Ask Schmutzie: When Is It Most Difficult?

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.

Ask Schmutzie: Thrill-Seeking, Fun, And The Best And Worst Of Times

I asked you to ask me questions about my sobriety. This is my fourth response to your questions. Check out my first, second, and third sets of questions and answers.



A question that often gets brought up when talking to former addicts: were you ever addicted to the adrenaline rush that comes from knowing you quite literally can die in this moment, that a mere tip of the scales will decide on which side of the life line you will land?
     — Barbara@TheMiddleAges

There is apparently a gene identified with thrill-seeking behaviour, and I definitely do not have it. My father coerced me into going on a kiddie roller coaster once when I was ten, and I still hold it against him.

Sometimes I did want to die, but I was less attached to looking for an adrenaline rush and more attached to the then-chronic depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation I used alcohol, in part, to outrun.


I'll ask you the question I get asked the most from those contemplating sobriety: What do you do for fun?
     — Tricky

This question is surprisingly difficult to answer. I have spent the majority of my fall, winter, and early spring primarily engaged in not drinking and not running back to that pub where most of my social life happened, so what I do mostly looks like sitting at home. The relative quietude of my life since I quit drinking, though, belies the joy I am finding in living the full psychological/intellectual/emotional experience of my life without being anaesthetized against it.

It turns out that hanging out at non-drinking events like movies in theatres and podcast recordings are more than thieves of good drinking time.

So, what I do for fun these days is soak up whatever I do sober — whether it be writing, recording a podcast, or talking with the Palinode — and relish my ability not only to actively take part but also to recall it later. It's amazing how much more interesting life can seem when you are actually able to remember how you've been occupying your time.


What is your worst memory from your drinking days? What is your best one? What is your worst memory so far from your new sobriety days? What is your best one?
     — Bobbi

When I originally read this question, I thought it would be so easy to answer, but as soon as I tried to nail down a best time and a worst time, my entire twenty-some years of drinking came back to me.

The thing is, as a grand avoidance tactic, I think part of what I was looking for was the best of times every time I sat down with a beer. I wanted epic conversations, epic parties, epic play, and I got it a lot, or at least the self-induced rush of it, because alcohol made me feel energetic in between the first glass and the eventual glimmer of a blackout, indefatigable even. I was on.

And so I was on throughout most, if not all, of my major life events over the last more than twenty years. I was intoxicated both times I got engaged. I drank before I walked down the aisle at my wedding. I was drunk during most of my sexual encounters. I was good and tipsy whenever I met any of my blogging heros. And it is the same for my worst events. When being out and being social was pretty much synonymous with being drunk, almost all of my best and worst times were drunk best and worst times. Being drunk was no longer a special occasion separate from the rest of my life; it was my life outside my house.

What I'm saying is that it doesn't mean much to ask about best and worst drunk times when almost all of my life events were drunk times. Being drunk is barely a differentiating characteristic when talking about the events of my past.

When it comes to defining the best and worst times of my recent sobriety, I am doing my best not to cast my experiences since August into good or bad categories. I am too close to the now, to making it through one day at a time, to be able to look at the broader picture and pick out a best and worst.

Sober life has been hard, and, although I haven't liked most of it, I deeply value all of it. I am learning to live a daily life that doesn't involve the constant pursuit of anaesthetization and instead to live one that embraces and honours real movement both within and without.

My new sobriety has been both the best and the worst of times, and I don't think I can effectively pick one apart from the other right now without losing the integrity of the whole.

Ask Schmutzie: Why I Can't Just Cut Down And Go Back To The Pub

I asked you to ask me questions about my sobriety. This is my third answer in response to your questions. Check out my first and second set of questions and answers here: Is There A Point Where It Won't Feel Like I Should Just Give In? and How Do You Deal With The Urge To Drink?



My question is — will you ever be able to go back to those "places" of alcohol consumption, or have you, and how have you handled it?
     — Rhonda

Why did you decide to quit instead of just cutting back?
     — kris

When I publicly admitted to having a dysfunctional relationship with alcohol, I had accepted the fact that I couldn't alter my habitualized interaction with it. I finally understood that my relationship with alcohol was entirely one-sided. It didn't know me, love me, or want me. I was its dewy-eyed stalker, taking what I could of it whenever I could.

With my public declaration, I had to take action, but I couldn't do it like all the other times when I had told myself after five pints of beer that I needed to cut back. That half-hearted conviction only resulted in me having one less beer the next night and one less blackout that week before I resumed my regularly scheduled bingeing.

It is important to know here that I never ever, under any circumstances, wanted only one or two drinks. I only ever wanted as many drinks as it would take to black out, so cutting back still meant getting loaded, which always lead to not cutting back, which lead to blacking out two nights later.

The only way out was to stop, and the only way to stop was to discontinue the triggers that I followed down that road again and again. This was a decision I had avoided making for years, being that my triggers were at least one hundred people and one particular drinking establishment to which I had very close ties. Everyone who worked there and most of the regular patrons knew me by name. I had drowned my sorrows about cancer there. We had celebrated the Palinode's back surgery and ability to stand upright again there.

My life had become work (to make money for alcohol), pub (to drink said alcohol), and home (to sleep off said alcohol) on a revolving carousel. I was going to have to break up with a substantial portion of my life, and I had to do it NOW. There could be no second-guessing or one last hoorah.

And so, without any fanfare, or even a word of explanation to anyone, I chose to simply disappear. I walked away from the pub I frequented and nearly ten years of friendships within a fairly expansive circle, and I forged three rules to help carry me through:

1. I can never again set foot in the pub I inhabited for so many years.
2. I cannot continue my friendships with most of the people with whom I drank during that decade, because my social ties are inextricably bound to my alcoholic triggers.
3. I can never drink alcohol again with the idea that I can control my relationship to it, nor can I be left alone with it in my home.

This first year away from that place and my friends hasn't always been easy. It's as though I am grieving a death, and I suppose that I am, in a way. Each major holiday, shifts in seasons, and birthdays and parties that come up on Facebook have me waxing nostalgic, and, especially now that spring is here, I am finding it hard to imagine that I won't park myself on that patio through long summer afternoons. As it stands, I avoid even the street that the pub I drank at sits on. In the past eight months, I have walked down that block a sum total of four times, three of which were by accident when I turned the corner to it out of habit.

What makes it easier, though, is reminding myself that the expansive circle of friends I thought I had was not the so-called chosen family I sometimes espoused it to be. Of the people I saw most often there near the end, of the couple of hundred people I knew in that place, a surprisingly tiny number have bothered to check in with me over the last eight months to see how I am, and most of those who checked in did so to tell me that I should come out for a drink. Quite a few more have unfriended or blocked me on Facebook.

I get the warm fuzzies all over just thinking about it.

Of course, I just dropped out without a word and have made no motion to contact most of them, either, so don't think that I am blaming a hamlet's worth of people for not declaring their undying support of my life decisions. I have not been the best example of how to win friends and influence people. If you want to know how to dump almost everyone you socialize with and spend an entire winter holed up in your apartment, though, I'm your gal.

It's just a little eye-opening in the clear light of sobriety to see how easily most of my supposed ties were cut, and it's surprisingly freeing. And, to be perfectly honest, I rarely, if ever, truly miss the configuration of the life I had just less than a year ago. I was lonely and sad and lost in a sea of people whose friendships I used to prop up that night's drunk. They deserve better, and so do I.

So, Rhonda and Kris, my answer to your questions is no. I cannot cut back when it comes to alcohol, and I can never revisit the pub I once thought I loved so much. My relationship to alcohol threw all of my other relationships tangential to it askew. I very nearly broke myself and the few parts of my life that I truly love, my liver among them, and I'm kind of attached to that little guy and all the living that he makes possible.