Often each sober day can seem so special

When I remember and think just how many many days in my life I spent in a drunken daze or stupor or sick or even crippled with a massive hangover then often now it happens that each sober day can seem so sort of special. It can feel so great both physically and mentally to be free of the pain and madness that can be bought about by drinking excessive amounts of alcohol.

I know there have been a lot of alcoholics who have drank themselves to death before the age of 50 or have reached 50 but have severe brain and/or liver damage. I feel so lucky to now be 50 and still alive and, probably thanks to longish periods of sobriety over the last 10 years, I do not have either severe brain or liver damage. I am very grateful that I have the chance to live the rest of my life being both fairly physically healthy and fairly sane, whether I have, for example, another 2, 10 or 20 years to live.

Lately I have especially felt so good during and immediately after a 60-90 minute walk. To repeat a bit, how physically and mentally well I can feel lately (and during other sober times over the last 10 years) is just so VERY VERY different and better compared to all those days in the past when I could be both sick and crazy because of alcohol abuse.

being 50

When someone turns 50 and he/she has been a non-smoker and has never abused alcohol and drugs and is not over weight and has mostly eaten healthy foods and exercised a bit etc then that person must, at 50, know he/she has a very good chance of living at least into their 70s.

But for someone like me, who has smoked for almost 30 years and who at a lot of different times in my life has abused alcohol, and who has often over 30 years not exercised and not eaten healthy foods etc then now, at 50, I know it is a real possibility I could die in my 50s. This could be my last decade alive. I don't dwell on this a lot and think about it all the time but I occasionally do think about the fact that most of my life is now behind me and there is really a good chance I could have less than 10 years left to live.

I do, however, often think how different and better my life would have been had I been a person who never had a bad drinking problem.  

Looking back......

As I have written before, I have been sober a lot of the last 10 years and most of the past 5 years. But over my whole life there were so VERY many days, weeks and months when I abused alcohol in a bad way. Looking back now I can't understand why I did not quit drinking much earlier in my life. It is or was truly madness how many many times I went back to drinking after a short or long period of sobriety when I should have known just how bloody much pain, problems, troubles and humiliations etc drinking was going to cause me.

There are days

There are days when it feels SO GOOD to be sober.

It is SO GREAT how sobriety can bring some peace, stability and sanity to my life.

There is such an ENORMOUS contrast between how physically and mentally well I can be while sober compared to how sick and crazy I have been in the past while abusing alcohol.

Also, I love how when sober and relatively sane I can almost all the time interact with other people in a quiet, respectful and sensible way. Again it is such a contrast with the troubles and problems I have had in the past when trying to mix with people while intoxicated. 

I have been sober a lot of the last 10 years and I have been sober more than 4 out of the last 5 years. The periods of time I am staying sober are getting longer and longer and when I have lapsed back into drinking alcohol the days/weeks drinking are getting less.

I imagine......

I imagine that almost every alcoholic or heavy/problem drinker, when he/she gets sober, sometimes looks back on certain events of their past and feels sadness, regrets and shame.

I also imagine that almost every person who has experienced episodes of mania or psychosis, when he/she becomes sane again, can at least occasionally look back and feel terrible about things he/she might have said and done while mentally unwell.

I know I can look back over the past 32 years, when I was aged 18 to 50, and I can feel quite sad and ashamed about things I have said and done, at different times, on and off, over a long period of time.

As well, I sometimes wonder how much of my bad behaviour in the past can be excused or explained by episodes of mental instability and alcohol abuse and how much the basis of my bad words and actions was more simply the sort of person I was and am?

I hope I am not fooling myself but I think bouts of bipolar/schizoaffective/alcoholic madness can often explain and even at times excuse the different stupid and crazy things I have said and done at different times in my life. It is such an enormous contrast comparing how quiet, law abiding, careful and relatively sane I can be while sober and mentally well (which is how I have been a lot of the time in recent years) to how loud, stupid, annoying, inappropriate and even crazy I can be while intoxicated and/or mentally unwell. 

other people worse off

For a little while I knew this bloke in Sydney who like me had "dual diagnosis" problems and like me had spent time in both psych wards and jails. This bloke had had one really bad experience in one institution at the hands of 2 staff members and he was later advised by a counselor to go to this support group for people, who he was told had suffered similar trauma to him. Anyway, he went along to this support group and there were participants in this group who had suffered some truly SHOCKING and TERRIBLE abuse in places/camps/institutions etc in Africa and the Middle East and so on and the bloke I knew told me later that he felt that what he had been through was almost nothing in comparison to what many of these other people in the support group had suffered.

I have never had any complaints about how I have been treated by police or corrections officers in NSW, Australia. As for mental health people, on and off for over 30 years, I have found most to be at least OK and some have been really good, in my opinion. However, I have been VERY badly treated by a small number of mental health workers over the years; one ended up getting sacked...........but I should think that what I went through with the occasional nasty, cruel, unprofessional mental health worker is probably very little compared to what other people have suffered in different places overseas or in earlier times.

It can be a similar thing sometimes for me at AA when an AA member talks about the hell he/she went through as a kid in a very abusive home with, for example, alcoholic and/or addict parent(s) and then I can look back to my childhood and I feel quite spoiled and I realize that as a kid and teenager I did not suffer 1% as much as some other AA members did as kids.

How it works?

I think it is true that a lot of alcoholics and heavy/problem drinkers stop drinking mainly because they get sick and tired of being sick and tired.

Then I do think will-power plays a part in an alcoholic staying sober that first 3, 6 or 12 months. Also, it helps if the alcoholic while sober can reflect in a rational way and associate drinking alcohol not so much with pleasure and good times but with pain, problems and humiliations etc.

Then I think the way it can work is that the sober alcoholic simply develops the habit of getting by each day without alcohol and coping with stress etc without alcohol and then after a year or so sober the sober alcoholic can see that a life without alcohol is just so much more peaceful, saner and much more free of troubles etc. And that can be matched with a determination not to return to all the pain and misery that goes with alcoholic drinking.

Yet why do so very many alcoholics and problem drinkers (like me) return to drinking after a period of sobriety? I think it can be like when people get a scare with a mild heart attack or are told they have diabetes etc and then for, say, about 6 to 18 months, they can exercise and improve their diet and maybe even give up smoking and so on but then after a while that initial impact of being told what they now have wears off and they they can go back to their more unhealthy ways with poorer diet and less exercise etc. Apparantly this can happen a lot.

I have read that about half the alcoholics who get their stories of successful recovery from alcoholic drinking published in the AA "Big Book" end up later relapsing into further alcohol abuse.

Yet, I have also read that a study by the Harvard Medical School showed that about 50% of all alcoholics eventually stop drinking and stay stopped.