One Year Dry

2004-09-29 - 10:13 a.m.

The subject line for this one will be easy.

Today is my one year anniversary of my last ever drink. Boy was it a doozy.

So, I've made it a year...now what?

In other news, I've been finding pennies around a lot. Here's hoping the luck holds out.

In even more other news, I won the "take a day off" contest at work. Typical, I guess, that just when I'm having trouble and planning to quit that I suddenly win one of the only major perks. I hope I don't appear ungrateful.

So, here's where my thoughts go when I'm faced with drinking:

"Am I sure that I couldn't have just one beer? It would taste great and, after going so long without, I'd probably get a pretty decent buzz off of it and wouldn't need to drink any more afterwards, and then I'd feel like I belong with everyone else, and life would be perfect."

Jeez...I wish the world really did work the way I sometimes think it does.

In the real world, I'd drink and drink and drink. Maybe not all at once, but my psychology doesn't allow for a difference between one drink and a hundred. I'm fairly convinced that one drink would make it easier to have the next and that while I might be able to maintain the illusion of being a healthy, normal drinker for a few weeks, a binge would be inevitable. Months from now, I'd be drinking as much as I used to. That's not a workable solution.

Some non-drinkers celebrate their anniversaries, calling them "birthdays". I don't want to call this a birthday. I'm happy that I was born, birthdays are happy times for me. I'm not happy with how I finally decided to quit for good. It was a horrible night for anyone involved in it, I was hurt pretty badly, and I hurt Pookie pretty badly, and it just was a great big night of crap. I kind of wish that I hadn't stopped drinking then, just so my anniversaries wouldn't have that history attached to them. Maybe, if I can go for 10 years, I'll throw myself a party in April or December or something, get totally wasted, and start over again, using that new date as my "birthday". Or maybe not. That idea seems suspiciously like a tricky way to get drunk.

I want to mark this day somehow, though. I just can't think of a way that's appropriate. Buy myself a gift? What kind of gift? Should I be patting myself on the back? Should I light a candle, or maybe pray or something? Give thanks? Am I happy about being dry for a year? Or am I feeling contemplative or melancholy?

I don't know.

Also, I've had the sniffles all day today and I'm worried that it's a head cold.

Cheers,

The Magus

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