Thirty days of sobriety, a week later.

As anyone who is reading this near its time of writing likely knows, I 'endured' a month of no nicotine, caffeine, alcohol or ganja. It was the best month I'd had in years. I started back up basically the night of the 30th.

I really should have written this post on the 30th when I felt great. I feel like absolute dog shit right now so I don't even feel justified in talking about how great it was. But, I'm going to.

It wasn't hard after the first 4 days or so where the nicotine and caffeine withdrawal really weighed on me. From then on it was a just a choice I had already made most of the time. Sometimes when I was tired and had work I wanted to do, I would really want some caffeine to focus.

Mostly though, I just filled my time with other things. I probably read more in January than in the later half of 2008. I also made more positive progress in my life over those same time periods. Sure, a lot of other things fell into place. But not having these periods of mental fogginess or recovery periods where I feel like the best thing I can do for myself is just lay there and get better also just made more time for me to do things.

I was shocked at how long the days seemed.

Now it's been a week since then and even with my 'intention' of cutting back, I find myself drinking at the same rate (ie. excessively) as before. I also went back to smoking when drinking.

This is tough, and I feel cowardly or something. I can't quite put my finger on the reservations for deciding to quit drinking. Its definitely in or around my ego, not really because quitting drinking would be hard, but rather being someone who quit drinking is scary.

Some of that certainly stems from just the social aspect of being 'that guy'. Why can't I just not drink excessively, or even just organically do things that are good for me and not do things that are bad for me? Making a decision and sticking to it inspite of new information has always been a real stick in my craw.

Yet that's exactly the whole point of making a decision like 'i quit drinking' or 'i resolve to do x' so you have some future thing you are looking at or holding when you want to be do something else. Some people just don't drink, they never got into it, they sometimes have a drink when other people do, but they never 'decided' one day to not drink.

Then there's other people who, some of them used to drink some of them never did, that don't drink. These people are using their previous decision instead of current visceral input to make decisions or guide their actions. This is the root of my hesitation: What happened to me that led me to the sorry state of not being able to treat each moment equally and with authenticity, but instead needing to live by a code.

Forever is a long time, to decide to quit drinking forever and actually hold yourself to that promise is a really odd thing. Its implying that you are wiser in this moment of decision making than your future self that will be following your directions. The same things applies if you decide to not drink this month, or even 'today.'

But when you pick a shorter period than "forever" you can theoretically change your mind after some point and not have to deal with not keeping a promise to yourself. This is something I still have issue with, keeping promises to oneself. Is it important? I suppose it must be though I don't understand why. Thats why I cannot bring myself to commit to stop drinking. What I want is to naturally want moment to moment to do the things that are best for myself. Until then..

I guess I'll do it for a month again: No drinking until March 6th.