An isolated and addicted heart šŸ˜”

Oh Chris thatā€™s heartbreaking. I feel for you brother. That is really hard.

Your sobriety is about you. It always has been. You choose, every minute, every hour, what you will do with the thoughts & feelings you have. Life has ups and downs, ins and outs. You choose what actions you take about it.

You still have the power to choose. You mention isolation. Isolation is unhealthy for anyone - addict or not - and addiction keeps us blind and dependent.

You also mention choosing alcohol over everything that matters. Our brains have been accustomed to certain pathways of action and ā€œrewardā€; because itā€™s been so long, weā€™ve forgotten - or never learned - how to find reward in healthy ways. Rewards is essential to human life too. Itā€™s built into our neurology: dopamine (anticipation: itā€™s released anytime we anticipate something), and the pleasure of achievement (thereā€™s a mix of pleasure hormones there, but theyā€™re there). Reward is what keeps us evolving.

You need to reset yourself. Since you donā€™t know how to live healthily - like so many of us donā€™t - you need a group to keep you honest. Try one of these:
Online meeting resources

Or these ones:
Resources for our recovery

Your sobriety is there for you to develop. But you have to be humble enough to acknowledge that you donā€™t know. You donā€™t know what you can and canā€™t do, because youā€™ve been escaping life for so long with alcohol. You donā€™t know your limits. You need to humbly try, every day, every minute, to learn. You need to reach out for help. You need to tell your story, go deep, trace the years of your addiction, trace the thoughts - the ā€œrelapse ladderā€ - the patterns that you walk through when you choose to drink. You need to give them shape, be crystal clear on them, so you can move past them.

You have work to do brother. The choice before you is as simple as that line from Shawshank: get busy living, or get busy dying.

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