Greetings from Virginia. After 14 months i am finding that not drinking has become easy. I don’t really have a choice given that it almost killed me via liver and kidney failure.
The hard part is cleaning up the mess i made of my life and not carrying around the regrets of the past. Its getting to me.
Oh yes. I’m only at 4 months but even I feel that way. Well, sometimes I still want to drink but it seems easy to remind myself as to why that would be a terrible idea and it goes away fairly quickly.
It isn’t so much cleaning up my messes but rather dealing with my emotions and feelings of “not enough”. I’ve had these feelings my whole life, I’ve never felt worthy of love though I desperately wanted it. But I ignored those feelings or numbed them with alcohol. Without alcohol I’m being forced to face them. I’m still pretty much ignoring them but at least it isn’t with a substance.
I do have some regrets, but those are mostly regretting what I missed out on because I was drinking.
Soon I’ll just have to face these feelings. There’s no getting around it. I don’t know HOW I’ll do it. For now I’m just keeping a mental note of everything I’m feeling so I remember it all when the time comes.
I will add…about the regrets of the past. There isn’t anything you can DO about that. You simply have to learn from it and move on to the present. I would also say about cleaning up the mess…all you can really do is make amends to who you have to make amends to and let them decide how to take it. It may take time.
If the mess is things like home and job…again, all you can do is start working from today. You can get things back. But you can’t “fix” the past.