Getting to 100 Days

If you quit drinking around New Year, then right about now you should be getting to 100 days!

Huge congratulations to SFM, Justonemore, Dr C and my e-mail friend CB for doing just that. Awesome work, my friends.

I looked back at the post I wrote on my own centenary (click here).

The reason 100 days is so significant is not just because it's a pretty number with three digits. It's a massive achievement.

One hundred one-days-at-a-time. Hundreds of battles with the wine witch. Endless sitting on your hands, gritting your teeth and mainlining hot chocolate.

The other reason it's so significant, is that for many of us, the 100 day mark was about when it started getting easier.

There's no immediate change. Everything on this journey happens slowly, slowly. BUT there will come a day, around that point, when you realise that you're not thinking about booze any more.

It's like being stuck in a cell for years, then discovering a window you've never spotted before and, through it, glimpsing freedom.

There will still be cravings. There will still be dark days. There will be episodes of PAWS. BUT you start to realise what it's all been for.

Leonard Cohen wrote:

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.

And that, for me, is how 100 days feels.

(By the way, here's what Leonard Cohen said about drugs: The recreational, the obsessional and the pharmaceutical - I've tried them all. I would be enthusiastically promoting any one of them if they worked.)

You've spent more than three months discovering all the cracks that you used to fill by pouring booze into them (not realising that it was only running out the bottom). You become painfully aware of how imperfect you are....

...but then, around day 100, the light starts to get in. And it all makes sense.

And you realise that without the preceding darkness, you'd never have appreciated the simple beauty of those shafts of light.

And you find that your cracks, your imperfections, are what make you strong and beautiful. They give you wisdom, resilience and empathy.

Once that light gets in, you never want to go back to the endless, oppressive gloom. And that makes the next 100 days so much easier.

So, welcome to the field of bunnies, all you wonderful, strong 100 dayers.

(If you've not heard of the field of bunnies, and want to know how to get there, then click here).

You rock. All of you. Whether you're on Day 100, or Day 1.

SM x

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