Day One

No, you didn’t fall asleep in a time machine and wake up in 2015 and yes, you read that right… Today is day one of my second year of sobriety.

A few of my close friends and family knew this was coming, and if you’re just finding out now, your reaction is probably similar to theirs.

“What? Why?”

Well, I have my reasons. Some of which I’ll share, and some of which will stay in my diary (oh I’m keeping a diary again too, only for the really dirty laundry though, don’t worry).

Reason #1: My current hangover.
On January 1st 2016, I gathered a bunch of friends to help me celebrate my year of sobriety. We went to a bar and I drank… a lot. I celebrated 365 sober days, by binge drinking and making some questionable life choices that night. Alanis Morissette could’ve written a verse or two about that irony.
The next morning, and by morning, I mean 4pm when I finally could get out of bed, I called my mom, and she said something that hit me like a ton of bricks. “Did you just go right back to where you started?” She was talking about who I was before my year of sobriety, which sounds harsh, I know, but she had/has a point.
One of the biggest reasons I wanted to do a sober year was to understand my relationship with alcohol and re-introduce it back into my life in a healthy, adult way.
Since I started drinking again, I’ve struggled a lot with this. There are some days I don’t feel the need to drink and there are some days that I do, and on those days, sometimes it’s difficult for me to have just one, sometimes it’s not. I don’t know if this is normal or if it’s addiction or if I’m just feeling guilty about all those times I didn’t have just one. What I do know is that I’ve repeated the binge drinking, questionable decision making a few too many times since my first day back in 2016, and honestly, I’m getting too old for this sh#%. Which leads me to…

Reason #2: I miss my sober body.
I was in the best shape of my life in 2015. Not only was I not drinking all the sugar and extra calories found in wine and spirits, but I was also really bored a lot and so I worked out all the time. By mid-April in 2015, I was running 5 miles a day 5 or 6 days a week. (I was also on the breakup diet which may have contributed to some extra weight loss, but whatever). I miss my sober body so much!
I literally (and I mean literally, not just white-girl-literally) just placed an Uber-Eats delivery for a breakfast burrito from some place I’ve never heard of in North Hollywood (not the nice Arts district, I mean real North Hollywood) because it’s the only greasy spoon open on New Year’s Day. This habit of drinking the night before and eating greasy food the next day to curb a hangover has been, well, a habit for me lately and I feel like a real garbage person because of it. That doesn’t mean I won’t treat myself to the occasional cheat day this year, it just means that when I do eat like garbage, it won’t be to feed the party demon still lingering in my body from the night before.

Reason #3: I need a do-over.
I think I made a few big mistakes coming back from my first year of sobriety. I think I was overly-confident and somewhat blind to everything I went through that year. I think I pushed a lot of bad stuff down and didn’t deal with some things, that maybe deserved a closer look. I realize I’m being extremely vague right now, but I’m just not ready to go into detail yet. Maybe I will be at some point this year, or maybe it’ll be an entry for that diary, but either way, I’m ready to clean out the rest of those dusty, old skeletons in my proverbial closet.

Reason #4, #5, #6….
There are tons of other reasons for this decision. Some of which, I probably haven’t even realized yet. Maybe I will, or maybe there aren’t, or maybe this is my last ditch effort to get this blog to go viral, just kidding, I think. Regardless, I will be here this year, sharing my thoughts and experiences with any of you who care to read them.

I’m a bag of mixed emotions right now, excited, scared, a little barfy, but I’m ready. I hope 2018 is ready too.