For most normal folks, drinking means conviviality, companionship and colorful imagination. It means release from care, boredom and worry. It is joyous intimacy with friends and a feeling that life is good.

ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS, p. 151

The longer I chased these elusive feelings with alcohol, the more out of reach they were. However, by applying this passage to my sobriety, I found that it described the magnificent new life made available to me by the A.A. program. “It” truly does “get better” one day at a time. The warmth, the love and the joy so simply expressed in these words grow in breadth and depth each time I read it. Sobriety is a gift that grows with time.

I started drinking the same way most middle-class Australian kids did. Drinking luke-warm cans of pre-mixed spirits out of a backpack at a local playground at a night where my mates and I had all told our parents we were staying at one another houses.

I’ve been self-conscious since I can remember. When I was five years old, I signed up to play Rugby League and cried my eyes out at the first training session, refusing to come out from behind my mum’s legs. I was too shy, ashamed, and embarrassed by what the other kids might think of me.

Drinking gave me the confidence to step into who I truly was. To be temporarily unashamed of myself. It was well received. Momentarily, I was accepted for who I was, and it felt great, so why wouldn’t I be drawn back to drinking?

In my late teens, I found stimulant drugs, which only exacerbated the above. I thought I was fucking Superman with a belly full of beer and a brain full of cocaine, and people liked me. Or at least I felt like they did. So why wouldn’t I be drawn back to drinking and doing drugs?

What I hadn’t realised, though, was as my drunken and fucked up persona grew more confident, my sober persona was shrivelling into an anxious, anti-social mess.

The longer m,y drug and alcohol abuse went on, the less and less I would be able to socialise when sober. It got to a point where I wouldn’t leave the house on a weekend unless it was somewhere where I could drink.

Ashamedly, I remember getting the shits at my partner for taking us out to somewhere nice for dinner but they didn’t have any “normal” beers on tap.

At the time, I couldn’t give a shit about the food, the experience, or the wanky fruit-filled beers. I saw even date night as an opportunity to drink as much as I could. Most date nights would end with my partner heading off to bed, me staying up drinking, and even getting a bag of coke dropped over so I could sit up until 5 am on my own being fried out of my brain.

Then I got to a point where if I was to be going somewhere on the weekend, I would have to be able to drink there, it would have to have been I would like, and I would have to have had beers before I went and even on most occasions have an order of drugs pre-arranged.

By this point, I was refusing to do anything even remotely social or sober. I would either be drunk, high, drinking or I wouldn’t go. I was a terrible partner, but at the time, I was so sick with self-loathing and self-obsession that I couldn’t see past the idea that I was always the victim of everyone and everything.

Eventually, I stopped going anywhere. Maybe the pub for a few hours, but by the end of my drinking and drug use, I just wanted to get some cocaine, go home to where I knew I had plenty of beers, no one would be around and I could spiral into that person I was so comfortable being yet too ashamed to let anyone see.

I had rid myself of any and all meaningful connection.

I would spend all weekend isolated from my pregnant partner. In the back yard, in the shed, convincing myself I was way too smart for her to know what I was up to. I just wanted to be alone, and get as fucked up as I could.

I despised rugs and alcohol. I despised myself for becoming so reliant on them. But this is the part I think most don’t understand: getting sober is scarier than it is to stay living in that constant state of guilt, shame and remorse because that state of guilt, shame and remorse is familiar.

Life without your most trusted, longest serving and most effective coping mechanism, that’s fucking scary. And I think that’s why so many of us HAVE to hit rock bottom.

As fucked as it was, I’ll always be grateful for hitting my rock bottom and the period that led to it. I have to be. As I sit here with 799 days of sobriety under my belt, not only is my life better than it ever has been, but it’s better than I ever even knew it would be able to be, and it’s getting better.

It’s not perfect, it’s not easy, and it’s not without its faults. But it’s better than ever and the trajectory is good.

Why?

Because I have a program that has taught me that I am unimportant. It’s taught me that a life of service to others is ultimately the greatest way of being of service to myself. It’s taught me that if I just do my best each day to make the right decision when presented with one, things will usually be ok. Irrelevant of what happens to or for me today, the world goes on, and that’s liberating. I’ve always been okay and I always will be. If I’m ever not okay, that’s when I’ll worry about it and do something to change that.

My program has given me peace between the ears, which allows me to be present, and enjoy life for what it is. I am grateful because, without that rock bottom, I would never have achieved that peace.

As they say, if drinkin’ was better than this shit, we’d all be out there drinkin’.

Cheers Wankers.

X.

Click Here to join our Sobering Thoughts Chat Group. Whether you’re sober or sober-curious, have someone in your life in sobriety or active addiction, or think you could help struggling people, we’d love to have you!

We’ve already got a bunch of legends in there sharing incredible stories and supporting one another. Jump in. You have nothing to lose!

Click here to check my other blogs. Follow me on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter @sbrngthghts.

Make sure you check out my Writing 4 Resilience friends. They’re all legends.

Running for Resilience Ben Alexander Brent Ford Running Rare The Milkbar Reflections of a Clare Bear

If anyone is struggling in any way, let someone know. Speak to a friend, family member, loved one, stranger, postman, Uber Eats driver, or me; talk to someone.

Lifeline Ph: 13 11 14

Alcoholics Anonymous Ph: 1300 222 222

NSW Mental Health Line Ph: 1800 011 511

Suicide Call Back Service Ph: 1300 659 467

Mensline Australia Ph: 1300 78 99 78

Kids Helpline Ph: 1800 55 1800

A GIFT THAT GROWS WITH TIME was originally published in Raising a Beautiful Mind on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Welcome to Sobering Shares.

The plan for this is simple. When I come across a daily reading from my 12-Step Program of Recovery that jumps out at me, that I relate to strongly, or I feel compelled to explore a little further, I will use this space to write and share on that topic.

It won’t be every day. If reading or something within it speaks to me at the time, I’ll share my thoughts on how it pertains to my experience. You might get five in a row, then not get one for a week. We’ll see what happens.

I’d love to hear how the reading resonates with others and create a dialogue in the comments of different people’s interpretations and perspectives so we can all learn and grow together.

Ultimately though, it’ll be whatever it is meant to be.

I hope you get something from it.

We found the Great Reality deep down within us. In the last analysis it is only there that He may be found. . . search diligently within yourself. . . . With this attitude you cannot fail. The consciousness of your belief is sure to come to you.

ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS, p. 55

It was out of the depths of loneliness, depression and despair that I sought the help of A.A. As I recovered and began to face the emptiness and ruin of my life, I began to open myself to the possibility of the healing that recovery offers through the A.A. program. By coming to meetings, staying sober, and taking the Steps, I had the opportunity to listen with increasing attentiveness to the depths of my soul. Daily I waited, in hope and gratitude, for that sure belief and steadfast love I had longed for in my life. In this process, I met my God, as I understand Him.

There are three words that stick out for me.

Loneliness, depression and despair.

I have a love/hate relationship with these negative emotions.

There are two people inside of me. Sam, and The Addict.

Sam hates these three emotions desperately, but The Addict, he loves them.

Because as much pain as they cause, The Addict finds comfort in their familiarity.

For The Addict, these emotions are enough to justify poor decisions and behaviours. They justify using mind-altering substances or behaviours to escape these exact emotions. The Addict is almost pleased to feel the negativity because it knows that with enough negativity, it will soon have what it desires.

When depressed, lonely, or in despair, I am susceptible to making the easy decision. I permit myself to take shortcuts, avoid doing what’s right, and find justification by telling myself it’s okay because I feel a certain way. I let my feelings dictate my actions.

The short-term solution ALWAYS makes the long-term pain worse. I know I am only delaying the inevitable, but for now, I lack the courage to do what’s right and good. The short-term solution is what The Addict wants cheap, easy thrills that will never equate to feelings of peace, fulfilment, or contentment.

That is why I need this program. To help Sam stay ahead of The Addict.

I need a daily reminder to make the next right decision at every possible turn or juncture. I must remember that self-esteem comes from doing esteemable things, which will keep that dreaded self-loathing at bay.

The solution for me to avoid feelings of Loneliness, Depression and Despair is now and always will lie in ACTION, not thinking. I CANNOT think my way into mental or spiritual or fitness, God knows I’ve tried. I need to ask myself where I can be of service to others. I must move my feet first, and my head will follow.

So just for today, I will work my program to the best of my ability to keep the Addict at bay. If I am true to my word, I can rest my head on the pillow tonight at peace, knowing that although I wasn’t perfect, I did my best with pure intentions and that’s all I can ask for.

Progress, not perfection.

Cheers Wankers.

X.

Click Here to join our Sobering Thoughts Chat Group. Whether you’re sober or sober-curious, have someone in your life in sobriety or active addiction, or think you could help struggling people, we’d love to have you!

We’ve already got a bunch of legends in there sharing incredible stories and supporting one another. Jump in. You have nothing to lose!

Click here to check my other blogs. Follow me on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter @sbrngthghts.

Make sure you check out my Writing 4 Resilience friends. They’re all legends.

Running for Resilience Ben Alexander Brent Ford Running Rare The Milkbar Reflections of a Clare Bear

If anyone is struggling in any way, let someone know. Speak to a friend, family member, loved one, stranger, postman, Uber Eats driver, or me; talk to someone.

Lifeline Ph: 13 11 14

Alcoholics Anonymous Ph: 1300 222 222

NSW Mental Health Line Ph: 1800 011 511

Suicide Call Back Service Ph: 1300 659 467

Mensline Australia Ph: 1300 78 99 78

Kids Helpline Ph: 1800 55 1800

DEEP DOWN WITHIN US was originally published in Raising a Beautiful Mind on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

G’day Legends.

Have ya’s missed me? Tell the truth. Ya didn’t even realise I was gone, did ya?

Just wanted to send a quick note to let everyone know that I haven’t died, relapsed, or forgotten about you all.

Since my last post, I’ve passed both two years and 750 days sober. Both milestones are ones that I wouldn’t have believed possible once upon a time.

I’ve been spending a lot of time working on myself and learning about who I truly am. As a result, my sobriety is stronger than ever, and I have a lot of things I’m eager to share with you all. I’ve just been struggling for time while I’ve been working my way through The 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Initially, I was trying to keep up with sharing a weekly or fortnightly post, and I have a few half-written posts in my drafts. I just haven’t had the time to finish them PROPERLY!

I’ve decided it’s probably best not to share my experience of the 12 steps until I have finished them. In many ways, I feel like some of the steps reinforce previous steps, and it wouldn’t be fair for me to comment on my experience with any of the steps until I have completed all of them, which hopefully won’t be too far away.

However, as an alcoholic/addict in recovery, I do feel obligated to share my experiences in the hope of helping others, and I do feel a sense of guilt for not sharing as regularly lately. Hopefully, I’ll be able to share a little more regularly in the coming months.

It’s frustrating for me. However, I know I’ll be of better service to those in need once I have gone through this journey and uncovered more about my drinking, drug use and me as a person in general.

Thanks everyone for your patience and understanding. Hopefully, you’ll hear more from me soon.

Cheers Wankers.

X.

Click Here to join our Sobering Thoughts Chat Group. Whether you’re sober, sober curious, have someone in your life in sobriety or active addiction, or you think you could help struggling people, we’d love to have you!

We’ve already got a bunch of legends in there sharing incredible stories and supporting one another. Jump in. You have nothing to lose!

Click here to check my other blogs. Follow me on Instagram and Twitter @sbrngthghts.

Make sure you check out my Writing 4 Resilience friends. They’re all legends.

Running for Resilience Ben Alexander Brent Ford Running Rare The Milkbar Reflections of a Clare Bear

If anyone is struggling in any way, make someone aware of it. Speak to a friend, family, loved one, stranger, postman, Uber Eats driver, or me; talk to someone.

Lifeline Ph: 13 11 14

Alcoholics Anonymous Ph: 1300 222 222

NSW Mental Health Line Ph: 1800 011 511

Suicide Call Back Service Ph: 1300 659 467

Mensline Australia Ph: 1300 78 99 78

Kids Helpline Ph: 1800 55 1800

Still Sober was originally published in Raising a Beautiful Mind on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

G’day legends. Did ya miss me?

It’s been a minute since I’ve posted anything here, and I apologise. I’ve been meaning to. I’ve just been busy, and if I’m being frank, since I’ve been surrounding myself with more sobriety, the need to write about what’s going on in my life or my precious little feelings is not as strong as it once was.

However, that’s selfish of me. I feel somewhat obligated to share whatever I can, hoping to help other people who are still struggling. Whether it’s drugs, alcohol, other vices, ADHD or other mental health issues, I owe it to people to talk about what is and isn’t working for me because when I need help, it’s there for me too. This shit is circular. I can’t just take. I have to give it away, too.

I feel like I’m finally starting to make some progress on this low self-esteem of mine. I feel like an idiot that it’s taken me as long as it has to have these realisations because, like all realisations, they seem so glaringly obvious only after you’ve had them.

It’s important because I feel like all or most of my mental health issues are ratcheted off of my self-esteem. The lower my self esteem, the worse my anxiety, the more susceptible I am to depression and all around negative thinking.

I’ve realised that my self-esteem and ego are opposite sides of a sea saw. If my self-esteem is low, my ego is entirely in charge. When have you ever seen a sea saw sitting perfectly balanced on its own? My ego was a defence mechanism. It protected me from accepting the truth. My ego would tell me that I had everything under control. It would justify all of my shitty behaviour to me. My ego would convince me that everything wrong that’s ever happened in my life resulted from the actions of some other person or thing. It was never my fault. My ego was that bad influence you don’t want your kids to hang out with. My ego was the voice that told me it was ok and encouraged me to live a life outside of my values.

Being fuelled by ego seems excellent at the time. You walk around doing whatever the fuck you like. You worry about no one but yourself. You invest all of your time, money and energy in yourself. How good is that! You get all the attention, all the money, all the everything you get to spend on yourself. It also helps me achieve things. It tells me I’m capable of things that I myself don’t necessarily believe I am.

The problem for me is that my ego had to coexist with this other thing called my conscience. My ego would take charge during the day, but my conscience was there once the ego was done for the day. My conscience is there all the time. It observes everything that I do. It doesn’t say a lot when my ego is in charge. It’s not like that. It can’t be bothered fighting for airtime with the wanker that is the ego. It knows that arguing with the ego wastes time and energy. It waits until my ego has been knocked off for the day before saying, “Oi! Pssst! Listen up! I’ve got some questions”.

It asks me if I’m happy with how I conducted myself that day. Am I proud of myself? Did I live my day in accordance with my values? Did I try to help someone who needed it today, or did I intentionally avoid situations where I might be expected to help others?

My conscience knows the truth. You can’t lie to your conscience. I tried to anyway, but it was pointless. I’ve spent extended periods of time throughout my life flat refusing to have the conversation with my conscience because I knew it was right. I knew I was doing so many of the wrong things, but I just couldn’t muster the energy to do anything about it. I just wanted to wallow in my own fucking misery. Deflect all blame onto everyone else. Play the victim, let my ego convince me that I was hard done by and that I could do nothing about anything. That’s right where my ego wants me to be. Ripe for the picking.

My ego manifests in many ways. I have a lot of different names for it. It is the addict in me; It’s the guy who justified going on four-day benders with a pregnant partner at home. It’s the voice that tells me to keep eating junk food when I’m overfull. It’s the voice that used to say to me that buying more cocaine at 4 am on a Sunday morning is a good idea. It tells me to have just one more drink before bed on a school night, another ten times. It lt allowed me to lay there on a Monday morning and believe that I never wanted to do this shit again, only to swoop in later in the week and talk me into doing the same shit yet again, convincing me along the way that my partner won’t mind or that I’ll be able to talk my way out of it yet again.

The only way for me to put my ego aside is to boost my self-esteem, but how the fuck do you do that? It’s definitely not as simple as it sounds.

I’ve spent thousands of dollars and countless hours in the offices of psychologists and psychiatrists to get to the bottom of why I felt the way I felt, drank the way I drank and used drugs the way I used drugs. I love seeing my psychologist, and I see her once a month, whether things are good, bad or indifferent.

However, I would always leave an appointment frustrated that whoever I had just seen hadn’t really given me anything tangible I could walk away and practice. My brain worked in a way where everything was transactional. I wanted someone to tell me to go and do this thing, which requires that much effort to achieve this equal and measurable result. But of course, it doesn’t work like that.

So what do you do?

The only way to rebalance that sea saw of self-esteem and ego is to live in a way where I consider how difficult that conversation with my conscience before I sleep every night will be.

It’s hard work, but by surrounding myself with like-minded people and immersing myself in sobriety, I am slowly considering how my daily actions will impact my conversation with my conscience each night. Before making a decision, I try to stop, think and consider how those actions will affect that conversation with my conscience before I go to sleep that night.

It’s hard work, and I’m not good at it. Slowly, though, through practice, I’m slowing down and making more and more of the right decisions throughout the day, which takes power away from my ego. It helps me have that conversation with my conscience. The conversation is much lighter and easier to digest because I have done fewer things that don’t align with my values to process each night.

Every night when that conversation is easy, and I can genuinely say that I did more things that align with my values than things that don’t, my self-esteem takes a boost, and that sea saw tips further and further into the side of good healthy self-esteem.

I don’t expect myself to be perfect. I expect myself to try. I expect myself to make progress and improve, but I have learned that I need to stop expecting so much from myself and never expect perfection. That leads to a letdown.

I can’t think my way into feeling better about myself. I can’t think my way into a higher view of myself. I can’t plan to go out for some massive good deed and expect it to make me feel some way. Doing something with a predetermined outcome in my mind will only lead to resentment when I don’t get the exact result I envisaged. That is, doing things, as kind as they are, for the wrong reasons and resentments, hurt me far more than the person I’m resentful of.

All I can do is wake up each day and see what kind of shit sandwich life throws at me and try to make the right decision about each shit sandwich as it comes to me.

That’s where I’m going to get self-esteem from.

Cheers Wankers.

X

Click Here to join our Sobering Thoughts Chat Group. Whether you’re sober, sober curious, have someone in your life in sobriety or active addiction, or you think you could help struggling people, we’d love to have you!

We’ve already got a bunch of legends in there sharing incredible stories and supporting one another. Jump in. You have nothing to lose!

Click here to check my other blogs. Follow me on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter @sbrngthghts.

Make sure you check out my Writing 4 Resilience friends. They’re all legends.

Running for Resilience Ben Alexander Brent Ford Running Rare The Milkbar Reflections of a Clare Bear

If anyone is struggling in any way, make someone aware of it. Speak to a friend, family, loved one, stranger, postman, Uber Eats driver, or me; talk to someone.

Lifeline Ph: 13 11 14

Alcoholics Anonymous Ph: 1300 222 222

NSW Mental Health Line Ph: 1800 011 511

Suicide Call Back Service Ph: 1300 659 467

Mensline Australia Ph: 1300 78 99 78

Kids Helpline Ph: 1800 55 1800

The Conversation was originally published in Raising a Beautiful Mind on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I have always been an overthinker.

I thought it was just the way I was. The way I was wired.

My overthinking is fuelled by fear. Fear of what others will think of me. Fear of what might happen if I haven’t got a plan A, B or C. Fear of just about anything. It’s something I developed at a young age for a few different reasons, which I have spoken about at length in previous blogs, but the short version is I have insecure attachment, abandonment, issues, ADHD, and I have a mild amount of ASD.

I was resigned to the idea that this was my lot. This is how things were going to be for me forever. I didn’t think I’d be able to change the way my brain worked in any way and that I’d just have to find better ways to live with it.

When I got sober, naively, I thought all my anxieties, and other mental health issues for that matter, would simply drift away. After all, I was doing my part. It was only fair for my brain to do its share of the heavy lifting.

The other day, I read something that said, “Overthinking is underfeeling”, and it blew my head off my neck.

It makes perfect sense… to me anyway.

We only have so much mental bandwidth, and if I’m spending a solid majority of mine on overthinking, I’m not going to have much left to feel my feelings.

For a long time, I have found myself frustrated that I have a perfectly sound understanding of a lot of the psychological practices that I read about or discuss with my psychologist, but my sticking point has been finding practical and tangible tools to use to help me to feel and process my feelings.

Why couldn’t my psychologist just tell me that if I walk out and do A and B, I will get an equal and relatively measurable improvement in return? Well, because she’s not an idiot and it doesn’t work like that. I was the idiot.

I knew that I was doing a lot of great things to help me manage my mental health and sobriety, but I also knew that I had been lacking genuine community since we relocated to the coast 21 months ago. In recent months, my anxiety and ADHD symptoms alike have dissipated significantly. The only thing I can attribute that to is immersing myself in a community of other sober people.

It’s been a dramatic psychic shift, and for the first time in my life, I am feeling a space between a stimulus and my response. I now can stop, think about what someone has said, think about what I am going to say before I say it, and then speak with much less risk of embarrassing myself or sounding like a fucking idiot. I’m far less irritable, more compassionate, more understanding, and I’m not getting triggered by dumb shit that doesn’t fucking matter. For the first time in my adult life, my brain has slowed, the fuck, down. I’m more present than ever, and I’m starting to feel like the truest version of myself I have since I was a teenager.

But why?

Anyone reading this from a fellowship will probably get pissed off that I’m doing this because you’re not supposed to try to figure this shit out, rather just try that when you do the work, you’ll get the reward you need and not the one you want, but I can’t help myself. I think I’m onto something here.

As a child, I conditioned myself not to feel. For whatever reason, I learned that feeling feelings was a bad thing and it was something that I shouldn’t do. Of course, this is wrong and fucking stupid, but it happened and here we are.

But when you have all of this mental bandwidth to use up, and you don’t want to feel your feelings or even think about them, what the fuck are you going to use it up on? You guessed it, thinking about dumb shit you don’t need to worry about. Allocating more mental energy than required to each task and analysing every fucking thing you have ever done or plan on doing, all the while neglecting the feelings that while you’re not dealing with are slowly but surely piling up in a back corner of your brain waiting for to shit all over you in a moment of vulnerability.

Because I never developed a coping mechanism to handle these feelings when they popped up, I tried to ignore them, and when that didn’t work, I would distract myself from them. Initially with food and later on drugs and alcohol. The problem is that feelings don’t just stop. They keep coming. For me, they built up, and over time, I required more food, drugs, and alcohol to keep pushing them away. If a bucket is slowly filling with water and the goal is to use a cup to scoop the water out at a rate quick enough to prevent the water from overflowing, I didn’t get the memo. The goal was to help drain the water out, but I was adding a cup of water each time rather than taking one away.

So, what is the link between my newfound community and my newfound ability to feel and process feelings?

I think it’s because, after years of feeling like the odd one out, I have finally found a community of people who are just like me. A community that not only puts up with people talking about how they feel, but it’s the literal purpose of the community. You gather in a group, in person or virtually, and talk openly and honestly about how you feel. Vulnerability is encouraged and supported. You are encouraged to share your guilt, shame and remorse in a room full of people who understand you and don’t judge you because most of them have felt the exact same way. They make you feel that not only is it okay to have those feelings, but it’s okay and important to share them and get them off your chest. And it feels fucking amazing.

At the end of each meeting, conversation, or period where the chat group has been overly active, I always walk away from the experience in a better state of mind than what I entered. Even on days when I don’t want to go or have been telling myself I can’t be bothered.

In AA, they say that the program is a program of action, not a program of thinking. I think that’s where I was getting it wrong. I was trying to think about my feelings rather than feel them. I was trying to understand what caused them physiologically and how I could prevent them from presenting themselves or reducing the severity of their impact because I literally didn’t know how to feel them. It was as though that mechanism in me was broken.

What they say about action is true. Since I have been getting off my ass and being an active member of the community, all things in my life are just better.

As I’ve said before, it’s not thanks to AA, one particular WhatsApp chat group, one or two close friends, my psychologist, or whatever the fuck else. The combination of all these things results in me immersing myself in a community of like-minded people who are all working towards the same goal. They make me feel like it’s safe and okay to be me for the first time ever.

In a short period of time, I have come to realise that I was never an overthinker and that it certainly isn’t a trait that I was born with or a trait that I am stuck with. It’s only taken a slight change in how and where I spend some of my spare time to show me that.

I conditioned myself to be an under feeler, which is not someone who feels people under the table, but someone who never developed the ability to feel their feelings because they were conditioned to think they shouldn’t or that it was a bad thing to do.

Whatever the case, the greatest revelation from all of this is that when I catch myself overthinking, I can remind myself that I’m not allowing myself to feel, and I can do something about that. Also, I am not destined to spend the rest of my life overthinking, under feeling and dealing with the negative crap associated with that, and you don’t have to either.

Find a community, keep pushing, figure out something that works for you, that adds value to your life, and then do the shit out of it. If it can happen to me, it can happen to you.

Cheers Wankers.

X

Click Here to join our Sobering Thoughts Chat Group. Whether you’re sober, sober curious, have someone in your life in sobriety or active addiction, or you think you could help struggling people, we’d love to have you!

We’ve already got a bunch of legends in there sharing incredible stories and supporting one another. Jump in. You have nothing to lose!

Click here to check my other blogs. Follow me on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter @sbrngthghts.

Make sure you check out my Writing 4 Resilience friends. They’re all legends.

Running for Resilience Ben Alexander Brent Ford Running Rare The Milkbar Reflections of a Clare Bear

If anyone is struggling in any way, make someone aware of it. Speak to a friend, family, loved one, stranger, postman, Uber Eats driver, or me; talk to someone.

Lifeline Ph: 13 11 14

Alcoholics Anonymous Ph: 1300 222 222

NSW Mental Health Line Ph: 1800 011 511

Suicide Call Back Service Ph: 1300 659 467

Mensline Australia Ph: 1300 78 99 78

Kids Helpline Ph: 1800 55 1800

Over Thinker/Under Feeler was originally published in Raising a Beautiful Mind on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I am not the owner of my sobriety.

In the months leading up to rock bottom, where I had finally had enough of the mirage I was living, incrementally, I transitioned from party mode to pity party mode. Unknowingly, I’d become incapable of thinking about anyone but myself. I had a loving, pregnant partner. We packed our house, preparing to move two hours from our hometown. We were trying to rent our house out and buy another home.

A lot was going on. It was a time when we needed to work together to ensure we got everything done, but more importantly, it was when we should have supported each other.

For some reason, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t escape my own negative, woe-is-me mindset. We had chosen to do these things. A fantastic opportunity for us as a family had presented itself, and we’d be mad not to take it. Somehow, I went in the opposite direction to the one I should have.

I didn’t have the coping mechanisms to deal with such significant stress, so I reverted to the only one I knew worked for sure: drugs and alcohol.

The more stressed I became, the more I abused substances, the more stressed I became, and so the violent vortex of self-sabotage grew stronger and stronger with each day that passed.

I realise now that I was too scared to ask for help. I didn’t want anyone to think I had bitten off more than I could chew and couldn’t handle many things simultaneously. I was struggling enough to accept that for myself.

I knew my substance use was becoming beyond my control, but I was too proud to admit that to anyone for fear of what they might think of me. I also genuinely believed that I was the only person on earth who had ever felt the way I was then.

I didn’t want to talk to my partner about it because I thought that it would only stress her out and not only affect her health but the health of my unborn baby.

I was too caught up in myself to realise that I was isolating myself and putting distance between my partner and me when I should have been doing the opposite. My twisted theory led me to isolate myself, putting space between my partner. My effort to protect her from stress was only making her stress more as she worried about what was going on with me, but I’d become a person who she was too scared to raise her concerns with as my reactions were always defensive and dismissive.

I was too caught up in feeling sorry for myself to realise that she was coming from a place of love, compassion, and care, and instead, I would take her worries as criticism.

The hardest thing was, though, that I knew she was right. I didn’t want to or could not accept that at the time.

I carried this self-centred mindset long into sobriety.

I did some fucking horrible things to her, and others for that matter, both in the depths of addiction and well into sobriety. These are things that I will be ashamed of for the rest of my life and things that, to this day, as hard as I try, I can’t figure out how I allowed to get to such a point.

My partner should have left me for her own sake. Several times. But for some reason, she didn’t.

She saw the good in me that I’ve never been able to see in myself. Through all the horrible things I had done, she maintained faith that the person she fell in love with would fight his way back, even when I wasn’t so sure I was capable of it.

It pains me to say, but she loved me more than I loved her. I feel horrible that this was the case. I never fell out of love with her. I think I was just so incapable of any love at all.

Getting sober was by far the most significant thing I have ever done for our relationship and us as a family. I have been sober almost exactly four months longer than my son has been alive, and nothing makes me prouder than knowing he has never seen me under the influence of anything.

But some of our most significant challenges as a couple came after I got sober because, for a long time, I held onto that self-centred, self-serving mindset. My brain would do all it could to somehow shift whatever blame for our situation onto her, and I would believe it because I didn’t want to accept the truth that all our problems stemmed from my actions.

I remember using it to my advantage when we would argue. “I’ve been doing all this hard work. You have no idea how hard this has been for me. All you want to do is criticise me over small things that don’t matter. I’m working on more important things”. I’m embarrassed as I type this.

If I didn’t get sober, our relationship would have ended. There was never an ultimatum, but the trajectory I was on would have taken us to a point of no return. My son would have had a part-time, drug and alcohol-addicted father who, when lucky enough to spend time with him, wouldn’t have been present. Knowing how dangerously close I came to that being a reality unsettles me to my core.

If I’d lost my family before it had even started, I know I would have drunk and drugged myself to death, either by poisoning myself to death or by committing suicide.

I’ve been reflecting a lot lately. As a couple and a family, we’ve been through a lot over the last 22 and a half months. I can comfortably speak on my partner’s behalf when I say things have never been better.

Still, though, I feel conflicted. I am grateful for everything that has happened to lead me to this very second because that’s what has led us to where we are today. Life is so good that now that the worst is over, it’s getting easier to say that I don’t regret a thing. It’s not that I am not trying to excuse the horrible things I have done, but because this is the path we have taken to land in the great place we find ourselves today.

Maybe it is okay to say that you have no regrets and simultaneously wish you could’ve gone about things differently because that’s how I feel.

The point is my sobriety doesn’t belong to me. For so long, I felt like I was fighting this battle alone. I was so determined to show people I could get sober on my own. I resisted all kinds of communal and professional help. That toxic, self-serving thinking was so hard to budge.

But as I gain more clarity of mind and let go of more and more things that don’t fucking matter, I realise that I never did any of it on my own. The love and goodwill of others were getting me through, even though I wasn’t reciprocating that.

I leant so heavily on so many people but was too self-absorbed to see how much I was taking from others.

I was so lucky to have a mate with nearly a decade of sobriety living with me at the time I hit rock bottom. I had other friends, too, who had decent lengths of sobriety up and who opened themselves up to me to contact whenever I needed anything. They weren’t just saving face, either. They meant it genuinely.

I had amazing support from online communities. People I’d been interacting with for years but never actually met sent me their numbers and demanded I call them should I ever need anything.

I started writing this silly little blog, and I was blown away when people responded positively. They gave me the accountability I needed.

After some struggles late last year, I have immersed myself in sobriety by surrounding myself with more sober people and sober communities, and it’s been the most incredible thing I have done for my sobriety. I feel stupid that I waited so long to do it.

Not only is my sobriety stronger than it’s ever been, but my anxiety levels are lower than they’ve been in my adult life. My outlook is brighter than ever. My sense of what matters and what doesn’t has never been more apparent, and my fear of what others think of me is slowly but surely witling away.

None of this happens, though, if not for one person. My partner. My partner, no matter how badly I lashed out, was there for me and loved me unconditionally, even when I couldn’t reciprocate that love or love myself.

My partner, who I gave every reason to leave and prioritise her emotional well-being, chose to risk being hurt again and again because she saw something in me that I’ve never been able to see myself.

My partner is the most naturally gifted, caring, compassionate, intelligent, grounded mother I have ever seen, to both an 18-month-old baby and a 35-year-old baby.

Without her, I wouldn’t be sober. Without sobriety, I would be dead.

My sobriety doesn’t belong to me. I am only the caretaker of it.

My sobriety belongs to all the people who were there for me when I needed it. It belongs to the online community, people who read this blog, my friends, my family, the fellowship that has welcomed me so lovingly, my beautiful, messy, cheeky, funny, 18-month-old boy, and most importantly, it belongs to my partner. I’m just the lucky one who gets to carry it around.

I will do all I can to manage, look after, maintain, take care of, polish the fucking wheels, vacuum the cracks, wipe the edges down and whatever else you can think of to keep this sobriety in the greatest condition possible.

I have to because it’s not mine to damage. I am obligated to keep it only in the same or better condition than how I found it.

Happy Birthday, Nutsy.

Thank you for all you have done and continue to do to make our lives so easy.

I love you.

Cheers Wankers.

X.

Click Here to join our Sobering Thoughts Chat Group. Whether you’re sober, sober curious, have someone in your life in sobriety or active addiction, or you think you could help struggling people, we’d love to have you!

We’ve already got a bunch of legends in there sharing incredible stories and supporting one another. Jump in. You have nothing to lose!

Make sure you check out my Writing 4 Resilience friends. They’re all legends.

Running for Resilience Ben Alexander Brent Ford Running Rare The Milkbar Reflections of a Clare Bear

If anyone is struggling in any way, make someone aware of it. Speak to a friend, family, loved one, stranger, postman, Uber Eats driver, or me; talk to someone.

Lifeline Ph: 13 11 14

Alcoholics Anonymous Ph: 1300 222 222

NSW Mental Health Line Ph: 1800 011 511

Suicide Call Back Service Ph: 1300 659 467

Mensline Australia Ph: 1300 78 99 78

Kids Helpline Ph: 1800 55 1800

SAM WILSON

MAR 8, 2024

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I am not the owner of my sobriety.

In the months leading up to rock bottom, where I had finally had enough of the mirage I was living, incrementally, I transitioned from party mode to pity party mode. Unknowingly, I’d become incapable of thinking about anyone but myself. I had a loving, pregnant partner. We packed our house, preparing to move two hours from our hometown. We were trying to rent our house out and buy another home.

A lot was going on. It was a time when we needed to work together to ensure we got everything done, but more importantly, it was when we should have supported each other.

For some reason, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t escape my own negative, woe-is-me mindset. We had chosen to do these things. A fantastic opportunity for us as a family had presented itself, and we’d be mad not to take it. Somehow, I went in the opposite direction to the one I should have.

I didn’t have the coping mechanisms to deal with such significant stress, so I reverted to the only one I knew worked for sure: drugs and alcohol.

The more stressed I became, the more I abused substances, the more stressed I became, and so the violent vortex of self-sabotage grew stronger and stronger with each day that passed.

I realise now that I was too scared to ask for help. I didn’t want anyone to think I had bitten off more than I could chew and couldn’t handle many things simultaneously. I was struggling enough to accept that for myself.

I knew my substance use was becoming beyond my control, but I was too proud to admit that to anyone for fear of what they might think of me. I also genuinely believed that I was the only person on earth who had ever felt the way I was then.

I didn’t want to talk to my partner about it because I thought that it would only stress her out and not only affect her health but the health of my unborn baby.

I was too caught up in myself to realise that I was isolating myself and putting distance between my partner and me when I should have been doing the opposite. My twisted theory led me to isolate myself, putting space between my partner. My effort to protect her from stress was only making her stress more as she worried about what was going on with me, but I’d become a person who she was too scared to raise her concerns with as my reactions were always defensive and dismissive.

I was too caught up in feeling sorry for myself to realise that she was coming from a place of love, compassion, and care, and instead, I would take her worries as criticism.

The hardest thing was, though, that I knew she was right. I didn’t want to or could not accept that at the time.

I carried this self-centred mindset long into sobriety.

I did some fucking horrible things to her, and others for that matter, both in the depths of addiction and well into sobriety. These are things that I will be ashamed of for the rest of my life and things that, to this day, as hard as I try, I can’t figure out how I allowed to get to such a point.

My partner should have left me for her own sake. Several times. But for some reason, she didn’t.

She saw the good in me that I’ve never been able to see in myself. Through all the horrible things I had done, she maintained faith that the person she fell in love with would fight his way back, even when I wasn’t so sure I was capable of it.

It pains me to say, but she loved me more than I loved her. I feel horrible that this was the case. I never fell out of love with her. I think I was just so incapable of any love at all.

Getting sober was by far the most significant thing I have ever done for our relationship and us as a family. I have been sober almost exactly four months longer than my son has been alive, and nothing makes me prouder than knowing he has never seen me under the influence of anything.

But some of our most significant challenges as a couple came after I got sober because, for a long time, I held onto that self-centred, self-serving mindset. My brain would do all it could to somehow shift whatever blame for our situation onto her, and I would believe it because I didn’t want to accept the truth that all our problems stemmed from my actions.

I remember using it to my advantage when we would argue. “I’ve been doing all this hard work. You have no idea how hard this has been for me. All you want to do is criticise me over small things that don’t matter. I’m working on more important things”. I’m embarrassed as I type this.

If I didn’t get sober, our relationship would have ended. There was never an ultimatum, but the trajectory I was on would have taken us to a point of no return. My son would have had a part-time, drug and alcohol-addicted father who, when lucky enough to spend time with him, wouldn’t have been present. Knowing how dangerously close I came to that being a reality unsettles me to my core.

If I’d lost my family before it had even started, I know I would have drunk and drugged myself to death, either by poisoning myself to death or by committing suicide.

I’ve been reflecting a lot lately. As a couple and a family, we’ve been through a lot over the last 22 and a half months. I can comfortably speak on my partner’s behalf when I say things have never been better.

Still, though, I feel conflicted. I am grateful for everything that has happened to lead me to this very second because that’s what has led us to where we are today. Life is so good that now that the worst is over, it’s getting easier to say that I don’t regret a thing. It’s not that I am not trying to excuse the horrible things I have done, but because this is the path we have taken to land in the great place we find ourselves today.

Maybe it is okay to say that you have no regrets and simultaneously wish you could’ve gone about things differently because that’s how I feel.

The point is my sobriety doesn’t belong to me. For so long, I felt like I was fighting this battle alone. I was so determined to show people I could get sober on my own. I resisted all kinds of communal and professional help. That toxic, self-serving thinking was so hard to budge.

But as I gain more clarity of mind and let go of more and more things that don’t fucking matter, I realise that I never did any of it on my own. The love and goodwill of others were getting me through, even though I wasn’t reciprocating that.

I leant so heavily on so many people but was too self-absorbed to see how much I was taking from others.

I was so lucky to have a mate with nearly a decade of sobriety living with me at the time I hit rock bottom. I had other friends, too, who had decent lengths of sobriety up and who opened themselves up to me to contact whenever I needed anything. They weren’t just saving face, either. They meant it genuinely.

I had amazing support from online communities. People I’d been interacting with for years but never actually met sent me their numbers and demanded I call them should I ever need anything.

I started writing this silly little blog, and I was blown away when people responded positively. They gave me the accountability I needed.

After some struggles late last year, I have immersed myself in sobriety by surrounding myself with more sober people and sober communities, and it’s been the most incredible thing I have done for my sobriety. I feel stupid that I waited so long to do it.

Not only is my sobriety stronger than it’s ever been, but my anxiety levels are lower than they’ve been in my adult life. My outlook is brighter than ever. My sense of what matters and what doesn’t has never been more apparent, and my fear of what others think of me is slowly but surely witling away.

None of this happens, though, if not for one person. My partner. My partner, no matter how badly I lashed out, was there for me and loved me unconditionally, even when I couldn’t reciprocate that love or love myself.

My partner, who I gave every reason to leave and prioritise her emotional well-being, chose to risk being hurt again and again because she saw something in me that I’ve never been able to see myself.

My partner is the most naturally gifted, caring, compassionate, intelligent, grounded mother I have ever seen, to both an 18-month-old baby and a 35-year-old baby.

Without her, I wouldn’t be sober. Without sobriety, I would be dead.

My sobriety doesn’t belong to me. I am only the caretaker of it.

My sobriety belongs to all the people who were there for me when I needed it. It belongs to the online community, people who read this blog, my friends, my family, the fellowship that has welcomed me so lovingly, my beautiful, messy, cheeky, funny, 18-month-old boy, and most importantly, it belongs to my partner. I’m just the lucky one who gets to carry it around.

I will do all I can to manage, look after, maintain, take care of, polish the fucking wheels, vacuum the cracks, wipe the edges down and whatever else you can think of to keep this sobriety in the greatest condition possible.

I have to because it’s not mine to damage. I am obligated to keep it only in the same or better condition than how I found it.

Happy Birthday, Nutsy.

Thank you for all you have done and continue to do to make our lives so easy.

I love you.

Cheers Wankers.

X.

Click Here to join our Sobering Thoughts Chat Group. Whether you’re sober, sober curious, have someone in your life in sobriety or active addiction, or you think you could help struggling people, we’d love to have you!

We’ve already got a bunch of legends in there sharing incredible stories and supporting one another. Jump in. You have nothing to lose!

Click here to check my other blogs. Follow me on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter @sbrngthghts.

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Make sure you check out my Writing 4 Resilience friends. They’re all legends.

Running for Resilience Ben Alexander Brent Ford Running Rare The Milkbar Reflections of a Clare Bear

If anyone is struggling in any way, make someone aware of it. Speak to a friend, family, loved one, stranger, postman, Uber Eats driver, or me; talk to someone.

Lifeline Ph: 13 11 14

Alcoholics Anonymous Ph: 1300 222 222

NSW Mental Health Line Ph: 1800 011 511

Suicide Call Back Service Ph: 1300 659 467

Mensline Australia Ph: 1300 78 99 78

Kids Helpline Ph: 1800 55 1800

The Caretaker was originally published in Raising a Beautiful Mind on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Almost everything of note that I have achieved in my life has been driven by a healthy serving of self-loathing.

It’s terribly unhealthy and hopelessly unsustainable, but it works… albeit temporarily.

I’ve lost over 20kgs on four separate occasions in my adult life, which is excellent, but I’ve also let myself get heavily overweight four times in my adult life. Each time I lost weight, I was motivated to do so by shame and embarrassment rather than the goal of being healthier, fitter and feeling better about myself.

I had a goal of running a marathon since I was probably 15 years old, just like my dad did. I finally got my shit together, trained my arse off and ran my first marathon almost five years ago. On days when I didn’t want to train, I subconsciously thought I was motivated by the end goal. I pictured myself feeling this incredible euphoria when I crossed the finish line… it never came. All I felt was that I should’ve done it sooner. I should’ve run it quicker.

As of right now, I’m a better runner than I have ever been and recently ran some pretty significant personal bests, and still, I don’t get any great feeling from it. Might be something in that…

We spent 15 months living out of suitcases to save a house deposit. House-sitting other people’s houses, looking after their pets, watering their gardens and whatever else they’d written down on their to-do list. In between house sits, we’d drag our suitcases back to one of our parents’ houses and stay until we started the next one.

I should have been motivated to buy a house to provide us with physical safety and financial security later in life, but I wasn’t. I was motivated by my fear of what other people would think of me for not owning my own home.

I was expecting to feel some overwhelming sense of achievement after buying our first home, especially living like gypsies for 15 months to do it, yet all I felt was apathy. I should’ve bought a house sooner. I should be able to afford a bigger or newer house. I fucking loved that house, but I was still self-conscious about what others would think about me and our house.

I spent years being embarrassed about what I did for work, even though it was necessary, honest, hard work that allowed me to travel and live all over Australia doing it while earning reasonable money. I was actually happy with my work. I was ashamed and embarrassed because I feared people would think I was the stereotypical roadworker.

In more recent years, I’ve managed to get my shit together and work my way into an operations manager-style role. Still, it wasn’t financial security, a sense of achievement or purpose in my work or some burning desire to progress my career that did it. I was motivated because I wanted people to see me in a particular light, and I believed my job title would impact that.

Just like all of my school report cards read, I have always been able to achieve things when I put my mind to it. I’ve just never been able to string those periods together. I think I’ve started to realise why.

When I set my sights on a goal, I can narrow my focus and become obsessed. I do everything I can to achieve it, plus a little more. I never focused on enjoying the process. Instead, I’d be fixated on the big shiny thing I was working towards. I always felt apathetic and underwhelmed when I got to the big shiny thing. I would question if all the time and energy I put in to get there was worth it. In some instances, it was, and in others it wasn’t.

So I’d be standing there with the big shiny thing I’d worked so hard for and feel nothing more than disappointment. I’d achieved the goal, done or received the thing, and felt worse than before. It was all because I was motivated by the wrong thing all along. In some instances, I probably even had the wrong goals.

I think this is why I’ve always struggled to keep my shit together for extended periods. I would get all psyched up to achieve a goal, complete it, and feel nothing or even worse than I did before, so why would I keep going in this cycle? Whenever I put effort into doing something good, I feel worse. It’s easier to give up, not try, and idle along doing the same old shit than it is to try to figure out and understand why I am the way I am.

I think the fact that I could get it together for periods actually makes it harder to accept. It would be easier for me to accept if I was fuckin’ hopeless at everything. It’s so much worse when you know you’re capable of more. You’ve proven to yourself that you can be and do better, but you can’t seem to do it consistently. It’s like a constant reminder that you’re not even close to your potential. That you’re letting yourself and others down. It’s a heavy weight to carry. It’s exhausting and unsustainable.

The good news is I’m feeling less and less like this each day, and again, I think I have figured out why.

Through regular visits to my psych, our Sobering Thoughts Community Support Group, a weekly face-to-face AA meeting and regular online AA meetings, I’m starting to feel better and better about myself. I’ve found communities of people who are similar to me. I am immersing myself in those communities; the results have been amazing. I’ve found so many amazing, like-minded people who are accepting and understanding, which has helped me realise I’m not alone in how I feel. There is nothing wrong with me; there are people out there who like me the way I am and value whatever input I have to add.

Essentially, my relationship with myself is improving because of who I am choosing to surround myself with, and I think that there is the reason why I’ve never been able to string together those periods where I’m able to get and keep my shit together until now.

I think it comes down to my view of myself at the time. When I’m low, I think I’m not worth the effort. It’s easier to grab something shiny and convenient that gives me some form of quick dopamine boost. Like all things, though, the easier it’s attained, the shorter the sense of reward.

It’s a lot like food. The shit food makes me feel good while I eat it, but shit after. The good food mightn’t give me as much of a boost while I eat it, but I feel better for a longer time afterwards.

When I was using drugs and alcohol, every time I made a poor decision, it was always motivated by how I was feeling about myself and not what was best for my long-term health. The lower my self-worth at the time, the easier it was to justify a poor decision.

I’m starting to realise that if I focus on my relationship with myself, and if I work on how I feel most of the time, rather than constantly working towards some big fucking shiny thing that doesn’t make me happy, I will make better choices organically. Incidentally, I will come to learn that I am worth the effort. That I deserve to do right by me. If I do that, I will become a better version of myself that others will benefit more from.

Maybe the key to long-term success or maintaining progress as a foundation all boils down to our relationship with or opinions of ourselves. Perhaps that’s why people can have periods where they progress but then stop and regress.

It’s all good to educate yourself on how things work and implement the relevant changes to your lifestyle, but if you reach the target you set and all your motivation has worn off, you need something else to keep going.

If you haven’t done any work on your relationship with yourself, as in the things that made you eat poorly, drink, use drugs, gamble, whatever, in time, you’ll resort back to those things or some other unhealthy outlet because although you might’ve changed your habits, have you really changed or grown as a person?

Maybe that relationship with self underpins all of it. Maybe without a healthy relationship with self, we’ll never truly be able to use our growth as a foundation to keep building on. It’s working away, trying to fill a wheelbarrow with a hole in its bottom. This stuff snowballs. We mightn’t realise it because it mightn’t be blatantly obvious, but what we did yesterday affects what we’re capable of doing today. Each choice is a building block for the next.

I think when we do right by ourselves, our selves will do right by us. When we surround ourselves with peers who make us feel good about ourselves, we will reduce our temptation to drink, use drugs, eat bad food or whatever other choices we struggle with. It’s about the place we are in when we are faced with these choices. But we have to put ourselves first to do that.

It’s hard to put yourself first. Particularly in Australian Culture, we’re conditioned by society to put others first. But are we really putting others first by showing up as a lesser version of ourselves?

I think the key is to seek what works for you relentlessly. It might take time to find it, but you can’t just accept that you’ll never find anything that works for you. There is something out there. There’s a place you belong. There’s a community that will make you feel better about yourself.

I spent over 18 months telling myself I didn’t need AA. Ultimately, I let fear of what others thought of me hold me back from pursuing something I was interested in, and I allowed it to become something in my head that was much bigger than it needed to be. I convinced myself that I didn’t need a community. I didn’t need any more support. And you know what? I was right. I didn’t need it, but fuck me, it has helped me a lot.

Is it because it’s the magical enchantment of AA? Of course, it’s fucking not. At its core, I’m just spending more time and energy connecting with people like me, making me feel good.

I’m learning I don’t actually have to do all of this hard work, all of this self-inventory on my own. I have to surround myself with people that make me feel good about myself. It will happen organically.

Achieving goals was never going to make me feel good about myself. Houses, jobs, running achievements, weight loss, none of them would ever make me feel better about myself. They would only help me cover up how I felt about myself.

All this time, I thought it was up to me to lock myself in some dark fucking corner and do some horrible kind of self-inventory where I focused on every single shitty thing about myself and figure out why I was like that or how to change it, but I don’t have to do that shit.

We’re humans. We will never rid ourselves entirely of things we don’t like about ourselves. So it’s fucking ridiculous to even try. I think the answer, for me at least, is to keep surrounding myself with people who encourage me to be and make me feel comfortable being the most authentic version of myself. The more I do that, the easier it will be for me and the better I will feel.

I wasted too much fucking time doing dumb shit that was never going to work. Don’t make the same mistake. Learn from mine. The solution lies in action, not thinking.

Go and get moving.

Cheers Wankers.

X.

Click Here to join our Sobering Thoughts Chat Group. Whether you’re sober, sober curious, have someone in your life in sobriety or active addiction, or you think you could help struggling people, we’d love to have you!

We’ve already got a bunch of legends in there sharing incredible stories and supporting one another. Jump in. You have nothing to lose!

Click here to check my other blogs. Follow me on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter @sbrngthghts.

Make sure you check out my Writing 4 Resilience friends. They’re all legends.

Running for Resilience Ben Alexander Brent Ford Running Rare The Milkbar Reflections of a Clare Bear

If anyone is struggling in any way, make someone aware of it. Speak to a friend, family, loved one, stranger, postman, Uber Eats driver, or me; talk to someone.

Lifeline Ph: 13 11 14

Alcoholics Anonymous Ph: 1300 222 222

NSW Mental Health Line Ph: 1800 011 511

Suicide Call Back Service Ph: 1300 659 467

Mensline Australia Ph: 1300 78 99 78

Kids Helpline Ph: 1800 55 1800

Start writing today. Use the button below to create your Substack and connect your publication with Sobering Thoughts.

Put Yourself First was originally published in Raising a Beautiful Mind on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I’ve spent all my life with an insecure attachment.

Having two amazing parents with an unrivalled work ethic, hellbent on providing us with more than what they had as kids, combined with undiagnosed ADHD, among other things, meant I didn’t get the extra emotional support that not even I understood I needed.

It wasn’t until recently that I started to grasp how this impacted me as an adult.

The Sobering Thoughts Community Support Group is only in its infancy, but it’s already impacted my life profoundly. It’s helped me reimmerse myself in sobriety, and it was the kick in the arse I needed to get myself into an AA meeting finally. Something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time but constantly found a way to talk myself out of it. This is something I’ll talk about in future posts.

Through regular interaction with this group of amazing people, regular AA meetings, and monthly appointments with my psych, I feel more immersed in my sobriety than ever, which is the complete turnaround I needed given it was only a couple of months ago I started to realise I had become complacent in terms of practising my sobriety.

A guy from my local meeting said to me just the other day that when you immerse yourself in sobriety, things… fall into place. And you know what? He’s fuckin’ spot on. Even though I’m having some internal grapples around

I’ve learned how that insecure attachment I developed as a child manifests in my adult life.

Control…

I don’t feel secure unless I’m in control. When I’m not in control, I am terrified.

There are far too many uncontrollable things in the world with the potential to directly or indirectly impact my life. There are some things you can prepare for, like setting money aside for regular utility bills. Some things you can’t prepare for, like raging bushfires.

It’s not all bad, though. Being a control freak has helped me professionally. I often get commended on my attention to detail and how thoroughly I plan my work. If only they knew that it has nothing to do with my desire to maximise company profit and everything to do with preventing future stress and anxiety, but hey, whatever works.

But I struggle to turn that control on and off. As much as I would like to, I can’t seem to be that meticulous, organised person at work and then drive ten minutes home, surrender control on the way and arrive home in a present state of mind.

I think this is why I always feel the need to be doing something. I always thought it was about avoiding specific thoughts and feelings, but maybe that’s not it. Perhaps it’s just the uncertainty that comes with not having something to do. I do not control what’s happening when I have nothing to do.

I think this is why, in the past, for the most part, I was able to drink less on weeknights and save the drug use for weekends, although toward the end there, those lines (no pun intended) started to blur. As much as I didn’t love work then, I knew what tomorrow had in store for me, and that familiarity and structure brought me comfort.

I think this is why, when it came to the weekends and, more recently, Thursday nights and Sundays, my substance use got out of hand. Initially, I would drink a little throughout the week, but always plenty on weekends. I didn’t realise it at the time. No one ever does, but I was incrementally becoming more and more reliant on drugs and alcohol substances to calm the anxieties that uncertainty provided. Using a depressant and a stimulant to cure my anxieties… clever.

On reflection, it’s no surprise that the closer I came to hitting rock bottom, the more uncertainties there were in my life. I had a pregnant partner. We were packing our house, trying to rent it out, moving from a city to a small town two hours away, where I’d be starting a new role at work. We were trying to find a new house to buy, secure finances for said house, and then move house before I had to start my new role. We would become parents for the first time four weeks after my start date, coinciding with my partner taking a financial hit as she started 12 months of maternity leave.

Things were pretty fuckin’ uncertain.

I realise now that I was using drugs and alcohol to permit myself to surrender control, albeit momentarily. I still remember the feeling I would get deep inside the bottom of my gut as the first line of cocaine would run down my throat — a taste I loved and hated at the same time. I’d quickly chase it down with a mouthful of beer that I could barely feel as my throat was numbing.

It felt like an electronic turbine starting up. It was like with every lap of the coil, the electric charge would double in speed. I fucking loved it and wanted as much of it as I could get. The desire for that feeling is directly relative to the amount of uncertainty ahead of me. I think that’s why I would drink for so long because I had permitted myself to forget about all the things I was trying to control, and I felt free. I wanted to hold onto that feeling for as long as I could. I had no worries in the world while I was drunk and high, and I loved it, but I would also fight my hardest to stay there in that feeling.

Sadly, that kind of behaviour is probably the least productive thing you can do at a time when you need to be sorting your shit to secure your family’s future, but I couldn’t stop. I knew what I was doing wasn’t sustainable, and I knew I wanted to stop. I knew if I didn’t stop, we would either end up with two mortgages and no one renting the first house, or we’d be in the new town with nowhere for me and my heavily pregnant partner to live, but even then, I just couldn’t fucking stop.

And it was all because of this insatiable desire to control everything at a time when I needed to do the opposite.

Today, I have been sober for 658 days. I’ve been working my arse off to better myself for most of this time. Everything I have discussed with my psych has logically made a lot of sense. The same goes for things I’ve learned on my own and through conversations with others doing similar things.

However, I have always struggled with applying what I have learned. In the past, I have talked a lot about trusting the process, particularly around things like running, fitness and weight loss, but these are all things that give us objective metrics and fancy trend lines so we can see our progress and give ourselves a pat on the back.

Emotional and psychological growth is much harder to measure. It can only be done through active reflection and self-assessment, which requires us to tackle our unconscious biases, which isn’t easy, especially for someone susceptible to low self-esteem.

While the above is true, I know I have made significantly more emotional and psychological progress over the last couple of months than I did in probably the six months before that. I can confidently pinpoint a few fundamental changes that have helped to accelerate my sobriety and improve my mental health.

The first one is the Sobering Thoughts Community Support Group. I’ve spoken more than enough about this group lately, so I’ll keep it brief. The ability to take a group of like-minded mates in my pocket everywhere I go and knowing that at any time I can jump into a safe space, free of ridicule and judgement, to seek advice has been amazing, and the quality of the dialogue in that chat continues to blow me away. Most of the people there I’ve never met in person, yet they’ve profoundly influenced my life over the last two months. You’re a bunch of legends, and I’m so grateful for each of you.

Secondly, I finally mustered up the stones to head along to my first AA meeting. I understand some people might see AA as a bit cult-like or no different to going to church. It was those exact fears that kept me from going for 21 months. This has not been my experience. My experience has also been nothing like the movies.

We do sit in a circle, and sometimes people do cry, but it’s not in some dingy abandoned fucking warehouse or dimly lit community hall with flickering lights where everyone is moping around with the shakes. There’s also no dick swinging. It’s just not tolerated, and because of that, no one is bothered. Ego is left at the door. It doesn’t matter if you have 50 years of sobriety or 50 seconds. Everyone is welcome, equal and as important as anyone else, and that’s truly been my experience.

Lastly, I found a daily online AA meeting to sit in on. I jump on every morning, and it helps me start my day with sobriety in mind front of my mind. While they lack the personal touch of a face-to-face meeting, they have their upsides too.

You can jump on anytime, anywhere. You can do so anonymously. You don’t have to turn your camera on, and you don’t have to share. I think this is great for anyone considering a program like AA but has some reservations. It’s a great stepping stone into AA or even a great way to dip your toes into the water and establish if it’s something you’d like to do or not. You never know until you try and lose nothing from listening to just one meeting. It might be your first and last ever meeting, and it might change the trajectory of your whole life, but you won’t know until you try!

I’ve realised there is no silver bullet to apply the practical knowledge I’ve been picking up over the last 21 months. As my friend from my meeting said, you have to show up with an open mind and allow things to fall into place.

I always associated surrender with weakness, as though it meant giving up. But for someone so conditioned to want to control everything, and the idea of not controlling things terrifies them to their core, surrendering is one of the bravest things you can do.

I know that for some, this might all sound a bit woo-woo, and to be honest, I’m still grappling with a lot of it. The thing is, though, this is your sobriety and your experience of it. You can interpret the literature in whatever way works for you. Like any self-help book, taking one or two helpful things from it is worthwhile.

All I know is that since I have been spending more time interacting with other sober people and being a little more open-minded about things, I have found more peace in my chaotic mind. I’ve realised that it’s not up to me to apply the practical knowledge that I am learning, but it is up to me to allow it to apply itself, and it’s all just from spending more time interacting with a community of like-minded people.

My mind feels slower, and for the first time in my life, I can stop and ask myself, “Do I need to worry about this?” or “Is this my problem?”. More often than not, the answer is no, and I can forget about it.

If the answer is yes, the next question I ask myself is, “Do I need to worry about this right now?” again, more often than not, the answer is no and just like that, I forget about it. If the answer is yes, then we deal with it.

It’s wild because I’ve even written in the past about how 85% of the things we worry about never happen. I know this stuff, but it’s taken until now, until I did these other things, for the message to land for me.

It’s helped me be less cynical, judgemental and critical of others. When we think that way about others, we’re actually seeing traits in others that we don’t like about ourselves. So, by reminding myself that I don’t need to concern myself with others and what they’re doing, I’m actually being kinder to, and more accepting of myself.

It’s hard for me to accept that something so simple can profoundly impact my day-to-day life, but isn’t that always the case?

I feel so much better in almost all aspects of my life. That subtle but constant hum of anxiety that has been following me around all my life is slowly dissipating. I’m worrying less and less about things I can’t control. That feeling of surrender I once got from that first line of cocaine I’m now finding within myself. If only I had known, I could do it on my own all along without all the adverse side effects.

It’s reaffirmed my belief that we just have to do the right thing for the sake of doing it. Not for any result or with the idea of getting something in return. It’s strengthened my trust in the universe, or spaghetti monster, or whatever, that you’ll get back what you put in, it’snot our business when it will happen or in what form. We’ll only get the reward when we’re ready to receive it.

I think the most accurate reflection of this kind of growth is when other people can see it.

When my partner mentioned to me just the other day that she’s noticed a fundamental change in me, the last 21 months’ worth of work felt all worthwhile.

Cheers Wankers.

X.

Click Here to join our Sobering Thoughts Chat Group. Whether you’re sober, sober curious, have someone in your life in sobriety or active addiction, or you think you could help people who are struggling, we’d love to have you!

We’ve already got a bunch of legends in there sharing incredible stories and supporting one another. Jump in. You have nothing to lose!

Click here to check my other blogs. Follow me on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter @sbrngthghts.

Make sure you check out my Writing 4 Resilience friends. They’re all legends.

Running for Resilience Ben Alexander Brent Ford Running Rare The Milkbar Reflections of a Clare Bear

If anyone is struggling in any way, make someone aware of it. Speak to a friend, family, loved one, stranger, postman, Uber Eats driver, or me; talk to someone.

Lifeline Ph: 13 11 14

Alcoholics Anonymous Ph: 1300 222 222

NSW Mental Health Line Ph: 1800 011 511

Suicide Call Back Service Ph: 1300 659 467

Mensline Australia Ph: 1300 78 99 78

Kids Helpline Ph: 1800 55 1800

Recently, I was asked to be a part of Running for Resilience’s Wednesday article Meet the R4R Runners.

In it, founder Matt Breen asked the question, “When you look back on those early days in your sobriety journey, is there any advice you’d give to yourself or someone in a similar position?”

I found it difficult to articulate my thoughts, and although I answered the question, I wasn’t happy with what I had written. I felt like it was clunky, and I didn’t feel like I delivered my message clearly enough.

That’s when I thought it would be much easier for me to answer this question in a letter to my past self. A letter to me at my lowest.

I started writing the letter, and I found myself in some kind of flow state, and I couldn’t stop writing. I felt like the answer was getting too long, but there were too many important bits that I couldn’t leave out, so I kept going.

I told Breeny that if he thought the answer was too long, he could use the original answer, and maybe I could post the letter here and link to it should anyone be interested.

It was a difficult but cathartic process. It’s one that I wouldn’t have done if not for being prompted by Breeny, so thank you, mate.

Anyway, that’s enough from me. I hope you enjoy it, but more importantly, I hope this finds someone who needs to hear it.

Cheers Wankers.

X.

“Sam,

You’re in a bad place right now. It’s not a coincidence that you find yourself here. Nor is it because you’ve done anything wrong. You’ve taken on too much. Your desire to satisfy others and your unfairly high expectations of yourself have led you to neglect yourself. You’ve filled your plate to the point where no time or energy is left for you. You’re desperately looking for more time in the day or more energy to get more done. You’re not alone in that.

You feel like the only way to find peace inside your mind is by drinking and using drugs. That’s the only way to get some reprieve from the whirlwind inside of your head. But you hate that this is the way it is. You don’t want to be this way, but you don’t see any other way at the moment. Every Monday, you wake up and swear to yourself you won’t do it again. You mean it from the bottom of your heart. You tell your partner, and you tell your friends, “I’m not doing this shit anymore”. You mean it and want to believe it, but in the back of your mind, you don’t believe that you can do it. You’re starting to wonder how much longer you can tell people you’re done, only to let them and yourself down again until they eventually get sick of it and walk away.

The paradox is that you are completely aware that your behaviours don’t align with your goals. You know they’re holding you back from getting the things you need to do. But the thought of living without them and without that break from your mind is overwhelming. You’re stuck in a cycle. You want to change, but you just feel like you can’t and worry that you’ll lose everything you have if you don’t, but the stress of that alone drives you back to those very behaviours.

Living like this is wearing you down and gradually taking you further and further away from who you once were. Who you truly are at your core. You’re carrying a lot of shame and embarrassment. You don’t feel like this is who you are, and you wonder how the fuck you ended up in this position, crawling around under the dining room table looking for cocaine crumbs at 3 am while your pregnant partner sleeps. But you hate yourself enough to let it happen. You’re exhausted. You’re giving up more and more each day.

You’re doing all you can to lead something of a double life. You’re doing well at work. The bills are paid. Everyone is okay. Everyone except you. At times, you even use this to justify your behaviour to yourself. Deep down, though, you’re not okay with it.

You’re getting tired. Not like a good sleep will fix you, tired, mentally and emotionally exhausted. Carrying secrets around and being dishonest about what you’re doing adds little pieces of straw to your back daily. Sneaking money out of the savings account to pay off drug dealers each week is getting exhausting. You don’t have the energy to do this shit anymore, but you just can’t seem to stop.

You’ve completely isolated yourself now. You don’t go out and drink anymore. Instead, you prefer to sit at home where you feel safe to do drugs and get drunk, free from the ridicule of others. You’ve convinced yourself that no one else on the planet feels or has felt the way that you feel. No one could possibly understand, so how could you ever tell anyone about it? They’ll only make you feel worse than you already do.

Soon, this weight will become too much, what you’ve been doing is unsustainable, and you’re about to find out the hard way. I know you want to stop. You want to stop more than just about anything and hate that you can’t. It’s not often you can’t do something you set your mind to, and it crushes you to feel powerless to change this.

You’re approaching a fork in the road, and very soon, you’ll be faced with a decision. A decision that logically seems so simple, yet for the first time in your life, you’re genuinely considering making what you know is the worst decision of all. It’s not your fault that you feel this way. You never meant to hurt anyone, but wonder if your existence is more harmful than hurtful to those around you.

Luckily, at the eleventh hour, when the shit hits the fan, after four days of inebriation, thousands of dollars spent and a 3:30 am breakdown on the lounge room floor, you give up. It goes against everything you’ve ever thought. But you realise you can’t do this anymore. You’re too tired. It’s too hard. Something’s gotta give. You can have your job, partner and unborn baby, or you can have this other life, but you can not have both. You’ve been trying everything in your power to have both for months and have now proven to yourself that it’s impossible. In that moment, you surrender to the knowledge that you have to get sober. There is no alternative.

You don’t realise it now, but it’s the best decision you’ve ever made.

The next 21 months are a wild ride. It’s a different ride to what you’re used to, but wild all the same.

It’s scary. You know that there are unresolved mental health issues waiting there for you that you walked away from in the past. The idea of facing them without your old coping mechanisms is terrifying.

Naively, you think that if you get sober, your brain will kind of, untangle itself and recalibrate on its own. This isn’t the case, but don’t let that scare you off. Believing this gets you through the early stages of sobriety.

One of the smartest things you do is tell yourself that you don’t have to worry about never drinking again. You tell yourself that you just need to stop drinking for long enough for this magical brain you think you have to repair itself. This is a good idea. Telling yourself you’ll never drink again is a form of pressure and expectation, the two things that had a lot to do with getting yourself into this mess in the first place. This teaches you probably the most valuable lesson you can learn in sobriety. You only have to worry about not drinking right now. Just don’t drink today.

You learn that you don’t need to worry about future decisions around drinking or drug use because the future never comes. It’s always just past an arm’s reach away, so why worry about it?

You go it alone for months. You write about it a bit, but for the most part, apart from one or two friends, you struggle to really embrace sobriety. You’re probably not even really sober; you’re just not drinking and using drugs.

Soon, you will learn that the sober part is easy. It’s coping that you struggle with. As the mental fog clears, you find yourself in many situations that would once drive you to substances, and you struggle to cope with it. But you cope.

In time, you become more comfortable with your sobriety and start reaching out to more people. You begin to see that you’re not special or unique like you thought you were. There are millions of people just like you, and the majority of them are amazing.

Gradually, you make a shift away from the people you used to spend a lot of time with and surround yourself with more like-minded people. Initially, you worry about that a lot, but you learn that this is natural. There is nothing wrong with them. There is no animosity, and you remain friends with a lot of these people. You’re often surprised at how supportive people are of your sobriety and realise you don’t need to be so scared of telling them what you’re doing and why.

You’re probably thinking, “Why the fuck do I want to go through all this?” and I get it.

You can’t keep doing what you’re doing. You can’t stay stagnant, either. If you’re not moving forward, you’re moving backwards.

In time, you will see that the most rewarding and fulfilling things correlate directly with the level of difficulty of the things you’re going through. The best things are on the other side of hard.

Day by day, you start to feel more and more like your old self, but better.

You know that psychologist you’ve been talking about going back to but keep lying to yourself and saying you don’t have time? You go back. But this time, you make progress because you mentally show up from a better place. It’s slow, but it’s progress.

You get healthier and feel better physically.

The reduced isolation and shame means your relationships improve. Some of them take some work, but you become a better partner, brother and son in time.

You have a fucking amazing son who has never seen you drunk or high. For the first time in your life, you feel unconditionally loved by someone. You experience this special kind of love that only a parent would know, and you have the clarity of mind to feel it in its fullest form. It’s amazing.

You realise that even though you believed your actions weren’t hurting anybody else, they were. Badly. You realise that your partner should have left you, more than once. But she doesn’t. You spend countless hours trying to work out why she hasn’t. But she sees something in you that you couldn’t for so long. Your constant focus on the bad things you’ve done has conditioned you to believe that all you ever did was bad. But somehow, she sees the good in you. She knows that the version of yourself you have wanted to become for so long is in there. You still don’t feel deserving of her. She’s been selfless in standing by you and supporting you, and you hope that one day you can repay her in some way, even though she says you don’t need to. You’re very fucking lucky, Sam. And although you’re not very good at showing it, you’re equally as grateful.

Eventually, you get to a point where people come to you for advice on sobriety. Friends, friends of friends, friends and family of others who are struggling. At first, it’s a bit weird, and you’re reluctant to offer anything up, but you become more comfortable with it and get better at it in time.

As you start to serve others and see your impact on their lives, you start to feel this incredibly foreign yet nice feeling. You’re learning to be proud of yourself.

Do you know that feeling you thought you’d get after buying your first house or running your first marathon, only to feel deflated because it didn’t make you feel how you wanted it to?

You find that feeling. The feeling you’ve been seeking for so long. You find it in serving others. You get it everywhere. You get it changing your son’s nappy, even the gross ones, or helping him walk up the stairs at home for the first time.

You get it when your mate rings you and drops a bombshell about his drug use, and you help him navigate the early stages of sobriety.

You get it when you create an online support group, and people actually fucking join! Then, they actually talk, and it’s fucking great chat!

It’s hard, man. Believe me, I know.

But the thing is, you’re in a better place now than you ever have been, and it’s because of this journey. It’s the hard shit that you’ve done that has got you here. You feel more than you ever have before. You’re healthier than you’ve ever been before. You’ve surrounded yourself with amazing, like-minded people. You’re slowly inching towards that version of yourself you’ve always wanted to be.

You’re doing things you wanted to do but never had the courage. Stuff you thought was weak or would make you look feminine, and you openly talk about it. Your fear of what others think is slowly but surely disappearing. You sit at the beach with your eyes closed, counting your breaths for 11 minutes straight with people walking by, and you don’t care. You’re writing about gratitude and feelings each night before bed, and it makes you feel good.

You just… feel better more of the time.

You’re finally learning to let your walls down and let people love you without wondering what they want from you. You’re understanding that for some people, you, as you are, are enough. You still don’t get it or see what they see in you, but you’ve learned to accept it and let them. It feels amazing.

Most importantly, though, mate, by learning to let others in and love you, slowly but surely, you’re learning that you’re not so bad after all.

Finally, you’re learning to love yourself for nothing more than who you are.

I’m excited for you to get here.”

Click Here to join our Sobering Thoughts Chat Group. Whether you’re sober, sober curious, have someone in your life in sobriety or active addiction, or you think you could help people who are struggling, we’d love to have you!

We’ve already got a bunch of legends in there sharing incredible stories and supporting one another. Jump in. You have nothing to lose!

Click here to check my other blogs. Follow me on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter @sbrngthghts.

Make sure you check out my Writing 4 Resilience friends. They’re all legends.

Running for Resilience Ben Alexander Brent Ford Running Rare The Milkbar Reflections of a Clare Bear

If anyone is struggling in any way, make someone aware of it. Speak to a friend, family, loved one, stranger, postman, Uber Eats driver, or me; talk to someone.

Lifeline Ph: 13 11 14

Alcoholics Anonymous Ph: 1300 222 222

NSW Mental Health Line Ph: 1800 011 511

Suicide Call Back Service Ph: 1300 659 467

Mensline Australia Ph: 1300 78 99 78

Kids Helpline Ph: 1800 55 1800

A Letter to My Past Self was originally published in Raising a Beautiful Mind on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.