Rookie mistake

I’ve been feeling ridiculously cravey for four days now. Strong, almost physically painful pangs to just NUMB. My life is feeling so blah and I can pinpoint a thousand reasons for it but bottom line is, the cravings are there and they are pulling out all the stops.

I have a group of sober girlfriends who are supporting each other through these early days (6 weeks today, woop!), and honestly, the only thing that kept me from downing a bottle of wine was the knowledge that I didn’t want to tell them I had. But – I wasn’t grateful to them for that. I was actually angry. I was mad that their existence kept me from behaving in the self-destructive ways I really wanted to.

I told them this (they’re addicts, they get it!). One of them replied, “Remember, it’s not the wine you want. What you actually want is to not feel like shit for a while.”

DUH.

This is where the rookie mistake came in. I’ve been on this sober journey for close to two years now and my brain knows that feelings are going to come up and they’re going to be hard and I’m going to have to figure out new ways of enduring them. And yet – when that scenario was happening in full technicolor, I totally lost sight of what was happening. I started believing the old voice that told me booze would fix it.

I’ve been rolling this thought around in my head for the last half day since she said it, and it’s starting to wear down the edges of the cravings. They’re still there, but I feel like I’ve sort of capped their intensity a bit. I’m in the middle of tearing my eyes away from staring at the cravings and moving my vision toward other coping mechanisms.

This is all just hard. I knew it would be, and it is. And I can remind myself it’s early days yet, but it’s still hard. I’m told that 100 days is when you start to really see the light at the end of the tunnel, and 6 months or so you start to come out of the tunnel completely. But right now, I’m still just in the dark, moving on faith that this is indeed a tunnel leading somewhere and not just a dank, musty cave.

Total downer post! But – for posterity – I want to make sure I remember how bad it is right now. I don’t want to be here again.

Please comment with your favorite coping mechanisms to not feel like shit. I’m willing to try anything right now!