The Bubble Hour

This morning, I listened to Sunday's podcast of The Bubble Hour. The topic was about relating to other alcoholics, as some of us do in meetings. There were a lot of moments in the podcast that I identified with. One of them was getting toward the end. Someone talked about Moderation Management, which, as you may know, I tried 2 years ago. She said that she was reading the MM discussion boards and they were filled with people reporting their drinks for the week and talking about how proud they were that they had just "2 units" of something when they were out at a party. Every message seemed to be a variation on this, and she was just like, "Wow, that's exhausting." Another person chimed in that when they read up on it (before they got sober), they laughed at the 30 days of abstinence and then scoffed at the moderation levels that people are supposed to attain. Only another alcoholic can so keenly relate to those responses. Moderation is exhausting. Drinking is supposed to be about having fun and these people are treating it like they are on a diet or something, imputing their drinks into a journal like food. Why bother at all? Also, I have since read that there just isn't any turning back once you've trained your brain to be alcoholic. It's irreversible. Instead, you just have to abstain for good or go back to drinking 10,000 drinks. Any attempts to moderate, once you've progressed to a certain point in the disease, will likely be met with failure which will untimely result in feelings of frustration and inadequacy. At least, this is the case for me. I haven't met anyone who can go back to social drinking after they've abused alcohol for a long time. Maybe people like this exist and if they do, god bless 'em.

It's Day 25 for me and the sun is out. It's Friday. I'm feeling better today, more optimistic. Last night, I ran for 30 minutes on the treadmill to get rid of my blah feelings and it seems to work. Thank you, endorphins. Of course, I got all crabby again when I went to take a shower and found that the shower handle suddenly broke off. (On Monday, we had our garbage disposal replaced and 2 traps snaked out in our upstairs bathroom. On Tuesday, I brought my car in because I had a flat tire, needed an oil change and an inspection sticker. The mechanic called to say that I needed new brakes, too, in order to pass inspection. On Wednesday morning, our home computer decided it didn't want to boot up. I wasn't in the mood for another repair!) My husband was actually able to fix the shower thing when he got home from work. Whew!