The Whole Wide World

Today was a good day.

It started with my weekly coffee shift this morning. It took all of me to get out of bed and go to it. It’s a two-day weekend for the community, which means no one gets up at 7AM, so I knew it would be a very quiet shift. I had my two-day weekend yesterday and the day before. I didn’t get out of bed yesterday. Sad girl vibes all day. But, I got honest and that’s a step in the right direction. Knowing it would be dead at coffee, I brought my laptop with me so that I could write. When I opened the page to start writing, I found this, which I’d written sometime in the past couple weeks. 

I’ve been struggling a bit, maybe more than a bit, with a situation down here. And for the first time in almost six years, I’ve wanted to drink. To numb the emotions I’ve been feeling. It’s a very confusing thing, to think I want to drink, knowing full well that it’s the last thing that will help me, but still wanting it. And it’s terrifying. I’ve done what I know to do. I’ve leaned on my people. The ones back home who are here for a reason and a lifetime. I am so grateful to have those people in my life. 

While I am still disappointed in myself and have done a damn good job beating myself up, there was something freeing in getting honest yesterday. I don’t have anything to hide. No secret life. No living against my will. No plotting and planning. I’ve struggled since day one with the fact that I am sober down here. It’s not that I have wanted to drink the whole time, the urge to drink is recent, but the drinking culture is intense down here and I never felt like I fit in. 

The summer was better, easier, I had more of my people. Not to say that there aren’t absolutely wonderful people down here now. I am surrounded by them. It’s just that in the summer I had more things I went to that didn’t revolve around drinking, with more people that didn’t drink, some of whom I was much closer to, which lightened that fear of judgement when we were out at gatherings. Again, I still have fantastic, amazing people all around me. We are a wonderful winter crew.

Everything, especially lately, is a party. The party isn’t the problem. The problem is I just don’t feel comfortable in my own skin. I look forward to when that day comes. Guess that’s just one of the lessons I have to learn from this slip. How to be more comfortable just being me. You’d think that at almost 39 I would be, but I’m not. I have so much fear around what people think of me. And being sober, being different, not being able to take the edge off in these big social gatherings, I just got stuck in my head about it. Who knows, maybe it wasn’t even a thing, other than the monstrosity I made in my head. 

That fear of judgement had me desperately wanting everyone down here to know that I am not this uptight square who doesn’t drink. I wanted people to know that I am fun. That I am mischievous and playful. That in Morocco, my counterpart’s nickname in Arabic for me was shaytana which means she-devil. That I have this colorful past that isn’t boring.

I guess that means I still don’t think I am all of those things sober. That I still equate being sober with being boring, after all, when I was a drinker that’s what I thought of sober people. I couldn’t comprehend a life without alcohol and thought that sober people must be the most boring people ever. I’ve been sober for long enough now to know that is bullshit. We are absolutely fun people. We are a wild bunch.