July 3rd - Day 183 in Posso's Prompts

It’s been too long since I’ve wrote something to share with the public. I figured this would be as good an update as any seeing that I am having a hell of a time sleeping at this girl’s place with no air conditioning. Reminds me of last summer, ironically and sadly.
July brought on six months of me being sober and over three months of being completely clean of any substance other than the occasional pain medication for aches and doctors visits. I haven’t gotten high since I was doing treatment (and since my plug suddenly passed away after just starting his cancer treatment in April.)

I started this as an attempt to keep myself not only entertained with stories and ideas but to try to pivot and keep my course on not drinking. I realized, that after awhile I thought it was more about entertaining others over myself. That spoke to me as commonly, one of the things therapy has provided is one of an outlook that I used alcohol to not only cope with my unhappiness but to also entertain everyone else without caring for my own well being.

Giving up on creating a new entry everyday wasn’t just out of laziness though. The world started to speed up to me. There were other things I wanted to do, people I finally wanted to hang out with again, break out into the social scene and make it known that I still wanted to hang out with friends and that I was capable of doing so without pounding whiskeys and screaming at pretty girls about how much I loved them.

There were many entries that I made that opened myself up to being vulnerable and in a way was a stress in itself - I don’t necessarily go out of my way to expose my insecurities to people, friends and strangers and as healing and contradictory as it made it, I still wasn’t being completely honest with myself - there were still words, poems, stories that I wanted to put down, get out, and realized that I could do that and I didn’t need to share them until I was ready, if that was ever going to be.

I have constructed so many short stories, poems, rambles, and most of all, the last few months I have been working on the screenplay I have told my friends that I would write for the last fifteen years. There isn’t really a theme to it yet, I just put a bunch down on pages and when I’m feeling up to it, I put some things together, delete a lot of shit, rant to myself about how fucking unfunny I actually am, think of something disgusting that drunk me would love to use as a pickup line, and eventually go to work, gamble, workout, get anywhere but in front of a computer or notebook.

The point of this blurb entry, I think, was to actively identify how I gave up alcohol for six months successfully and what has become of my life since it has occurred.

Boring has been a word I find myself quite obsessed with. In a way, it has been great that I feel bored in the sense that I have gone six months without ever having to apologize for anything that I cannot remember doing. At times when I do have free time and am alone, the thought that I would just get drunk and wander into random watering holes that I would frequent for years just to cause some trouble and spend a ton of money trying to impress makes me realize that I did have a problem. I don’t think I am an alcoholic by the standards that the word has devolved into - After not having it for a couple weeks, I wasn’t going through any physical symptoms; there hasn’t been any craving that I can’t insatiate by not having booze - the ‘alcoholic’ that conformed to me was how much I needed it in a social setting thinking I had to be drunk just to fit in and keep my friends happy. Sure, there were points, especially in the last few years where I used whiskey to take away physical and emotional pain, but coming to the sober realization that I didn’t need to do that combined with the eye opening journey that if I would have successfully killed myself that it would have been so regrettable and selfish - that I didn’t want to die and I was unsure of what to do with my life in the state it was in - lead me to realize that I just needed to step away from my social circle, dry out and get my head right the appropriate and healthy way.

While the journey has been long, struggle-filled and definitely lonely at times, all of that factored into my healing process. I wasn’t happy. I hadn’t been in ages, and when I finally had felt that happiness and especially in a time last summer while I was going through so much physical pain, it was a new situation for me and when I’m thrown into new things I handle them in the same unhealthy ways. Having to tell myself that I treated the woman I fell in love with wrongly and then blamed everything on myself without ever owning my behavior lead to an internal struggle where I was saying to myself this year that I had to find someone else to fall in love with so they could get to know me without ever seeing the drunken fool side of me and I only had a year to do it because once I have no bet on drinking that I could easily go back to the habit of being the weekend warrior clown mess. The fact that I kept skipping in my head though was and still has been - if I like myself without alcohol, do I ever have to go back, and if I am worried about that ever being an issue, why drink again?

Regrettably, I’ve done some stupid, idiotic, messy things in the past and almost all of them have occurred with alcohol as a factor. Years have gone by but in this last six months I’ve been enlightened by the idea that I can make myself happy and I should care about myself before I stick my neck out for others and help friends with their problems. It’s okay to be selfish in that regard. Too many people worry about others before they take care of themselves and when its too late its really too late. Look at how many comedians you can think of that have taken their lives, died early, or just outright quit and disappeared off of the face of the earth. They decide to ignore their own well being to make money off of others happiness and eventually not taking care of themselves catches up to them. Frankly, I realized, albeit way too late, that I need to change this path of my own life. I might be bored at times but I can truly say that I have become happier with myself. The healing of years of sickness from cancer treatments and the myriad of related problems has finally been noticeable. It’s an inexplicable feeling but I can just tell I’m healing. There are days I wake up where my groin hurts. I can feel shooting pains - and that’s something I haven’t been able to do for years. Writing for myself makes me smile. The amount of books I’ve read in this six month period mirrors the amount I read for five years of college.

The hardest things for me to accept have been living with the things I regret. There are days where my mind wanders and picks up a random drunk memory from one of the bars, from Casie, Heather, Kylie, Michelle, Shanna, Carole or any other girl I hurled insults, spewed shitty word vomit at, nights where I fought friends in streets, wrecked havoc when it was unnecessary. I hit an incredibly and inexplicably hard patch for about a week where I stayed up for almost three straight days, composing, rewording, and deleting texts, messages, letters to exes, old friends, relatives. Never being one for letting time ‘heal all wounds’ I felt that if I had gone through multiple cancer bouts, multiple attempts at drunkenly offing myself, that I would really regret it if I didn’t say my thought and put my mind at ease for once and try to move on from the guilt I felt from months of soberly meditating on these wrongdoings.

It went about as well as you’d expect. Lots of ignores, “Fuck you, Posso,” “Lose this number,” “I’ll never forgive you.” Harsh. Reminded me of being the lead character in a movie where you fuck up and everyone decides to find a new hero. Quickly realizing that this was probably not the greatest way to go off the beaten path and ‘wing it’ with your therapists advice and stick to the plan of self love, I deleted and blocked all numbers I had, all traces of social media that would connect me to these ridiculous attempts at keyboard warrior forgiveness. The next day, I got one response from someone I had expected to just ignore me and move on with her day like she had been for the years I had burnt the already janky bridge we built our goofy friendship on. I didn’t expect anyone to just forgive, forget, move on - but when my friend Casie answered me and we started talking after over 2 years of silence, it just felt good to know that I could still be given a chance to be important in an old friends livelihood.

It was just so out there at the end of April but I think I was coming to terms with finally owning my own streak of shitty behavior and looking for validation that I wasn’t a completely terrible, broken and lost person. Having Casie back in my life has been great for me in terms of having a bond and connection with someone that just isn’t there in anyone else but it also made me realize that I had completely cut out all of those bonds while I was trying to take care of myself and it had made me more lonely than I probably needed to be. Compelled to keep getting better, and missing some of my friends dearly, I started venturing out to bars and social functions again. Not drinking is incredibly easy and given being a bartender, saying no to offers of shots and drinks has been as quick as a classic eyeroll from me. Seeing what its like when I am sober and my friends are drunk is definitely eye opening. There isn’t meant to be judgement in that statement but rather an acknowledgment and acceptance that I may have been quite an irregular and unnecessary handful to many people for many a year. Realizing that I could be around the shenanigans without having to take over and be king of the shitshow has made it incredibly comforting that I don’t ever have to do that again and its really obvious now that I needed that to reveal itself in my sober eyes.

Hindsight isn’t meant to dwell on and I have a terrible tendency to do so but the fact is - I have gone through a multitude of emotions and mental states and the one I am currently in with my own self and sobriety is one that I denied myself of way too long and it’s only right that I give that to others now as they could use it just as much as I have been able to. Drinking used to be fun for me, and I don’t think I’ll be ready to drink again until I can guarantee that it’s for my own entertainment first. Once I can establish the boundaries in my head and keep enforcing that ultimately it shouldn’t fucking matter if I am drunk or not if you want my companionship or love, will I be comfortable with having a whiskey and water with you. If it’s going to take more than a year of forced sobriety and a poker bet, then so be it. I’m not missing that part of me at all.

Hopefully, I’ll string some stuff together a little more often in the next few weeks, after all, there are some stories we need to share and criminal records that need explaining.

I’ll leave you with the end of a chapter I wrote in a book about my failed romances.

I don’t want to write the ending to us because I don’t want us to be over this way. Everyone remembers the bad endings because they don’t want them as their own.