6 Months!!

Yes, so 6 MONTHS BOOZE FREE TODAY! 😀

I’ve spent a bit of time this morning pondering my drinking over the years and trying to pin-point when it started to become normal for me to drink in the way I did.

The first thing that I was shocked to realise was my wine drinking was an adopted habit I picked up from one of my best friends. I never used to drink wine- I hated the stuff and I can’t be sure of the point when I developed a taste for rose but I did and then Friday nights became about wine and pizza.

I clearly recall my friend saying, on a number of occasions, that “Friday nights are my wind-down time, when I can have my wine and my pizza and I really look forward to it. I work bloody hard all week so Friday is wine-time!”

It wasn’t direct peer-pressure at all, as I was a binge drinker anyway, but this Friday night wine habit became My Thing as well. It’s a truth that as drinkers we surround ourselves with those who have the same drinking habits as us as Primrose so accurately pointed out in this post  “…as boozers we surrounded ourselves with heavy drinkers. we self-selected our norms so that we were comfortable with them”.

Those two sentences had a profound and lasting impact on me. So flippin’ true!!!

It’s becoming clear to me that drinking was just one way I tried to hide away from Me, the ‘shadow comforts‘ I relied upon to take me away from reality and numb me for a while. This is in addition to some, ahem, recreational enhancements to nights out in my younger days, spending money (and HOW- I got into some fairly serious financial deep water in my late teens/early twenties because I just couldn’t seem to stop spending money. And on utter crap. Poor Dad bailed me out but at the time I was just an ungrateful kid who *in hindsight* was seriously depressed and just thought it was normal to feel so shit about myself day in day out), and boys, obviously.

God, it’s all so obvious when I look at the patterns and behaviours now but there’s no way anyone could’ve told me that when I was in the throes of it all. I wouldn’t have listened because I Knew Best.

I’m loving this enlightenment and analysis into my past behaviours, and I now understand the mental illness was the underlying cause to my often erratic behaviour and surly, selfish attitude to everything and everyone. hindsight is wonderful, isn’t it?

I only ever intended on quitting booze for January but somehow, 6 months down the line (I stopped on Christmas Day) I’m still here and liking where this journey is taking me. Here’s to another 6 months (at least!)

x