I am not dead!

I am not dead! Or relapsed, either. I've just been sick with the flu and a little bit down due to my being unemployed and not knowing what to do with myself during the working hours. I'm getting interviews and call backs, so this should be temporary, but until then, I've got my fingers crossed.

I'm off to an interview right now, as a matter of fact!

There are always reasons

YesterdayI had a doctor's appointment. My doc is closing up shop for some semi-retirement, and I'm gonna miss him. He's the sort of no-nonsense guy that I need for a medical professional, because as self-aware as I sometimes appear, I'm the king of denial when it comes to actually living my life. He's been urging me to think about quitting my drinking ever since I first saw him to get out of a really terrible anxiety period, and I was looking forward to telling him about my progress (6 months tomorrow).

He was happy for me, but he had something more serious to discuss. Last year I went to a sleep assessment thing, where they hook you up to a bunch of wires and tubes in a lab and expect you to get a good night's sleep while they watch you through a camera. One of the most uncomfortable experiences I've ever done. I was supposed to go to a follow up appointment, but ended up missing it due to a combination of anxiety and alcoholism. Well, my doc had the results, and now I've got one more reason to stay sober.

I have "Very Severe" sleep apnea, which means that I stop breathing when I sleep. It took a moment for me to process the words "very severe", because my doctor doesn't throw those wordss around at random. I guess during the sleep study I stopped breathing long enough for them to register a dip in my blood oxygen levels over 350 times. In one night. My doc said those periods were all very short (and I answered: "Of course they're short! At 350 times a night, if they were long I wouldn't be breathing at all!"), but because of the related health issues around apnea (including increased risk of stroke and heart disease), it's pretty serious.

Then my doc explained something about sleep apnea and alcohol. When someone stops breathing when they're sleeping, their oxygen levels in their blood start to drop. Most often, the brain detects this drop, says "uh-oh!" and then wakes you up so that you can start breathing again. Now, in the intoxicated brain, this signal doesn't always get through. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how an alcoholic dies in his sleep and then traumatizes his life partner by forcing him to wake up to a dead body one morning.

So, today I have to call the sleep clinic and schedule another session. I'm hoping that the combination of sobriety, getting more excercise, and not smoking pot will all lead to a better diagnosis, but I'll probably have to be one of those guys who sleeps with a face mask for the rest of my life.

But I was drinking heavily for months after that first sleep test, which means I stopped breathing more than 30,000 times, many of those times after drinking huge volumes of alcohol. I have no idea how many times I escaped death, but let's just say I've got another good reason to stay away from alcohol.

By A Thread

I had a close call over the weekend. Not with booze, (for those keeping track, Thursday is my 6-month-a-versary) but with another addiction (habit? dependence? Labels, ugh.) that I don't talk much about on here, because I'm still sorting things through: pot.

Not to go into the details, but I've smoked a fair bit of marijuana. I don't have as near a bad relationship with it as I do with alcohol, but I've noticed that I do tend to use it to replace alcohol, and especially being booze-free has made me more aware of what effect pot was having on my life. Last month, to coincide with my booze-free date, I stopped smoking pot.

The plan in this case is similar to what the booze plan was: set a date when I could start smoking again, and then see what happens. The date is in about a month, but yesterday, after a nice brunch with friends, one of the friends produced a joint for the walk home. I really wanted to partake, and in the moment my resistance was about as tough as a soggy paper bag. When the joint came my way, I demured, but I know without a doubt that if anyone had said "Oh, come on," I would have accepted without hesitation.

This sort of thing worries me, but I'm not letting it get me down. Because I refused in the first place. And that's a kind of progress.

But I what I DO need to do is re-evaluate. If I am to live completely sober, I need stronger defences and stronger motivations. Sometimes we're hanging by a thread, and that thread is the greatest thing in the world, because we're still hanging, not falling. But even spider silk has its limits, and I could definitely use a safety net.

When a grown man cries

So, here is a description of me:

I am 6', 260lbs, short dark hair, glasses (unless I'm playing rugby), often with a beard but currently just a little patch of well-trimmed hair on my chin, broad shoulders, thick legs, used to be "barrel-shaped" but 6 months of going to the gym and not drinking booze mean I am getting more triangle-shaped. 35, but on a good day I (hope I) look closer to 30. I have all of my hair and none of it is grey.

So, while I'm basically a delicate kitten, I look like a giant clumsy bear.

Which is why one of the funniest things (to me) about being sober is how much its turned me into a bit of an emotional cream puff. The latest example is watching an episode of How I Met Your Mother last night when one of the characters' father dies at the end of the episode, and here's me, this big, bearded guy, sniffling into my kleenex for a good fifteen minutes after the credits rolled.

But, the thing is, I'll trade that little crying jag for any of the drunken-binge-inspired sob fests any day. I suspect I don't "cry pretty" when I'm loaded off my ass.

Anxiety

So, a few years ago I was diagnosed with social anxiety disorder. I knew I had it, because it was clear that I find social situations more difficult to handle than the average person. It leads me to avoid social situations. I don't enjoy meeting new people (I like people, but unless I have a "script", eg working in a customer service situation, I get anxious about what I'm saying). There are people who have anxiety worse than I do, and most of the time I manage. On a day-to-day basis, I can go to work, for example.

But every now and then my anxiety spikes. It becomes a challenge to even leave the house. At times it's been so bad that I haven't left my bed except for bathroom breaks. I've avoided the windows of my ground-level apartments, for fear that someone would see me. It's not fun.

There's a corollation between people who have a mental illness and abuse drugs or alcohol. I think it's called self-medicating, because the booze (or drugs) can provide relief in the short term, even though neurologically alcohol and drugs may actually make the mental illness worse. So, I might use a few drinks* when I'm out with friends to take some of the edge off, but my anxiety would be worse for probably the next week or so. Which means I have more motivation to drink.

Of course, even when I was drunk, the anxiety was still there. Which is why I much prefered to just get drunk when I was home, alone. The drinking would dull the anxiety, and because I was safe at home, I didn't have to worry about socialising with anyone. Also, booze at the liquor store is cheaper than booze at the bar.

Towards the end of my drinking, especially last summer, it was becoming clear that drinking was a failing strategy for dealing with my anxiety. I'm not sure if it was biological or what, but suddenly (I have no idea how sudden it actually was. I noticed it suddenly) drinking socially turned me into a passive aggressive paranoid asshole. I didn't like my friends, I didn't like myself, and I could tell that I was not a very fun person to be around. A few of us went on a camping trip and I was seriously a giant jerk the whole time. I was pissed off constantly, felt like all of their jokes excluded me, that they weren't listening to my ideas. I was miserable, and I don't think it's a coincidence that there are plans for a camping trip next summer that don't include me. I wouldn't have included me, based on how I was acting last year.

One of my hopes with not drinking was that it would help me get a handle on my anxiety and prevent things like that camping trip from happening again. I'm happy to report that socially I'm not so much of a misfit. I'm not angry at everyone anymore, and that's a huge, HUGE payoff.

The anxiety is still there, though. I'll feel it sometimes when I'm with groups. Sometimes it's just out-and-out fear, and sometimes it's a sense of...closing myself off, like the world is full of cotton and I just can't manage the effort to hear what other people are doing and just want to find a corner to myself. Sometimes, the happiest I am at parties is when the party is going on all around me and I'm left by myself. But sometimes the most miserable I am at parties is when it's going on around me and I'm left by myself. You can imagine how frustrating that is.

I'm experiencing some high level anxiety lately. I don't know how long it will last. I have 4 more days of work left, and I hope that that helps a bit. I'm worried that it will cause me to freeze when I renew my job hunt, which would be disastrous. I have an appointment with my GP soon, so I will probably bring this up...but since I will be unemployed and without a drug plan, I may just have to endure it until it passes.





*This is a typical alcoholic's dodge, by the way: there's no such thing in my life as "a few drinks". When I use that phrase, please substitute "a significantly large number of drinks".

Disappointment and Risk

So, one of the things about being sober is learning how to live with emotions. When I began on this path, I suspected that anxiety would be the hardest for me to overcome. I've had some form of anxiety or another for most of my life, usually it's "social anxiety", I get nervous and often try to avoid social situations. There's a picture of me when I must have been 4 or 5 years old, dressed in a Superman costume, huddled in my dad's lap at a school's halowe'en party. I remember that party because I was too scared to go and play with any of the kids. My mom still has that picture, and it's kind of hillarious: superman, huddled and frightened and needing his dad.

And don't get me wrong: dealing with my anxiety sober has been challenging, but it isn't the hardest, and I found that out last night.

I think I've mentioned that I'm leaving my job. There are a few reasons that I won't go into just now (but, hey, if you happen to be in a leadership position, maybe take some time today to acknowledge the hard work that your subordinates are doing for you), but I don't have anything concrete lined up, so for the first time in 6 years I will be unemployed.

Yesterday I found out that a job I wanted went to someone else, and that crushed me. It's the first time I've been disappointed since quitting drinking, and so the need to drink came at me as a surprise. And it's because this is what I've always done when things didn't turn out okay: I would make a bee-line to the nearest liquor store, load up, go home and binge and watch movies until I passed out. I don't have much practice being disappointed and sober.

So instead I went home, told the bf that I didn't get the job, and that I needed him to hug me, tell me it was okay, and that I could deal with this without drinking. By the time I asked him to say all that, I knew I wasn't going to drink, but I needed to hear someone else tell me, just to feel a little bit better.

So, it's the next day, and the disappointment is fading. I'm burying it under loads of "sour grapes" reasoning: the commute would have been too far, right? And it was more of a lateral move. I wouldn't have liked some of the people. Blah blah blah. I'm still disappointed, but there are other emotions moving in. Fear and uncertainty about my future, but also hope and determination. I'm stronger now than I've been in a long time, I have every reason to believe I'll land on my feet.

And next time when I have to handle being disappointed and I know I can't drink, I'll have at least had some practice.

Morning people

I'm not supposed to be a morning person. Even as a kid, I liked sleeping in, and the my teenage years took it up a notch: waking up at 3pm was not unheard of.

But this morning, as happens more frequently since I quit drinking, I woke up 30 minutes before the alarm, and since I try to get up at 4:15 so I can hit the gym before work, that means I basically woke up in the middle of the night.

But, I wasn't sleepy. I felt well-rested. Instead of lying there I just got up and made myself a coffee and breakfast and used the extra time to read some favourite websites and catch up on the news. It was nice.

While I was waiting for the water to boil, I thought about how this would have gone down if I were drinking. My mouth would have tasted gross. I would have been tired. I would have had a headache. I would have been sluggish, grumpy, and possibly still drunk. I would have been covered in sweat, and I would have kept the boyfriend awake with my loud snoring.

Oh! Here's a fun fact: because my snoring was so loud, my boyfriend and I have always slept foot-to-head, upside down to each other. For the last month, we've been sleeping with our heads at the same side of the bed. It's much better, because I can listen to him breathe. And he says he sleeps just fine.

Sobriety is good for relationships!