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The Daily Check-in for 8 November 2024 - just for today, we are not drinking!
(self.stopdrinking)
Hi again!
Still sober; A few years in with hopefully more in the future. I am going to preface this with a trigger warning. I may touch on some dark spots that recently sober people probably will not want to read. tl; dr: Sobriety isn't all rainbows and unicorn farts.
The last few days have been rough, but yet, here I am. Even before the recent political chaos, I was already in a seriously dark nihilistic phase for some reason, so that sucked.
Strangely enough, my recent cravings are not specifically about drinking, but more about numbing myself to the world for just a few short hours. Alcohol just happens to be the only crutch I know that does that in just the perfect way.
In retrospect, craving alcohol was just a symptom of deeper issues I needed to resolve.
I have mentioned several times that I do not particularly care for AA or its methodology, but damn does it get a ton of things right about how the brain of a drunk works. In my case specifically, me getting caught up in issues I can't control and problems I can't solve was pointing me square into the depths of a bottle. My unwillingness to resolve the things I could control was also pointing me in the wrong direction. The feedback loop of my problems being everyone else's fault had started once again.
Alcohol is my faux cocoon. It can and will give me a few short hours of relief where I truly don't care about anyone or anything else. That is the temptation for me now when it used to be about just getting a fix. For better or for worse, life seemed much simpler when I was numb.
When we take a step back and look at the world and even everything we know about the universe, our individual lives actually don't matter one bit. After the awe wore off from seeing pictures of recently discovered black hole jets that extended for 23 million light years into the void, I was left wondering how many thousands of planets it must have wiped clean over the time it took form. How many other solar systems and societies did the universe just extinguish at random? Needless to say, it took a bit of mental gymnastics to justify how me not drinking a beer would actually matter to anyone or anything here in even just 10 years time. It absolutely isn't a concern of the universe as whole if you choose to think about things that way.
But I will say, yet again, here I am. I am here again typing out a carbon copy of the same story we all share in one way or another and have collectively typed out millions of times over. At the end of the day we do this because it works. It solves a problem I have now, on this planet in this solar system and in our universe.
What I think the overall point of this was, is that coming to terms with our own insignificance can be challenging, if not repetitive. Without a doubt, my own insignificance was (and still is) a driver for my alcoholism. Life is an interesting thing and is as beautiful as it is brutal.
So, pending any solar system destruction events, I will not drink with you today.