What did you find to be your best help with becoming sober?
(To mod, if you can’t answer this one thats good! Im just trying to see if theres a way i havent tried yet to help me lol)
Editor's Note:
My initial reaction was that even though I'd be happy to talk about this, letting Nate talk about it in the guise of actually being helpful would be a bad idea. But then I remembered how many things I've accomplished specifically by relating too hard to characters. And you know, whatever fuckin works.
At the same time, I wasn't willing to write anything for him that wasn't also an honest character study. Soooo like he says, you probably don't want to literally do any of this stuff. But there is a grain of truth in all of it that might be helpful. And I think maybe the most helpful thing is that you're looking for those grains of truth wherever they might be scattered, because you never know what's gonna click for you. Which is also why I linked those articles at the bottom. Not a source I would have expected to find grains in, but I did. (And yeah, I can totally see them being a medium that would actually work for Nate too.)
Additional disclaimer for the articles: The author was fired for sexual harassment and all his articles were taken down for a long time. I'm really glad they've been reposted because I think they say a lot of worthwhile stuff, and I want that stuff to be available to do potential good in the world even if he's not doing good in the world. But if knowing that about him will poison the well for you, I get that too, feel free to not click on them.
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You -- you wanna ask me. How to get sober. Me. You sure you got the right address?
Okay, your first step is: Don't do anything I did. But you asked, so okay, here's what I did:
Got revenge. Doesn't matter that she was playing me when she said it, Sophie was right. I needed to do something to feel like I'd actually changed anything, like I had any power over my own situation besides the power to, you know, drink it away. Talking to Maggie also helped to kind of, change the narrative, I guess. Stopped me from being completely stuck in my own version of the story.
Stopped stealing. Don't worry, I'm not gonna tell you crime is wrong and bad. That's not the problem. The problem is that I'd built up patterns around it. I'd sit down to plan a job, and I'd do it with a bottle next to me to help me think. Then we'd go to do the job, and I'd drink to keep my confidence up, to keep moving, to keep from suddenly realizing how insane this was and freezing up. And that was the only way I'd ever done it, right? So the two things, drinking and doing the job, got so tied up together that there's no way I could have quit the one if I was still doing the other.
Left the crew. It's funny, because you'll always hear that you need to separate yourself from people who encourage you to drink. That's obvious. But being around the people who want you to stop can make it harder too. At least if you're like me and you have a, a knee-jerk reaction against ever doing something just because somebody else says you should. Or if you already feel guilty or embarrassed about it, and then hearing people talk about it just makes you feel even worse. So yeah, I think if they'd been around, if they'd even known I was trying to quit, they would have talked about it more, they would have tried to be encouraging, and it would have just made me feel worse about myself and angrier at them, and it wouldn't have worked.
Moved in over McRory's. What's important is not that it's a thief bar, what's important is that it was my dad's thief bar. The place I'd have to drive him home from when he drank too much. The place he made me have my first drinks. You don't want to know how old I was when either of those things happened. So I moved in there, because then that's what I'd think of when I thought of going downstairs and getting a drink. Yeah, I'm not beating the "that's very Catholic of you" allegations, am I?
See, like I said, you probably don't want to emulate most of that. And besides that, you do know it didn't stick, right? But then, you probably also know that it usually doesn't, not the first time, or the second time. Doesn't mean it can't. Just means you have to be more willing to keep trying than I am. Sounds like you are.
One last thing. Point #2 meant I had to find something else to do with my time. I didn't do a very interesting job of that. I watched too much TV, I drank too much coffee, I played too much solitaire, I listened to too much of that ah, whiny, depressing music kids were making at the time. And, I spent way too much time on this one website reading serious discussions disguised as lowbrow list-based humor articles. They're crass, and the author is probably an asshole, and they're not completely positive. I know, I'm selling this about as well as I'm selling myself here. But they helped, because I hadn't really heard anybody else talk about it that bluntly -- or, or heard anybody talk about some of this stuff at all outside of, you know, the kind of places Hurley wants me to go to. So, you know, worth a shot.
5 Things Nobody Tells You About Quitting Drinking
7 Things You Don't Realize About Addiction (Until You Quit)
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jbbartram-illu
germansingergirl
vaporwave
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