AdeinEngland's Journal

i suppose it will come as little shock to a lot of people that adjusting to sobriety after years of abuse is... hmmm... how do i put this?

a test of character?

character-building?

challenging?

boring?

sensible?

Like so many other activities that breed those adjectives, sobriety bores me to the f***ing eyeballs. I'm not intentionally trying to disrespect anything about sobriety, quitting or AA or indeed anyONE that's trying to get and stay clean. I'm actually trying to offer a little empathy to those of us out there that are no doubt feeling just as bored and increasingly depressed and disillusioned with the way the world actually is sans-toxins.

I struggle to think of something that's both character building and sensible that's actually fun. Seriously. When i was about 11 i started doing a paper-round and as well as it being sensible (making money) and character building ( i was going to put an example in brackets here but again i'm struggling) - of all the things it WAS, it was definitely NOT fun. 

So accepting that the orchestra of bashing cymbals that greets so many of life's surprises would probably take a day off when i say "Being sober is boring me to tears", i sit... and i sigh.

In the first couple of weeks of giving up alcohol you have the novelty of being booze free to fuel yourself on. The idea of staying in, watching a movie and eating pizza still seems fresh and new. Mostly because it's 100% fresh and new. But also because like anything that you just started doing - you havent got bored of it yet. Whether thats a new woman, a new man, a new job, a new CD - you're still into it and thats that. Inevitably though, as the guys in the impotence support group will tell you, what goes up, must come down. And stay down. 

Slowly over the last couple of weeks i've run out of excuses to NOT be out with friends getting hammered, and they're starting to ask questions, the guys at work are getting just as bored with saying "so you still haven't touched a drop?" as i am answering it with "nope... no i haven't". Our version of cableTV (Sky) has a desire to show only DieHard movies on rotation. A desire that i match equally passionately by avoiding them. Don't get me wrong - i love Bruce Willis. I even love the bad guys in it. But there's only so many times I, as a 28 year old englishman, sat alone, eating cold pizza with a geeky laptop on a coffee table, can feel cool mouthing along "Yippee Ky-yay motherfu..."

(And by 'so many' times i actually mean about two)

As the excuses get more and more ridiculous....

"Your BIRTHDAY!? Oh why didn't you say and i never would've booked MJ Tickets!?"

"You just bought MJ tickets?"

"Yeah."
"But he's dead."

"Your BIRTHDAY!? Oh why didn't you say and i never would've booked Madonna Tickets!?"

"Hmmmmm"

And as the things to do at home become all the more depressing....

"Hmmmm i haven't cleaned the oven for a while. I wonder if i can do that AND the bathroom before Celebrity Brain Surgeon starts"

That would be a wicked idea for a reality show, wouldn't it? I can just see the trailer now:-

"Celebrities. They think they're SO smart, don't they? Well we'll find out just  how smart they are when we take your ten favourite stars and give them five weeks to learn COMPLEX BRAIN SURGERY!!! This week: Watch in awe as ex-basketball player Jamal Brown successfully reattaches the spinal nurons of an unconcious priest! And hate it or love it - 50 cent is going to remove this golf-ball sized tumor from a former hustler he knew on the street."

50: See the thing is. Homie gotta get back out to work. Sell his $hit. He aint gonna make no money layin out here with this $hit in his brain. Gotta take the $hit OUTTA his brain. So he can go out there and put HIS $hit into other peoples brains. Its a circle of life, for real. Can't f*ck with it. It's nature. And this is like i'm givin something back on a personal level, this aint no commercial $hit, this is me givin somethin personal ba... album drops 24th, holla."

So anyway - i digress. Again.

The boredom that comes with this sobriety will hopefully wear off. I'm sure that at the moment all it really comes down to is my brain needing to get bored with worrying about the idea of me missing out on SOMETHING going on out there, somewhere. It's a bit like when you first hook up with someone new. Maybe they're not into getting hammered the whole time so you toned it down, and for a while u felt like you were missing out or that you wanted to go out and see your friends more and then slowly you got used to the new rota. 

Or a more depressing example - when you hook up with someone new and wanted to spend every waking moment banging away with them. Sooner or later that becomes less of a big deal and you enjoy the little things, sharing experiences with eachother and changing lifestyle patterns. What started as wanting to bang away every 5 minutes morphs into wanting to know them deeper and enjoying that too. 

The trouble with that is - in a relationship you stand everything to gain from getting to know the person deeper and sharing new experiences. With sobriety, as the excuses run low, and the friends get less and less patient with you 'not making the effort' - you stand to lose mates (and YES they are real mates - who WOULDN'T get fed up if everytime they asked you to come out, u said u were busy), you lose excitement and the prospect of meeting anyone new (a truly frightening prospect when you're not aesthetically blessed anyway and struggle to 'pull' at the best of (drunk) times). And when you work in an environment/industry where so much is based on (boozy) relationships.

In fact what it feels like you're left with is a carbon copy of what you used to be, except the toner ran low and because *I* am the office bitch it's like i was the retarded idiot that forgot to order the new cartridge! I'm sat like "I'm retarded and sober. DAMN i used to just be retarded!?"

I'm hoping that my friends can hang in there while i develop a stronger 'self' where i can still go out and just hang with them sober but the tight, money-concious me dispells this by offering a "So you get to go out... be sober... AND spend the same amount on soft-drinks? Wow where do i SIGN!!!!".

Throw in an eye-watering kick in the te$ticles and you've got christmas!

I'm not sure what i'm saying - just maybe that as i get bored of the novelty of being sober and waking afresh on a saturday and sunday, i'm concerned that this is as good as it's gona get and that the most i can hope for is to live a sober, clear-headed, less fun version of my former life. Of course it could just be that whole 'mourning' phase where i'm still coming to terms with the loss of that era. As though my addict-brain is attempting to get me down, push me back towards the booze and this is the first step of doing that. Who knows. But it feels good to write about it. Not AS good as going out and getting wasted, sleeping with chicks when we're both drunk or laughing my ar$e off in a pub - but almost. 

And it's taken me about an hour to type this so if i can just multiply it by five and do it on a night out, maybe i'll have conquered the problem.

I suppose sober or drunk my brain could be in a lot worse states. I could be holding a £2,000 backstage pass for MJ dates while bored out of my mind at a f***ing Madonna concert.