What would you do with your day tomorrow if you were still drinking, smoking or whatever your poison is and it simply didn’t exists anymore? You walk into that off licence and ask for that bottle of vodka and the store owner says that they’ve never herd of vodka and or alchol for that matter! where would you go and what would you do? What would you be doing 2 days after that? a week? a month? a YEAR?!
I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently and I can tell you that I know the first few days would be painful for me but after a while I can think of nothing but positive things id be doing.
If I still was in active addiction I’d be looking for something else. I quit smoking weed first, thinking alcohol wasn’t a problem for me. Went from binging a couple of times a week to drinking every day within months and kept drinking more and more until I quit that too. Which took me another 4 years. Never again.
Are we not always in active addiction? So you may exchange one addiction for another? I remember the first time I quit I started going to the gym and swapped one addition for another but at least it was better for me than drinking.
Interesting question… I still vape nicotine and if it stopped existing I’d probably try and replace with something else of equal addictive value.
Thing is, I don’t need drugs and alchohol to stop existing for me to quit. I got sober because I wanted to and because I started working on my inner demons in a healthy manner.
Just because something exists, doesn’t mean I have to partake. Those roller-coasters that spin you upside down and make you puke exist, I’ve never neen tempted by them. One of my biggest breakthrough was realizing that I don’t have to drink. I can just… not.
For me active addiction means actively indulging in (ab)using substances. Right now my substance abuse disorder is in long term remission (to use the correct medical terminology). And for the sake of argument I’ll restrict myself to substance addiction. Behavioural addictions and dependencies are much harder to grasp and fight. Porn, sex, eating to name a few. Going to exercise and gaming. For now I’ll stick to substances.
awesome! I felt the same as well. I have a sigh of relief when i think about a world that doesn’t have alchol in. A pub with only soft drinks on tap sounds amazing to me now where as before it was horrifying!
It would be great, its never going to happen unfortunately but what i can tell you is that a year down the line of sobriety i can tell you that nowadays i dont actually WANT it, you can feel that too…there IS hope friend
As much as I would love to say it would not be a big deal, in reality if I was still drinking the way I was and this was a scenerio that happened, I would replace it with something else. Obviously, that’s never an ideal solution but to me it would be the most realistic. If that were to happen, within a year I’d probably be dead.
When I got a DUI, I went to court to plead guilty in hopes that I’d get the maximum penalty, a year in jail. My plan was that if I was incarcerated, I couldn’t drink. So, it would sort of be like that it didn’t exist, for a while and only in my small corner of the world.
Unfortunately, the judge appreciated my acceptance of responsibility and lowered the charge and gave me a $500 fine.
