The Buzzard vs. a Sober Curious Beer Lover

My stomach still feels like it is recovering from my binge on Tuesday, but hopefully I'll feel more normal today. I'm deciding to be thankful for the awful hangover because it will be a great reminder for why I'm doing this. I live in the desert, so it is getting really hot here. Despite many days of not drinking this month I'm still struggling to get up early enough to run before work, which I try to start at 7:30am. This struggle isn't mysterious, if I want to get up I have to get to bed early, and it is stiflingly hot until around 8pm, so that pushes out the cooking of dinner and evening workouts. I've tried napping after work, but it doesn't always work out well. Another option is to give up on the mornings and run at night, but something about it scares me. In winter I went running here after sunset all the time, I've got all kinds of glow belts and high-viz gear to make that safe. When I lived in a city it was  not crazy to go for a night run - the

I biffed it. One of the hardest times to not drink is when I'm home alone, and I'm alone all week this week while my partner is out for a work. The buzzard doesn't really come at me as hard, when he is here. Drinking, two days in a row, and I went harder last night. I'm starting this blog at 3am, and I'm awake feeling hung over already and sitting with a case of the regrets. There is a storm in my gut. There is so much I wanted to do today, and it is going to be that much harder. I wanted good sleep, so I could get a ton done before my first meeting of the day. I wanted to get up early enough to run before it gets hot, but I think that is going to be hard and painful. I hadn't been counting days in these posts, because I've been stringing together some sober days at a time,  as I work up to a Dry July. I didn't have a great streak, but maybe that is something I should prioritize. I think I need to start counting now. June 24th here we go. This relapse is

I was just reading a blog post about going sugar free for a month, and it seems like sugar is a common substitute for booze. I've always had a sweet tooth, and as a human female I've always had some body issues imposed on me by the world. In high school, especially my disordered eating was severe. I would do the counting calories and skipping meals thing often aiming for less than 1000 calories a day, and then I would get so hungry and eat a whole movie theater candy box. I know intellectually that any minute I spend hating my body is a minute I've wasted, a minute I'll never get back. Life is too precious for that. I am an athlete, my hunger is real and I should honor it. At the same time, I can remember the times I was a bit thinner, and feeling good about my body made me feel invincible. That bliss is only a few pounds away...  Alcohol is something I've used as a coping mechanism for many things. Realistically, I know that when I crave a beer, I'm also crav

While I'm trying to figure out for myself what I want my relationship to alcohol to be, one of the things that scares me is telling people. There is a difference between telling people why you've quit vs just that you aren't drinking. Having to talk about the why is part of what scares me about committing to a forever sobriety. Right now, if it comes up I'm just saying that I'm not drinking today, or right now. Because of the pandemic, I'm not really around too many people so it isn't something I've had to confront. My partner is an obvious exception to this pandemic isolation. We live together and so if felt necessary to say something. I've told him that I'm not drinking because (he already knows) I need a exercise to stay happy and I need a goal for my training to exercise (true) so I've picked a race in a few months that hasn't been cancelled yet (true) and that because it is so hot in the place where we live, training early in the

Part of the myth of alcoholism is that you need to hit some kind of rock bottom in order to make a change. You can always find a few things that you haven't messed up yet as a way to prove you don't have a problem. This narrative makes it super easy to avoid facing your truth. So, as with many of the sober-curious folks out there I'm not using alcoholism to describe my situation. So straight to the spilled tea, on my worst days I'd have maybe 4-5 drinks. Perhaps I'd start with a beer at "lunch." But, lets be honest when you are working remotely like I do, I don't really take a distinct lunch break. So more honestly it looks like getting a case of the hungries, opening the fridge to uninspiring leftovers, and deciding to pour a beer into your coffee mug as you and continuing to tap away at your tasks. The beer buzzard says, "Look at you! You've been working since 7am, and this little act of rebellion is exactly the way to treat yourself! The be

I was drinking a lot. Not the cliche alcoholic kind of waking up with a bottle in my hand under a park bench kind of rock bottom alcoholism, but the pandemic-drinking-isn't-cute-anymore kind. How bad is bad enough, I made this blog anonymously, so I might as well be honest about it. I also want to be able to remember later, when I've figured out what works for me, how big my progress has been, but - I think I'll write a separate post about that.  I recently read The Sober Diaries, by Clare Pooley, as part of my er, sober curiousity. Basically around the end of May, I decided I needed to make a change, and that I would start it out with break from alcohol. It was harder than I expected, especially the first week. Reading this indulgently honest kind of content was my replacement treat when I felt like drinking. I could keep going in this genre, by finding blogs or by starting the next book on my list Mrs. D Goes Without, but then I thought about what was missing from the boo