29 days, 31st birthday

Long time lurker, first time poster. I'm sorry for the wall of text and possible grammar errors as english is not my first language.

Today is a special day for me. Today I turn 31 years old, which by all means isn't that special, but today also marks 29 days sober for me. On top of that this is the first birthday since I was 18 years old that I'm spending sober.

Alcohol has been present in my life more or less since I was a kid. I had a good childhood with very loving parents. When I hit my teenage years they started to have terrible marital problems and began drowning their sorrows in alcohol (eventually in the future they divorced). During these times it was my turn to be introduced properly to alcohol and me and my friend group would often seek for someone older who could buy us some beer and/or we'd steal from our parents bottles and get shitfaced. Oh wow was that exciting back then.

When my parents divorced I moved with my mom and lived with her until I turned 18 and moved on my own. I was still going to high school. Everything was going good and it felt great to have my own little apartment, as well as to experience what it was like to be an adult for the first time.

Something, at some point happened and I remember going to the store after school and walked down the beer aisle and did grab few with me "to wind down" after long day at school (in my country you can buy beer after turning 18 from a regular grocery store). Went home, watched some TV series, had my few beers and thought to myself this is kinda nice. Eventually, this became a habit, and the habit grew bigger and worse.

Near to the graduation I had taken on daily drinking, 90% of the time it was not just few beers, and obviously it had started to affect my performance as well. Not all too bad, but enough to have my class supervisor to ask if everything was ok. Well, everything was ok IMO, there was just "a lot of stuff" going on in my life. That's what I said. Eventually and miraculously I graduated with okayish grades. Summer began, so did my 2 years of unemployment and daily drinking which got heavier and heavier.

A lot of happened during those two years and honestly much of it is blur. One of the worst moments was when I was taken to the ER in a police car due to me being extremely drunk and calling long distance friend, crying and telling her that I can't take it anymore. She was worried sick, and when she couldn't get hold of me after that, she called for help. I don't remember the call but I do remember the police showing up at my door and eventually sitting in the back of the police car on my way to the ER. This is how my mother got to know I have an issue, and was she worried sick. I was 20 years old. 

Eventually I managed to find a job which forced me to slow down a little. The daily drinking didn't disappear right away and the times I went hungover to work can't be counted, I still managed to show up for work and function. Gradually things started to slowly change. This job also was the gateway to my present career, which I genuinely like. As time went on the daily drinking turned into weekend drinking, which felt like an improvement.

But yeah, alcohol never really left my life. It just found a different place in it..

For the past several years I've considered myself "a weekend warrior" and would always be more than happy to go out drinking if anyone asked. I've gone out of my way to find a reason to party/drink, especially after moving from a smaller town to a bigger city after my job, where's always somewhere to go and something to do. If I didn't go out, I'd drink at home. I've been great at telling myself that since this isn't a daily habit, it's ok. For so long.

Especially during the past two years 99% of my weekends started turning into terrible binges. Sometimes, and often mostly the weekend wouldn't end on sunday and the drinking would continue into the following week and I'd blackout more times than I'd want to admit. I'd end up exhausted, very, very anxious, remorseful, feeling like absolutely shit, take many, many days to recover promising myself this is the last time, and eventually do it all over again. Almost each time it getting worse. Ohh and I've done and said more embarrassing shit while drunk than I care to remember.

29 days ago I was on last days of my trip, which was supposed to be well deserved summer holiday vacation abroad but turned into two weeks of heavy drinking. By the last day my body had had enough. I was vomiting, my stomach was fucked up, I couldn't keep anything down and felt like hell. On top of the physical suffering I was so ashamed and sad I had managed to turn something I had been looking forward to for months into another recovery shitshow from drinking, but now I wasn't even sure if I was able to catch flight back home due to how horrible I was feeling and if I needed to go to the hospital.

I managed to catch my flight and got home, sick, exhausted and ashamed with a feeling of being completely done of doing this to myself. After the trip I still had one week of vacation which I spent feeling the way described in the last sentence. Sick and exhausted.

The past 29 days have not been easy. I've been tired, really tied at times and definitely when there is good days, there is bad days as well.

Somewhere around three week mark I started noticing something unexpected. I actually started to find joy in really small things after so long. As example buying myself a journal and sitting down to write in it. Having a good cup of tea. Going for a walk or a run and just looking at how beautiful the view is now that the autumn is here. The sense of relief not waking up hungover and ashamed and the joy of getting my weekends back.

This all brings me to this day.

I don't know what the future holds and 29 days isn't that long time, but it's the longest I've been sober in so, so many years. I'm afraid to say "never again" but all I know is that I don't want to go back to where I was.

Not entirely sure why I felt the need to write all of this. I suppose today just felt like a day worth sharing. So thank you for letting me share this with you. And thank you for reading.

IWNDWYT.