Author: jenwielgusjournalism

Grad school started back up a couple weeks ago, and one of the first assignments I have to tackle (aside, of course, from hundreds of pages of textbook reading) is an “Abstinence Project” for my Foundations of Addictions class.

My whole life has been an abstinence project over the past 3+ years, so I definitely see the educational value in such an undertaking. Throwing down a crutch you thought you needed to walk through life surely will teach you a few things about yourself (not all pretty 😬). It might also shed some light on addiction as a universal human experience, a natural biological urge to seek pleasure over pain, and not just a shameful moral failing or psychological dysfunction reserved for the scum of the Earth.

Or, at the very least, a project like this might help you lose some pesky excess weight, if your diet happens to have gone a little too loosey-goosey and your middle-aged metabolism can’t keep up. 🤷🏼‍♀️

One of the biggest things I’ve learned since I quit drinking 38 months ago is how easily one can transfer those very human addictive tendencies from one habit to another. Cut off your primary source of dopamine, and before you know it, you’ve found another source to take its place. You start clinging to other comforts as tightly as you did your original “drug.”

Suddenly, you find yourself sitting in a pile of Tootsie Pop wrappers with gooey sticks plastered to your clothes and in your hair, feeling like Bart and Milhouse after an all-syrup Super Squishee. …

Moving into a suburban area hundreds of miles from home, by yourself, to do a job with long, odd hours and random off days, pretty much guarantees that any friends you make will be at work. So it was for me when I arrived in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, in the fall of 2002.

I met the guy who would become my husband at the local newspaper; he was a 25-year-old news intern from Northeastern PA, and I, at 24, had been hired away (rescued?) from my first journalism job in the middle of Georgia to cover Philly-area sports.

We were polar opposites in terms of our personalities — I famously told one of our mutual friends, “I could never date that guy; he’s late for everything!” — so we definitely didn’t start out as “love interests.” But since we were part of a very small group of young transplants who didn’t have much to do outside the newsroom, we naturally ended up in the same loosely-connected social circle.

We started hanging out, just the two of us, for one reason: I had an extra ticket to a Cubs-Phillies game at Veterans Stadium, and someone told me that he, too, liked my team.

I scoffed when my therapist kept telling me, “It’s only a matter of time.” She had seen pretty much all her clients and family members, regardless of vaccination status, come down with COVID at some point over the past few years. But I could not even remember the last time I’d been truly sick, and having received all three shots plus being a staunch homebody who typically only leaves the house to go on nature hikes, I was confident in my immunity.

Maybe that’s why I felt so totally knocked on my ass this past week, when the virus finally did invade our house. We got exposed sometime around July 4; my husband hit the skids last weekend, and I followed a couple days behind.

I’ve known plenty of people who tested positive but escaped the symptoms; unfortunately, Hubby and I were not so lucky. In fact, I got slammed with COVID — fever, chills, heavy congestion, fatigue, the whole shebang — on the 21st day of my cycle, compounding the abject insanity/misery of PMS during perimenopause. As a result, I spent nearly all of Wednesday through Friday alternately coughing, crying — and, with help from NyQuil, napping — in bed.