There’s a real interesting phenomenon going in my brain right now.

I keep seeing people that have stopped drinking saying things like, “I’ve been sober for eight months.” Or “I’ve been sober for two years!”

But I can’t say it. I say that I have “been without alcohol for 15 days.” Why do I have such a hard time saying that word?

And I think it’s because even though I was drinking way too much, I never got drunk. Which is good and bad. It means that we were exceedingly high functioning alcoholics. We never went a day without drinking for about 3 or 4 months, not really. There might have been one or two days in there that we didn’t. But neither of us ever got drunk, so it’s hard for me to equate never being drunk to say, “now I’m sober.”

I was always sober….. And that may seem like semantics. It may seem like me pussin out on saying the word. And maybe someday I will. But it’s hard for me to say I’m now sober when I was basically sober everyday.

And I think that’s part of it as well. Many many many millions of people that stop drinking do it because it’s affecting their family life or their social life or their work-life because they were getting intoxicated and making bad decisions. Whereas we stopped drinking because it was affecting our health. My liver was having problems. I wasn’t sleeping. I couldn’t lose any weight. I had no motivation to work out.

However, when you think about it like that and when you put it all down into sentences like that, you realize that it WAS making you make bad decisions. Even though you didn’t feel intoxicated, the alcohol was guiding your decision making process. And by you I mean me. See? I still have a problem saying that it was me.

So let me re-state that. Even though I wasn’t drunk, the alcohol was in my system making me make bad choices. So maybe there are different kinds of drunk. Maybe there’s that angry drunk which we know of, and party drunk which we are all familiar, an amnesia drunk which a few people have experienced, and maybe there is a high functioning, I just want to eat garbage and not workout kind of drunk. An intoxication that just says, “I’m not buzzed, but fuck it. Let’s have another and then order pizza.”

Well that’s something to think about anyway. Today is day 16.

Day 16 of being sober. There. I said it. Happy?

It was cold this morning. Too cold for August. It made me pine for fall. We took the dog for a walk, it was 35 degrees and I could see my breath. Then we got home and we both worked out. So that’s good. It’s just now 8:30 in the morning and we’ve already had a long walk and a workout. It feels a lot better to start the day like that even though I didn’t really want to.

I’m out of here for the day. Tomorrow is week 2 weigh-in day. I’m kind of scared about what the scale is going to say after what’s been going on this week but we’ll keep our fingers crossed.

Peace