alcoholic

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THE NEW NORMAL

When I return to work life, people might not recognize me

Here is the problem, I so identified myself as a “normal” person over the past 8 years of drinking at night, that they had no idea who I really was. The same was true of myself. I would get to work at 6:30 and work until 3:00 each day and would drink from 4pm to 4am with sleep off and on. I didn’t have any hangovers or leave any clue. I hid everything.

“My life at work was stressful to say the least. Without revealing too much, our doors never close and therefore neither did my job end at the end of the day. There was always the next text, email or call that I had to deal with. In over a decade I have not had a “normal” vacation. I was always on all of the time. Needless to say, it doesn’t take much to know that I couldn’t keep this up forever. Even going to Church was at times difficult as I would receive a text, “I need help”. I’d try to text back without being noticed, but by then my concentration was shot.

Homelife wasn’t much easier. With a special needs child turning into a man and other stresses, I could never stop. My child would never be happy with moving on when a difficult situation happened, they would freak, panic and in general, overwhelm everyone. I felt I had to be the one person to try and help, and most of the time I was not successful. Eventually I gained a lot of weight, at 5’9″, I was overweight for many years at 235 lbs. I tired running or working out, but it never seemed to stick. Finally in 2011 I topped 275 lbs, finally ending at 278 lbs, therefore the name of this blog. My wife was going to a doctor who looked at me and said he could help me also. He put us both on a diet and we both lost ~100 lbs. By the time I got to 220 lbs, I began running very slowly. I was able to do 2 miles pretty well and kept at that for a while. I then upped it to 3 miles every other day. Then 3 miles Monday – Friday with a 5 mile run on Saturday. That became my plan. I would run 5 days at the same mileage and then up it by 25% on Saturday. Soon I was topping 50 miles a week, I had a PR in a 5k at 20:48 and my half marathon PR was 1:43. Needless to say, it was during this time I lost the rest of my weight and got to 178 lbs.

Then my running career ended with the injury that I mentioned at the beginning of my first post in many years called, “The upcoming change in my life“.

Somewhere in the time of my short running career the stress from home and work caught up to me and I began drinking. I don’t know exactly when it happened, but I remember ending my daily runs with a drink (not Gatorade like people thought). I would always run in the afternoon after work and so it seemed okay at the time.

Here I sit, 2.5 week sober after 8 years and temped so many times to drink, but not really. I feel the urge at the end of a day or at some other point when I would normally say my day had ended, but honestly, I really have no desire to return to that life. My work has taken a lot of pressure off of me in the past month or so and I cannot say more how thankful that I am to my lovely wife who had become my helpmate and rock during this time. Finally my children have moved out and really I had no reason to drink, other than the habit I developed over the 8 years.

Here I sit. I head back to work, 2 weeks from Monday. Who will I be when I return. After a month of no stress, no phone calls, no emails or texts, how will I do when I return. I will be kind and helpful as always, but I will no longer try to handle stress that is impossible to handle. So many people have been so wonderful to me, I would feel like I betrayed their kindness if I turned back. So I will need to figure this out before then. My therapist is giving me help to get through the day suggesting trips to the gym and also helping with cooking dinner which does interest me. I have 2 more weeks before I return, but that will go by in a flash and then I will have to be the new me, not the old me.

Back to the question, “Will anyone recognize me when I return to work?” I’m not sure. I have already had people remark how “light” my lovely wife and I look to them, “You and your lovely wife just seem lighter to us” my friend mentioned. Obviously the storms will come and I will need to take my place on the bridge of the boat, but I must learn to lead and not just run around wiping up the water.

I will need to lead. Strength and leadership is what I have been learning on this break. In two weeks everyone will see how successful I have become at both!

I hope to show them the NEW NORMAL version of who I am. This is a lifetime change, so how will they react? To some extent, I really don’t care.

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SLEEP PROBLEMS

Click image to go to a site with interesting sleep facts

As I write this blog I’m still going through changes with my new life of sobriety. I don’t know if anyone in the blogosphere have had any experience with this change, but thought I’d relate mine to you.

My biggest problem is sleep. Probably because I’d use alcohol to put me to sleep for many years. My issue is I wake up 6 – 8 times a night. I can’t sleep more than 2 hours at a time and sometimes much less.

There’s and app for that

I created an app so I could track the amount of times I wake up as by morning I don’t want to “feel” I woke up a lot during the night and perhaps it was just a perception. Below is last night’s sleep and wake times. The hours on the right are the amount of hours from when I woke the last time to the point I woke the next time.

As you can see, I didn’t have good sleep last night.

My wake time for Monday 8/30/2021

I wonder if this is due to my drinking at night for 6 years straight or something else. My family doctor prescribed me some sleep meds, but as you can see, they didn’t seem to help last night.

Sleep isn’t everything, but it is important, it also is needed for a productive day.

Know that I have no complaints, but just some questions. I have a great life and leave soon for a trip to visit a friend for a few days. I probably won’t write while there, but if I have time I will.

Have a happy, productive and restful day!

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HAPPY AGAIN

I am now 13 days sober. I am happy with the progress I’ve made so far. My lovely wife and I have reconnected to a place we haven’t been since before we had kids. We haven’t had kids at home for a few years, but the alcohol was a major issue / distraction.

Life at home

I have an opportunity most people never get. I am at home with no responsibility from my work. I was on call everyday for many years. Now I have staff that take call, but I am the final fall back as I am in charge of my department. So I have to sleep knowing I may get called that night. Most nights I don’t get called, but just knowing it may happen is an issue since I have been on call for so long. Also during the day I would get calls or support tickets coming in many times a day. Since I work from home now due to COVID, it has really caused a lot of stress. Let me rephrase that… I do work from home, but that really wasn’t the issue, it was my drinking every night starting between 4 – 5.

I have realized that my life consisted of work and drinking and not much room for my lovely wife. Maybe we would send 30 minutes together at night, but most nights I’d go to bed at 6:00 and go to sleep by 8:00.

I was so selfish and I didn’t see it was due to my drinking.

During this time of rehab / getting my life back on track, I work from 7am – 10am. That time is specific and not changeable as my managers has put those limits on me. They also don’t want me to take any calls and don’t want me calling anyone. This has been an amazing time for my lovely wife and I to reconnect.

From 10am to 9:30pm my lovely wife and I are together non-stop. That seems like a lot, but we had always been our own best friends. We loved talking and spending time together. All of that stopped with my drinking. We never thought we’d ever get it back. Many times over the past 8 years we both have said, if we can’t live together, we wouldn’t leave the other, but we would just live separate lives under the same roof. It got bad at times. My drinking didn’t make my life better as I had thought, it made it worse. I was more tired, more angry, more unhappy, and less thoughtful. Inside I knew all of these things, but I just pushed it down so that I could continue to drink.

The time with my lovely wife over the past week has been a real eye opener. We still have it! We still love talking and spending time together. We are happier than we have been in a long time. I have stopped watching TV, mindlessly being on the Internet, mindlessly looking at my phone, etc. That time is now my time with my lovely wife. Honestly my relationship with her is the only relationship that really matters in the end. We have gone from saying, we will live separate lives in the same house, to having lives that have quality and hope.

I compare the past few weeks to taking the red pill in the Matrix. I suddenly saw the damage I was doing to my relationships and myself. Now the sky is the limit as I have an extra 5 hours a day in my life that I didn’t have when I was drunk.

I love my life!

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The upcoming change in my life

I have not written on this blog in a long, long time. The reason is because one day I was at home right after a run,, trying to get my dog to come inside. My backyard had a fairly long, and one foot deep ravine going through it. I didn’t pay attention and hit the ravine and as my lower body fell forward, my upper body fell backwards. The end result was that my quad was totally separated from my knee.

Thus the end of my short lived running career and I have come up for a new use for this blog (at least until I might start running again). I’m about to begin a journey that will change my life forever and so I’d like to use this space to document it.

This 30 day journey isn’t something I’m proud of. It isn’t anyone else’s fault but my own. I hate that I’m in this place, but there is nothing I can do about that.

The hidden truth

I’ll being by explaining what I didn’t write in the first paragraph of this post. One reason that I fell that day and had to go through months of pain, surgery and therapy was because I was drunk. Somehow (and I don’t remember why) I had begun to drink after my afternoon runs. Years before I used to have a drinking problem up until my sophomore year in college. That summer I had a major change in my life as described under the “Faith” tab above. Now I had gotten myself back into drinking and the end result wouldn’t be pretty.

Fast forward to today. I am a alcoholic. It is hard to admit this . I have been drinking every evening for 8 – 10 years. I never drank during the day, but that doesn’t change the fact I can’t stop drinking on my own. My lovely wife has known I’ve had an issue for years and was always worried about me. I did hide it from her and everyone for a while, but that didn’t last long.

The journey

No one knew I had a drinking problem other than my lovely wife. No one knew I drank vodka every night for the past 8 years. No one knew this was a problem that I begged God to remove from me. No one knew…

About 2 weeks ago was the first time I told an someone that I had a drinking problem (not using the alcoholic word yet) and he said he would pray for me. Last week I decided to go to my family doctor whom we have gone to for 25 years and let him know that I have this problem. He gave me some meds that would prevent me from feeling the effects of the alcohol. The next morning I took the meds and went through my day. That evening (by the way, my evenings went from 6:00 to 5:00 to 4:00) I drank 8 ounces of vodka and felt totally sober. PANIC ATTACK! For someone who has needed alcohol to get past the stress of the day, this was actually a bad idea.

I knew then that I had a real problem.

The red pill

I had been lying to myself for years. I even told my family doctor that I drank about 8 ounces of vodka a night. Suddenly my eyes were open to my own lies. I realized that I was drinking from 16 – 20 ounces or more of vodka a night, 3/4 of it straight. It was like I took the red pill from Morpheus in the Matrix. Everything became clear.

My lovely wife decided to look up tapering off alcohol and came across a site for substance abuse and rehab. She called them and talked for an hour to a very nice woman about my problem. They said they could help…

The confession

Over a period of time last weekend I went from denial to getting admitted into rehab. I knew I had to come clean with my work as I was going to be gone for a month. I could have just said it was a long vacation or come up with some excuse, but I knew that I had to finally bring my problem into the light. Fortunately I have a secure position at work and am well respected and liked. That is also the worst part… No one knew. No one had a clue. How would they reacI began by telling my staff. I actually cried when I started telling them. Their eyes were wide open in shock when I began to explain, “I’m going to rehab”. We have been so close and they had no idea I had a problem.

An hour later was the big reveal to the chief officers of my company. I told them about going to rehab and they were very gracious. I told my whole story about my hidden addition. They said they respected me for making this major step and that they would support me in any way they could.

Next was telling my colleagues… I called each one ( about 6 people) and said the same thing to each, starting with, “I am just going to tear off the bandaid, I’m going to rehab for alcohol addition”. All were shocked but all were very supportive. Some had stories about themselves I never knew and about people in their family with the same issue.

Finally, I wrote an email to the entire staff. I explained my problem and said I’d be gone a month. It is a big deal to tell people I’ll be gone for a month and will have no contact with anyone or email.

The future

I have no idea of what my future holds. Since I began this matrix moment, I have had so many thoughts going though my head.

What will it be like trying to sleep without alcohol after 8 years?

Will I be able to sleep?

What will detox be like? I’ll be in a hospital for 5 days detoxing and then off to rehab.

What are the health implications to drinking 20 ounces of straight vodka for 8 – 10 years? What about my stomach or esophagus?

No one knows what the future holds, but God alone. He is going to be by my side. He brought me to this moment and will take me through it with the faithfulness He has always shown me. I haven’t been trusting Him and that needs to change.

I hope to write daily of my experience in rehab on this site. My hope is that somehow I can help someone else who is in a similar situation. I am scared of the what the next month holds as it will be a life change that I wasn’t planning on going through. Going from denial to rehab in two weeks is overwhelming.

I know I have to do this, and hopefully I will be able to help at least one other person by being transparent about my decision to move on with my life. Struggling in silence isn’t a solution. Bringing your bad choices and decisions to the light and moving to a better place and future is a solution.

God help me!