“I just drank an entire bottle of wine in a hotel room while my partner sleeps next to me and I feel like shit. ”

Dec 12

Holiday Check-Ins!
By The Small Bow Anonymous Family Orchestra
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*How everyone’s holding up so far…*

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I'm so tired of thinking about my relationship to alcohol. Does that happen to anyone else? Like, I just wish it could be chill.

I have a 1-year-old, and it's been a long/lonely year even though I love her more than the universe, and the day after Christmas, my partner and I were finally able to go out on our first date night since she was born because we could leave her at home with my parents. We hit up a dive bar in Southern Oregon and ordered a couple of Pacificos. It was a really nice night out. We made out under the string lights, it was raining outside, and I felt good. I felt hopeful.

But now we're driving back from Oregon, and I just drank an entire bottle of wine in a hotel room while my partner sleeps next to me, and I feel like shit. I have a Jekyll/Hyde relationship with alcohol—sometimes it's this medium for connection and pleasure with friends and loves, and sometimes it's this horrible anesthesia that I seek out in the dark. I keep hoping I'll feel enough conviction to break my solo drinking habit in the new year.

This artist I follow posted something recently: "Discomfort oriented toward growth is always preferable to stagnant comfort that keeps producing the same results and the same life again and again and again." Please send me the strength to choose discomfort going into this new year. I want to grow. I don't want to be stuck here.”

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“One of the most vivid Christmas memories from childhood is being at my maternal grandparents' house. Mom and Grandma got into it, so Mom loaded us up in the car in a huff. As we backed out of the driveway at breakneck speed, Grandma came to the front door and flung the Christmas gift Mom had given her into the front yard. It was a blouse, still in its tasteful garment box from The Jones Store. Grandma launched it like it was an Olympic discus. The top of the box went flying off and the blouse, probably an Alfred Dunner, fluttered down into the snow beside the hedgerow at the driveway's edge.

Since then, my bar for whether or not it's a shitty holiday has been "Did we fling any Christmas gifts into the front yard?"

Another thing that helps is making sure we only spend one night (two max) at any one parent's house before moving on. Company being "like fish," and all. Turning every holiday into a Road Warrior weekend (literally dashing through the snow) en route to various Grandmas' houses has its own stress. But that mobility is its own freedom too. If the expectation is that we're just going to roll through, then we can "roll out" at the first sign of a perilous vibe shift and go on to the next stop.”

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“I have a narrative that the holidays don’t mean anything to me: I’m Jewish, I don’t particularly enjoy spending time with my family and intentionally live far away from them, cultural constructs can’t nonconsensually dictate my life etc. Except this time last year I was leaning into romance for the first time in sobriety and this time this year I am still sick and suffering over someone I haven’t so much as texted in more than 4 months. Last year I went caroling for the first time ever and he came and he smelled like clove and he stayed even though he hated it, he stayed because he wanted to be near me, and it was the first time we spent any time together outside of my workplace. This year he was tired at my workplace and I usually try not to engage with him but I couldn’t help it, self-harm is such an old habit, and I asked, “late night?” And he smirked and said, “yeah” and nothing else and I went to the bathroom and sat on the floor and sobbed. When I came back out he was at the desk, a customer, and I performed my job and he stood there and stretched repeatedly to show me how small the shirt he was wearing was, baring the strip of stomach above the waist of his jeans to me over and over. Last year at this time I fixated on that strip of stomach as he stretched out on the floor in the children’s playroom at work and his daughter played with a friend who was wingwomaning an opportunity to talk with him, so early on, when I still wasn’t sure he’d ever like me because I was so deeply insecure. This year at the time well I guess the one thing I can say is I’m less insecure in general, which is huge progress, and yet it feels so small in comparison to the craving for him and his approval. Sometimes I walk out of work at night and it’s dark and the air is, I swear, exactly the same as it was this time last year and I just have to put all my energy into knowing that I’m not. I’m not the same and that means I can change which means I can recover. I’m in a new 12-step program now and I’m holding onto it so tightly, with that newcomer’s terror and desperation. Some days I don’t know what I want more, recovery or to satisfy the craving. I can’t even believe I’m saying this but the truth is those days I turn to God even harder. It took months to be able to sincerely mean the prayer “please relieve me of this obsession” and yet what those months taught me is I can change, even if it’s ever so slowly. Anyway I don’t know about the holidays except last year they were with him and this year they’ll most likely be with this craving for him and my biggest prayer is that I endure, sober, because that’s the thing I know makes it possible for me to maybe, god please help me, change.”

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“I am pretty stressed out and sad this Christmas but I am not drinking or using pornography so those are wins. Working the steps in SAA too. Christmas time is hard anyway just because it is supposed to be a hopeful season, yet what feels more hopeless than right now? Still, I feel incredibly grateful for my health and my loved ones.”

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“All I wanted to do for the holidays this year was be home. Spend time with my wife, daughter, and needy menagerie of pets. Everytime I make the effort to pack the car and drive to my parents house or my in-laws my anxiety goes through the roof as I think about all the things my mom will say that will piss me off or what my in-laws won't say which will also piss me off. My mom drinks to cope which means she drinks a hell of a lot of wine and then proclaims it's ok because she'll just fall asleep and we won't count the hurtful side comments made while she was busy refilling her 5th glass. drink too much when I'm home. A way to numb my feelings around my mom. I barely drink with my in-laws but I'm on edge the entire time feeling like I have to perform as I open the gifts I don't want since they never ask what I'd like. Can't fucking wait.”

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“My mother hurt my feelings so horrifically at Thanksgiving I milked the story for weeks. My sponsor’s eyes got wide as she just shook her head. My therapist put his head in his hands to compose himself, a reaction I had been anticipating with a little glee since the moment she did it. “Terrible!!” was my immediate response to everyone who asked how my holiday was. Not to mention how my sister refused to even acknowledge my presence.

I have been going home for the holidays for almost two decades now; at first to make amends for my absence and then to foster a relationship between my children and their cousins and grandparents. This year is the first year I’ve really had to face the fact that I don’t *have* to do that. I can choose instead to spend the holidays with people who know and love me. My family is not going to change and if I go home and am mistreated that was my own choice. And also— the choice does not have to be black and white. Boundaries do not have to be an all or nothing concrete wall. I can build picket fences around the things I want to keep tender and stay open where I am unaffected. Rejecting the all or nothing rigidity of my family’s religion requires rejecting that same all or nothing mentality.

I still don’t know if I’m going back for Christmas. But I think if I do I’ll be ok.”

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“I'm leaving my tree and decorations in the storage bin they've been in since last year; I am not in the mood to celebrate. Nothing has made me feel more alone, than navigating this holiday season with a fake smile, as I fa-la-la my way through the rest of this horrific year that never seems to end. I am feverously swiping right on Tinder, hoping to make some connection that will give me enough of whatever it is I am looking for, to get me through the next few weeks. I've started drinking green smoothies in the morning, and waking up at 5:30AM to practice yoga; I've started to have conversations with myself, out loud, as my dogs look on, concerned or confused. I notice that I go days without getting a hug or any physical touch from another person, and I am starting to wonder how much that affects me. I am the happiest I have been, despite it all, in a long, long time.”

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“I drank the Monday after Thanksgiving after a year and a half of pretty good sobriety. Each slip is a lesson and a chance to return to this lifelong journey of being a better human without numbing out. After my mom fell in October, I had been staying in her apartment in NJ, visiting her at the rehabilitation place (a different kind of rehab than what I'm used to) where she was relearning to walk and dress and go to the bathroom. Trying to figure out medicare and elder care and how we were going to pay for this and what was next. Every day for 6 weeks felt like one step forward and 10 steps back. It was hard. I didn't have my routine and support system and small joys I had come to rely on since moving to North Carolina. I was glad that I could be there and be sober for my mom. But I felt like a burden every time I cried to my friends and my brother. I was isolating, I was spending as much time as possible in bed. I think Thanksgiving broke me. Spending the day in my mom's apartment alone, the apartment where we usually held Thanksgiving, and delivering day-old Chinese takeout to my mom while she lay in bed in a diaper. I cried all day and the next. I didn't answer the phone. I didn't call anyone. That weekend she was taken to the hospital. Thankfully it was nothing serious. But I drank the next day and had the worst two-day hangover of my life. Lesson learned. Reach out. Talk to someone. I am not a burden. I am loved. And prepare for what is likely going to be a shitty Christmas.”

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“Christmas is creeping up on me again. So is January 2nd which is my 2-year anniversary of quitting drinking alcohol. Is that how you are supposed to say it? I refuse to use the word sober. When I do it sounds so corny. Am I the only mother who despises Christmas? Not possible. With 5 kids Christmas is a chore. Perhaps it’s also because 2 Christmas eves ago I drank so much egg nog and makers that I vomited all over myself on Christmas morning at 4:00am. I tried convincing my husband laying next to me that I had a stomach bug. I jumped out of bed to quickly shower and strip the sheets and I fell over in the bathroom slamming my face on the floor. Once again… Christmas morning with 5 kids sleeping. My husband, who can handle is alcohol, said to me “come on, it’s Christmas morning”. Christmas morning 2020 was the worst day of my life so far. I continued to drink alcohol until January 2nd because… well… new years, right? To end this on a high note I haven’t had a sip of alcohol since. It saved my life because I probably would have… ya know.”

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“I continue to not know where I am with my weed use. I took a “break” with the intent to come back with a cute new tolerance but my withdrawal symptoms have been tough and coincide with some really hard times with my kid’s ADHD plus the holidays. Depression has been adding to depression. I feel ambiguously fluish and foolish for doing it to myself, and can’t really talk about it with people. My brain sometimes points out that weed would make these things temporarily retreat into the background but my brain also says that won’t help you at all and just set you back again. I know I should probably just stop, never buy it again, but I’m not wiling to accept that yet and do the work.

I saw a meme somewhere that said I don’t wan to be sober or an addict but another, third thing and that’s how I feel. I also wish I could store up the strength and goodwill to wipe the slate clean every day (hour? Minute?) with my kid and not be so ground down and take it personally when it’s hard to deal with him.

But right now everyone is asleep and the house is quiet and I have black coffee and a weighted blanket and a dog on the bed next to me so that part is good.”