So…Alcohol.
Anyone who knows me, has known me, or has partied with me knows…I am a party girl. I can be a social butterfly. I like my booze. I like to get wild, get loud and have a good time.
However, I don’t drink every day. It doesn’t interfere with work. I don’t have a physical reaction when I don’t drink. I’ve never had my stomach pumped. And maybe that’s why I didn’t think it was an issue for so long. I had this preconceived idea that it had to be ‘extreme’ in order to be an issue in my life.
This part is hard – I didn’t think about what my kids were seeing. I didn’t think about Phil. What’s a few drinks on a Friday and Saturday night right? Society says that’s what you do to relax. You OWE it to yourself to have that nice cold beer after a long week where you worked hard.
Well, those few drinks started to become (alarmingly) many. It wasn’t 2 beers…its was 5. Or 7. Red Flag.
My tolerance went way up. When Phil would mention “do you really need another one?”. I’d get annoyed…mad even. Another red flag. We’d go camping. What goes together better than camping and drinking by the fire all day long, all weekend long? We’d actually run out of beer and have to go buy more. BIG red flag.
But I ignored that. The idea of no booze – terrifying. How will I relax? How will I have fun? Unconsciously, how could I avoid the pain bubbling under the surface if I couldn’t take the edge off?
I tried a couple of times to do 30 days no alcohol. I think I lasted 3 weeks each time. I could do no booze – but apparently only for a fixed amount of time. Then I’d pat myself on the back, assured that I ‘don’t have a problem’, and get right back to where I was before.
Booze has been part of my life since I was a teen. I can’t say if it was an issue in this same way before the last few years. Before my whole life was turned upside down with every cut of that knife to remove the cancer…then prevent cancer…then rebuild what cancer took from me. When I went through treatment I slid into a badass mindset and wholly embraced it. I tackled everything head on. I thought I did that equally for all the parts – chemo, rads and surgery. Maybe I ran out of steam. Maybe the non permanent parts were easier to tackle – hair grows back, radiated skin heals, cancer treatment ends. Cause I don’t think I tackled surgery in the same way. Any of the 3 surgeries.
Breasts do not grow back. Having them cut off is not an expected part of life. You don’t grow up thinking “one day when I have to have my breasts removed…”. I won’t lie – there was a novelty of having no breasts. It was kind of liberating. For a while. Then the novelty wore off. No prob though - I was having reconstruction right? That would fix everything! A boob job no less – who doesn’t think that’s a great thing? Except reconstruction is not a boob job. You don’t get nipples like you were born with with reconstruction. Those are gone forever. You can get tattoos, surgical creation of the nipple in looks only. You can get implants or cut off part of your body to stitch to your chest. But it is NOT the same thing as the breasts you knew and loved. My plastic surgeon once said “God makes breasts. I am not God. I make a reasonable facsimile of breasts. Under clothes, no one will ever know.” (Naked, it’s a different thing. At least for me. Maybe that’s where the image in the mirror first started to get distorted for me.)
And you know what? What they can do now for patients who get mastectomies is AMAZING. I am so so so very grateful to my plastic surgeon. Maybe that’s what makes it so hard. I’m so very grateful, and so very heartbroken all at the same time. I guess its not such a stretch that when I’d be happy and have a buzz from drinking, things didn’t quite seem so bad or matter so much. It’s easy to gloss over the sad feelings, while amplifying the good ones. But it’s not sustainable. Obviously or I wouldn’t be here!
So, how did I get past the 3 week limit of cutting out booze?
Well, as usual I did a lot of reading. AA didn’t seem like a good idea to me – I was already drowning in negative labels – it didn’t make sense for me to add another one ( and I am in no way knocking AA – I just didn’t feel like it was a good fit for me). Just pure willpower wasn’t going to work either – it never seemed to last past the 3 weeks right?
While researching, I came across a book called The 30 Day Alcohol Experiment, by Annie Grace. It seemed to speak right to me. The idea is to try 30 days without booze – but to look at it as an experiment about what life could be like - without booze. And she has a chapter a day for you to read. And she agrees about will power – her argument is will power is finite. Basically you only have so much. So you start using it to not drink a beer. But you are also using it to not eat that pizza. Oh and we need it to go to the gym that we don’t feel like going to. At some point, it’s going to run out. You only have so much, and the more you use it for, the less stronger it will be. That totally made sense to me. She does stress that this book should not be used in place of medical facilities for people who need to detox – if you are having physical detox reactions, you need help from doctors who can help you safely. What I love about her book is it’s not all or nothing. People who use her tools aren’t just people who cut it out completely. People use her book to reset and just reduce how much they drink. Or to become more mindful drinkers.
Anyways, her book was a huge help. I was esp. motivated this time too since I was committed to Phil and myself to figure things out before they got really bad.
So if you have tried some stuff, or haven’t found anything that has helped you, and you want to reduce (or eliminate) how much you drink, check out her book. They even have it at the library so you can try it without committing if you decide you hate it! She’s got a podcast too (This Naked Mind), if you wanna go that route and check out what she’s about first.
It wasn’t just the book though that helped. I also got some fakies. Non alcoholic beer (ya i know - but they actually aren't that bad). That was a HUGE help too. My favorite actually is Heineken or Coors (although I also like O'douls amber). I saw some Toolshed non alcoholic beers too at Sobeys but I haven’t tried those yet... We have also started to drink virgin Mules – Ginger beer (like ginger ale but spicier – spiciest one is at Super Store) and lime juice. SO good! Phil saying he wasn’t going to drink beer around me or have it in the house was important to. Days when it was harder cause I really, really felt like a beer were made easier by it not being in the fridge.
I have to say – I feel really good. In some ways it wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be. I like not having hangovers. I like getting up early and tackling the day with a clear head. I’ll talk about Rachel Hollis and her #Made For More group in another post, but she challenges women with “what if you didn’t break your promise to yourself this time”. So promising myself to stay away from booze till I healed, and actually holding up that end of the promises has made me feel like I can do hard things for myself. And that its just as important to do it for myself than anyone else (maybe more). It has allowed me to feel the pain come to the surface. That’s been uncomfortable. But I’m trying to sit with that uncomfortable feeling and be curious about it, instead of pushing it down cause its uncomfortable. Kinda like dipping a toe in the water before you jump in. Sitting with it without the comfort of beer (but without actively addressing it) has been prepping me for when I go talk to someone and it gets very uncomfortable.
We did go for dinner at a pub a few nights ago and we each had a beer. It was one beer, and a bit of a test, and I was so happy that in my mind I passed. I didn’t crave a second one. I didn’t down my beer before the food got there (I actually savored it and tried to be aware of drinking it instead of mindlessly drinking it) It was just so freaking nice to have a beer with my husband like a normal couple. I don’t plan on having another for a while, but I’m glad we did have one that night cause I think I needed to see if staying away from it for over a month prior had changed anything. I’m not ready to be drinking. Maybe I’ll decide to give it up for good. I don’t know – I'm not ready to make that decision right now. I need to work on the broken stuff inside before I even decide if it still has a place in my life. Otherwise it will likely just become a crutch again to help me not deal with the hard stuff.
And I have to deal with the hard stuff.
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