Today I am celebrating 60 days alcohol free. I am super proud! I still think about drinking 1000 times a day and while I can go to the store and trust myself not to buy any alcohol I still say to myself “I wanna drink so bad”. Staying stong though! My issue is that i get sad when I think about all the future times that I will no longer be able to drink. As the title says, mouring the loss of drinking. I think about beach vacations, concerts and even when my kids turn 21- we have a bottle of wine put away for each of their birth year vintages, hope that makes sense. I know I can still have fun on vacation and at concerts and such, but I am still sad. Has anyone else felt like getting sober almost feels like mourning a loss?
The short answer to your question is: absolutely, I miss drinking a lot.
Having said that, I have learned to look at it differently. If I really wanted to, I could still partake in drinking, at the risk of losing my health, job, way of living and relationships. That’s a risk profile that is too high for me to enjoy, just like I would not consider car racing, bungy jumping etc., thrilling as they may be.
You are 60 days in and your ‘loss’ is relatively fresh. Over time, you will enjoy experiences without the thrill of drinking and your memories of the good, drunk times will fade to the back. Please just allow yourself a decent amount of time to adjust
I suppose you are kind of mourning a loss, the loss of the life you had before, the loss of the previous version of yourself who drank.
It is more so like the end of a very toxic relationship though rather than the loss of a good friend. Remember how that version of yourself treated you, how they treated others. Remember why you had to end the relationship with them!
Congratulations on your 60 days. You’re doing great!
This feeling comes and goes for me and less and less with time.
I always remind myself that I could partake if I wanted to. Nobody is stopping me from doing that, however the price I have to pay is far greater than the fun of it at this point.
My cravings soon pass as I remember the lowest and darkest of my drinking days.
Well done on your 2 months! At about 30 days, I showed up at AA and started taking the suggestions they gave me for how to grow sobriety, rather than just stack dry days. That helped me to get to the place where I lost the obsession with drinking - with checking what others were drinking, glancing down the beer aisle in the store, regretting not being able to drink, thinking about past drinking episodes, etc. Doing that program, around 3-4 months sober, I suddenly realized I hadn’t thought about drinking per se for two whole days! I was grateful that day, for sure.
It took me years of jumping on and off the merry-go-round of drinking-quitting-relapsing-blackouts before I decided to be done. But once I was done. Like really accepted to the very depth of my soul that there’s absolutely 0 positives to drinking, well… that’s when sobriety stuck. I didn’t mourn it. I don’t miss it. Everything is better without it. My birthday, meals out, celebrations, travelling… everything. Waking up every single morning with full recollection of going to bed the night before is priceless. And I wouldn’t change it for the world.
Even when things suck, I know that alcohol would make things work.
What really helped me was reading a fair number of quitlit books, staying active on this forum, and allowing my mind to accept reality. Alcohol was killing me. It was ruining my life. It was making me blackout and lose time. It got this close to taking absolutely everything from me. I was done picking up the pieces.
My advice is to do a lot of reflection. Maybe really assess whether those events you mentioned were actually improved by drinking. Maybe what made those concerts fun was being there with friends or family and enjoying an event together, not the alcohol.
I went through a phase of feeling like this, and it pops up briefly occasionally. I have to remind myself that I am romanticizing it. Drinking on a beach meant dehydration headaches doubled, drinking at gigs meant queuing to buy booze or pee rather than watch the band, ‘fun’ girl nights out meant over sharing and shame and always the over spending, the falls, the behavior that doesn’t fit my values. I am feeling loss for something I never had. I never was and will never be a cool or sensible drinker.
