Tag: sobriety

As expected, decorating the Christmas tree without draining a bottle of Jose Cuervo — as much a staple of the season, for me, as Mannheim Steamroller music, “Christmas Vacation” quotes and Hallmark keepsake ornaments — was the hardest part of this holiday weekend.

Well, that, and getting my 🤬-ing period on Thanksgiving Eve, but we don’t need to get into that…too much.

I did dump a bottle of tequila, technically (see picture), but that wasn’t the least bit difficult. When I came across the cheap piece of decorative glass I brought home from my retail job last year around this time, when I had just about reached “raging” on the alcoholic spectrum, I marched right past the tree and over to the recycling bin. RIP, shiny souvenir of shitty decisions!

If there had been any actual booze in that bottle, this might have been a different story, because for all the years since I moved out of my parents’ house back in 2000, drinking and decorating went together like “Why is the carpet all wet, Todd?” and “I don’t KNOW, Margo!” in my head. Continue reading “Gratitude” →

Perhaps my most potent proof-of-a-higher-power moment came Saturday morning when I was asked, five minutes before the start of a recovery meeting, to pick a reading from the literature and start off the discussion. Stricken by a wave of performance anxiety, I fumbled with the book, anxiously flipping through pages until finally landing on one near the middle. The first few sentences sliced straight through my mental fog, instantly dissolving panic into peace.

I’d found a story about an alcoholic who liked to make up stories when she was young!

This is my life story. In fact, just this week, as I cleared the 4 1/2-month mark in my sobriety journey, a dramatic realization hit me: As a kid, I wanted to be an author.

Actually, I kind of was an author, back then. Someone in the family bought me a bunch of little blank booklets, a paper playground for my hyperactive imagination and collection of art supplies, and I would fill pages and pages with fictional tales of talking animals — complete with colored-pencil illustrations. Such riveting titles as “Lucky The Ladybug Goes To School” and “Skiing With The Best Friend Bunnies” (that one was part of a series, in the vein of “The Babysitters Club”) might have — who knows? — gone on to become beloved children’s classics had I ever, once, finished those stories instead of abandoning them mid-plot and moving on to a new booklet because I couldn’t think of a good ending.

Those damn endings got me, every time. My parents found a bunch of my booklets in the basement, years later after I’d moved away, and they texted me, like, “What ever happened to Lucky The Ladybug? This book just stops on Page 12.” 😂 Continue reading “Creativity” →

They say you stop maturing when you start developing an addiction, and I look around at my life at 132 days sober, and I’ll be damned if they aren’t right.

Freeing my body and mind from the grip/fog of alcohol has magically time-warped me back to my 18-year-old self, proudly donning Doc Martens every day (the brown boots pictured were my 4 Months present to myself!), re-watching  “The Sopranos” for the 12 millionth time (if I said “16 Czechoslovakians” and “one-shoe c*cksucker,” would you know where I’m at in the series right now? 😂) and working out to such Amazon playlists as “I Miss The 90s” and “90s Alternative Hits,” which, it turns out, play most of the same songs.

It’s a hard-and-fast rule that I have to stop whatever I’m doing and sing along whenever “The Freshmen” by The Verve Pipe comes on, so I probably should choose different music if I want to get in better shape. I think I have some C&C Music Factory and CeCe Peniston somewhere in my CD collection…

I have no idea why or how this regression to Pre-Drinking Jen happened, but I like it. …Well, except for the acne. WTF, acne?!? Apparently my body decided to go all-in on this “teenage dream” theme and push out fresh new zits for me to notice each morning in the mirror. At 41, I honestly thought my Clearasil days were over. (Do they still make Clearasil? I’m writing out a CVS shopping list.) Continue reading “Nostalgia” →

I just spent a little more than three hours on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, driving through relentless sheets of rain, fog and drivers constantly slamming on their brakes at 65 miles an hour for no reason, to get from my in-laws’ house near Scranton to mine in Bucks County. But my travel experience was nowhere near as scary as what I was escaping from.

THE FAMILY WAS PLANNING TO GO OUT TO LUNCH! 😱

Yes, I am scared of restaurants. I’ve only set foot in two since I got sober in early July, and the last time, I was so anxious I drank at least 12 Coke Zeroes, ate an entire ahi tuna appetizer AND an ahi tuna entree by myself (pro tip: there is such a thing as too much ahi tuna), went to the bathroom 10 times, bit off all the nails on my right hand and sang along to whatever song was playing on the PA system, out loud, while sitting at the table with eight other people, which I was taught as a small child is rude.

That was a few weeks ago, and I’m still not feeling the whole “going out in public places where alcohol is served” thing. I decided I need to avoid those situations in order to protect my precious young sobriety.

Fact is, at 112 days, I truly am a small child. Don’t get me wrong; I could sit here and list a thousand tiny ways in which this stage of recovery feels absolutely amazing. But it also feels like walking around completely naked, like all of us kids used to do when we were two or three…with one major difference.

The adults don’t think I’m cute. Continue reading “Safety” →

With proper instruction, the thinking goes, one can be taught to drink responsibly. To me, the idea that a budding alcoholic can learn to drink moderately sounds like a contradiction in terms. (I rarely, if ever, drank moderately, even at the beginning.) It also seems to ignore the more deeply-rooted, compulsive pulls a drinker feels toward alcohol; these are needs that don’t respond well to the concept of moderation.”

— Caroline Knapp, “Drinking: A Love Story”

I quit drinking and discovered some fun new things to do with my hands, such as tapping out each week’s stream of consciousness here on this blog. Or, stuffing my mouth with gum, popping piece after piece in the old pie hole like Homer Simpson in Donut Hell.  The trash can near my desk at work looks like the undercarriage of a high school cafeteria table.  I find myself picking up a new supply of sugar-free anxiety-easers (tooth-crackers, probably, given my luck) every morning at the Wawa, and finding all of it gone shortly after lunch.

A two-packs-a-day — and escalating — Orbit habit. Well, shoot. That figures.

I’ve been a glutton all my life. A bottomless pit. Whatever shut-off valve exists in other people that engages when they reach satiety, mine’s either defective or I didn’t get one. And this charming biological deficiency came out to play, long before I discovered alcohol.

It didn’t matter if it was fresh bagels from the deli after church, frozen Market Day pizza on a Friday after school, a box of Golden Grahams during Saturday morning cartoons, a half gallon of egg nog at Christmas or Grandma’s homemade cheesecake on my birthday. Even as a kid, I saw zero point in stopping at “just one,” or using a knife; my serving size was “all of it.” I ate as much as I could get until somebody stopped me or, God forbid, barged in and wanted to, like, have some too.

I clearly wasn’t one of those kids who didn’t clean her plate or had to be tricked or threatened by adults to “just take a bite.” I was one of those kids you wondered, how does she not weigh as much as a school bus?

Answer: genetics and athletics. In other words, I was just lucky. Continue reading “Moderation” →