Just in case this needs saying, this isn’t the sub for April Fools’ jokes.

woohoo, congratulations!

Happy birthday!

You never have to drink again.

You never have to worry about whether you said something horrible to a friend while you were drunk again.

You never have to wake up hungover and regretful again.

You never have to check your emails and think “wait, I bought what?” again and either scramble to cancel it or faff about with returning it.

You never have to worry about running into friends/your parish priest in the supermarket when all you have in your trolley is gin and biscuits.

You never have to deal with that low level “do they know how much I drink? Am I hiding it sufficiently? Are they judging me?” hum of anxiety.

Sometimes you need days like that 🙂

congratulations!

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congratulations!

What are your temptations, and how can you mitigate them?

for instance, Friday nights became my treat night. I’d get the ingredients for a favourite meal, a really nice non-alcoholic drink, and a beauty treatment, and I’d put dinner on and after dinner I’d get into my pyjamas and do a sheet mask and a hand mask while watching a film.

On days when I was working from home, I’d go for a walk, or in the winter I’d do a workout at home, after locking my laptop for the day, rather than going for a walk to the fridge for wine.

I worked on breaking those associations of “it’s a certain time of day, it’s time for a drink,” by changing my routine. Pushing dinner prep back by 15 minutes by doing a meditation beforehand, which broke that “meal prep = time for the first glass,” neural pathway. I live on my own so I control what comes in through my front door, and I don’t drink, so I don’t buy alcohol, I don’t have to negotiate other people’s drinking in my space. For the first six months or so I was getting groceries delivered and always making sure there was plenty of non-alcoholic drink options in the fridge, so I didn’t go “urgh, there’s nothing to eat/drink, I’ll just go to the shop and oh look how did this wine get into my basket?”

Glad it went OK.

it matters because you matter.

Alcohol is a depressant that steals your joy, steals your confidence, steals your hope, steals your you. It robs you of the ability to plan beyond the next bottle, it poisons your mind and keeps you downtrodden, and all it gives you in return is a short-lived artificial high that gets shorter and shorter each time.

this stuff is hard and there is exactly zero reason to make it harder on yourself than it needs to be. Congratulations on your one month!

Thank you. I’m coming up on three years in a couple of months.

A company called Notch. The alcohol-specific ones are here and they support a UK charity called Alcohol Change here in the UK.

I have “Sobriety rocks” in gold, then the various day count ones, and IWNDWYT 😁in purple, and “get your calm back 2022” in gold.

Mine are all on a loop attached to my keyring, but they do a couple of other ways of holding them as well.

Rewards are important. I don’t have coins but I do have these on my keyring - metal discs for 30 Edit 31, 60, 100, 365 and 1,000 days

That connection to the Other goes under many guises. Always has, always will. Thomas Aquinas referred to “the Prime Mover”, Thomas Merton referred to the many paths up the mountain.

Alcohol is a poison, it’s not rewarding yourself to poison yourself.

Have a good dinner and watch a film, instead.

gotta 12 step myself on weed too. not keen.

One thing at a time, one thing at a time.

I’ve seen people do the “I’m going to get sober and I’m going to stop smoking and I’m going to start [an unfeasible exercise programme from scratch] and I’m going to lose weight and …” thing and it never works out as they hoped.

So my advice, which is worth what you paid for it, obviously, is to take it easy. Get a stretch of sobriety under your belt before making any other changes. You may find that your weed use decreases naturally anyway, and you can start the 12-step programme when you’re in a different headspace with it.

What scuppered me for a long time was not having non-alcoholic drinks at home that I actually liked (apart from coffee, but I don’t drink that past noon). So I’d go to the fridge, and there’d be nothing, and I’d go “ugh,” and go and buy wine. So that’s my first tip - get some nice drinks in that you like.

Good stuff. It may also be worth asking the guardian why they did that when they come back, because at best it seems a remarkably thoughtless thing to do, and at worst, actively malicious and cruel.