tired. I feel existentially isolated. I am lost.
And I am reminding myself that it gets better, because it does. Every morning proves to me that it gets better than the hard night before, even if it is sometimes only a little bit.
categorized in health and tagged in alcoholism, ask Schmutzie, sober, sobriety
health and tagged in alcoholism, ask Schmutzie, sober, sobriety 
Reader Comments (15)
You are amazing and brave and strong and tonight, right now, you are not alone. I am holding your hand. xo
You are so brave. I wish you lived closer so we could hang out, sober as all get-out. Miss you.
I don't know if I could ever do it. And that means it never feels right to say that I admire the choice or any other easy thing to say, because I know it just is and whatever it is it's fucking hard.
Regardless I think that you are one of the most powerful people I know, for what that's worth. I support you.
I know you don't need someone to ask you this - I know this is a release - but when you were drinking, did it take away all the thin and limp and tired and existentially isolated and lostness? Other than the couple of hours of distraction from the thin/limp/isolated/lost, I mean?
Cause I just wanted to let you know that I feel that way all the time too - without the factor of drinking or not drinking. It makes me wonder if all our distractive vices - booze, drugs, sex, any other way of seeking to make the thin/limp/isolated/lost ease off - make us forget that thin/limp/isolated/lost is the human baseline. It's a trick. It's a carrot on the end of a stick.
By relating, I don't mean to diminish your experience of quitting alcohol. Quitting alcohol is a big deal. I just mean to say that remembering the baseline comforts me. It always has. On one hand I worry that I'm too cynical to remember that everyone is lonely. On the other hand, it makes me feel a little less broken and dysfunctional. It's important to remember how unspecial - and therefore how connected - we are. And it helps me to say, "Well, shit. Fine. On we go." Sometimes. (Sometimes not.)
When I feel that way, it helps me to call another person that needs help. Gets me out of my head. Next time you feel that way, call me... you'll NEVER wake up the next day wishing you had drank the night before.
Out-numbered beat me to it. Call me anytime.
At least you are actually alone feeling the alone and expressing it and riding it out, rather than covering the alone amidst a group of friends bonded by covering the feeling alone.
Hugs.
Thanks for your honesty. Hugs to you.
Maybe it's like--you have to choose between escaping from those moments or being who you want to be. That's what makes it such an amazing choice.
When I moved, I felt lonely. It took a while to meet new people, and to do that I had to make a huge effort... to volunteer at school, go to the yoga class, strike up conversations, act desperate. Many people were unfriendly, or acted nice but never followed through, but a few are now true friends. Is there a class or meditation centre or something nearby where you can pop in a few evenings a week?
As I read, I arranged my thoughts in my head, the thoughts I'd write when it came time to comment. Then I read the comments and Kate's threw me for a fucking loop and my head is now muddled with different thoughts. Thoughts about the "human baseline." The "thin/limp/isolated/lost."
I think, maybe. Maybe that's what all of this is about.
Then, I think, no. Perhaps, that's precisely what it's about.
For me, anyway.
Because a year after giving up the booze, I still struggle like you. Last week, as I sent my husband out for a heap of custard for the fifth night in a row, I realized I'd substituted one distraction for another. And so I'm experimenting with giving up sugar too. Only now I'm pissed! Because, I think, WTF is wrong with me that I always have to have some kind of distraction?
Reconsidering all of this as the baseline - and cutting myself some slack for feeling it - is intriguing. Thank you, Kate. Thank you, Schmutzie!
It's been a long time since I've reconnected with my favorite blog reads (since I started reading them for a living) and I'm glad you reminded me to check in with your link. Damn.
I have admitted this to NO ONE but I keep boxing around the probable necessity for me to quit drinking. At least for a while. But I'm not at whatever point I need to get to in order to just do it and I hate myself for it because I know, I know that the reason I can't do it is because I will be left completely raw without beer. I don't actually get drunk or fuzzy but I drink A LOT of beer. I have cultivated a high tolerance and can drink most reasonable people under the table without actually meaning to.
This is not something I'm proud of. I know I need to stop drinking, at least for a while. The fact that I can't come up to scratch and do it underlines the necessity. So your sobriety comes as a poignant piece of dialog. It's so strange because in a sideways perspective I am actually longing to stop drinking. I don't see drinking as bad or evil but it's getting in the way of some things I want.
I have questions I think your earlier posts probably answer so I'll read those and not ask.
Thank you for continuing to bring all this into the light with your writing.
You are amazing.
When I read this post, I thought of this poem, which has helped me through some very dark times.
http://plagiarist.com/poetry/7806/
Note: what follows isn't meant to criticize what you do to stay sober. It's to share my experience.
I've found -- for me, which doesn't mean it's the same for you -- that being in a recovery program has made those moments of "existential isolation" few and far between. I know I can always go to a meeting (which is largely because I live in a large metropolitan area; I know this isn't the case everywhere) and I will not be alone -- I will be with at least one other person who knows exactly how I feel.
I know you've been vocal about not wanting to be part of a 12-step program, and it's not my intention nor my desire to convince you otherwise. What I would like to do is to highlight one thing which has (again, for me) made sobriety more enjoyable and less like I've given up an entire social network for, well, an absence of a social network. The times I stop going to meetings, or when I haven't been to many, is when I realize how important it is to my serenity to be around people who "get it." (And I'll say right now: I went into recovery as an atheist, and I can't think of how that's substantially changed in the past four years.)
Regardless, know that you at least have a reader who understands and gets what you're going through. :)
"I wonder when it will stop feeling like I am continually waving goodbye to so much of what I find familiar and comforting."
When one door closes, another opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us. -Alexander Graham Bell