I succumbed to some distorted logic on Friday. I found myself having a panic attack, without meds* and my self-soothing techniques weren't working. Amid my spiral, I remembered that I had kept some beer to use to trap slugs, and drank that. Drinking and mental illness aren't a good mix for me (or likely anyone) as really amplifies my depression, but I was lucky on Friday and it just made me sleepy. Predictably, I felt like garbage Saturday and Sunday. Sometimes I get smug about how easy I found it to stop drinking for fun, but then things like this come up and remind me how my problem was more about using it as a crutch.
*It's not that I had none on hand, only that they were years past expiration and ineffective - a sign that I'm doing a great job of not taking them too often and a crummy job of keeping track of the shelf life of things.
That's some really great self reflection my friend.
I too am having a rough day. I had a few medical things just overload my system today. I don't really get anxiety anymore because I actually burned out my capacity for it, lol. However, I do have days that just overload my capacity.
Back when I was drinking, I would have felt like there was no way to cope with these feelings. I would have tried to chase them away with a few glasses of wine.
Not drinking has really proven to me that even the worst feelings have an end point, they can't last forever, and that time will pass regardless of what you do, so it's inevitable that eventually, you will just feel better. You actually can't avoid it.
Drinking actually reinforced the sense that the feelings would last forever unless I did something to try and fight them, like open a bottle of wine. My brain convinced me that I was so much more powerless against horrible feelings than I really am.
Now, feeling really horrible just doesn't intimidate me. It can't do anything other than stick around for awhile. I can't just make it go away, but I never could. Alcohol never made it go away, it just made it more comfortable to feel miserable.
It's the same way painkillers don't make an injury go away, they just make it more comfortable to be injured. But if you have a fucked up knee and take pain killers to keep running, you just fuck up the knee even more.
That's what booze does. It doesn't actually take away the emotional injury, it just makes it feel more comfortable to be in psychic pain. It actually prolongs the awful feeling and makes the injury worse.
Now, my metaphor is God damn poetic today, because the reason I'm overloaded is because I had a very stressful procedure that has left me in extreme pain, but I can't take painkillers because the inflammation the treatment causes is how it helps me.
I have to sit here with my pain and just wait it out for the next week as it slowly subsides. Likewise, I have to just sit here with my emotional pain, and let it slowly subside, not try and bury it under mind altering chemicals.
At the end of the day, I'm fine. I'm in pain for good reasons that will strengthen me as they heal stronger, both physically and emotionally.
I'm just having a "bad day", and that's fine. Some days are good, some days are bad. If they're bad, they either just need patience to move through, or they need action to resolve things. Either way, alcohol just makes the pain last longer and prevents any positive action towards resolving things.
I hit 500 days sober a few days ago, and I'm really happy to be at a point where alcohol doesn't even cross my mind when I'm feeling emotionally overwhelmed, because I no longer ever feel like I can't handle my own emotions. I just feel them, and they're okay, even when they suck donkey balls.
