Six Months Sober!

Last night I was reading Alice in Wonderland to #3.

Looking back through the Looking Glass to six months ago, it struck me how much I felt like Alice.

Disappearing into a bottle of vino for a few decades is very much like falling down a rabbit hole.

 Like Alice, I'd picked up a bottle labelled 'Drink Me' and I'd got smaller and smaller.

As Alice gets increasingly tiny, she wonders where it will stop. Will it carry on until she becomes totally extinguished, like a candle? That worried me too!

When you drink, your world gets smaller. It revolves around the next drinking opportunity.  You stop growing, expanding, learning new things. You don't look ahead further than a few hours.

At one stage, Alice says to the white rabbit "How long is forever?" He replies "Sometimes, just one second."

It feels like that, sometimes, when you're waiting for wine o'clock, or when you first quit and you're trying to get through wine o'clock.

But when you stop drinking, slowly your horizons expand. You start looking outward instead of inward. You start planning ahead. You think about what you want to do with your life, not just where to get the next bottle from.

At the beginning, I counted in hours. Then days. Obsessively. I totally understood the maxim of one day at a time. If I looked any further ahead than one day I panicked. What? No more wine forever? Can't compute. Overload....

When I got to four months I stopped counting in days and switched to months. I now, honestly, have no idea what day I'm on.

In fact, I totally forgot yesterday to post on the fact that as of September 2nd 2015 I was SIX MONTHS SOBER. 

I forgot! Who'd have thought it? Curiouser and curiouser.

Now I realise that you use 'one day at a time' until you no longer need it. It's there to stop you worrying about forever (which, in the words of Prince is a very long time) until you can cope with it.

And now, my friends, I can.

Now, after six months, I can truly see myself never drinking again. It doesn't scare me. At all. It's liberating. Exciting. Miraculous.

I'm not, I hope, being smug, or over confident. I'm totally aware how easy it is to fall off the wagon and end up back at Day One. I read stories about people like me doing just that all the time.

I also know about the ups and downs. This time next week I could easily be a shivering wreck again.

But, the point is, right now I am no longer scared. Or miserable. Or feeling denied.

So, if you're at the beginning of this journey, then listen to the King from Alice in Wonderland:

"Begin at the beginning," the King said, very gravely, "and go on till you come to the end: then stop."

And if you're reading this thinking OMG that SoberMummy is totally crazy, then take heed from the Cheshire Cat:

"But I don't want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.

"Oh, you can't help that," said the Cat: "we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad."

"How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice.

"You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn't have come here."

How true....

Love, to all my crazy, mad friends,

 SM x