One Month, 2nd Time Around

​My first time reaching 1 month sober I was so excited. It was monumental. This time around I’m not excited, I’m not bored with it, I just have one month. Relief?  The month went by so quickly, maybe that I don’t feel I really earned it. It was too easy? Was it easy? Yeah, it was easier than the last “first month” because I wasn’t as steeped into the bottle this time around, I was faking normal drinking. And this time around, I got a shiny red coin to prove my month.
 
I’ve almost completed my drunkalogue.  It is not book worthy! The lows are not the lows that are the hallmarks of a woman spinning out of control for years. It’s a thousand of little cuts into my integrity, self-worth, relationships and health. I’m not trying to compete I know, but sometimes I still wonder, maybe I’m not an alcoholic after all. Even writing that, eek! But indeed my life had become unmanageable, I could control how much I drank. I often blacked out.  
 
 A couple of revelations came out of writing this narrative of my drinking history.
 

1. Personality changes while drinking were there from the start.  As I recalled my first drinking experience at 13, I was the obnoxious loud ringer leader that pushed the group farther into drinking and poor behaviors. That one experience was showed what I was capable of and who I would become 10-15 years later when I drank heavily.
2. Transitions to new situations where people don’t know me (or have expectations of me) results in drinking to “quickly make friends” and drinking too fasta and too much and ending up in compromised situations. My recent relapse when I moved here to China is just one more example, albeit mild, of me reaching for a drink to ease the awkwardness of a friendless new place without society pressure for me to behave. The worst examples of this when I arrived in Ghana for my Peace Corps service. I stumbled in as a disaster when I wasn’t one yet, but there I would start to become one.

 
I’m still going to meetings, mostly I like them, but I continue to bristle at some parts of it. Especially when people seem to discredit those who stopped drinking without AA by calling them a “dry drunk”. I did a lot of work on myself last time around without the formalized steps and that counts, dammit.  But I like the community and support and it can’t hurt my sobriety, right? I also can bare to introduce myself every time I speak to the 3 other people there, and follow my name with “I’m an alcoholic” I can’t buy into it as of yet, but I’ll keep going back until something better comes along, or summer starts and all the group chairs go to other countries for 6 weeks.