Failure

Failure. Friend offered me a beer at lunch while we were working. Rainy cold day, had dinner at her house and she made me a cocktail. Daughter had melt down at dinner, plus pushing her home in the cold rain, needed a cocktail when I got home...

All excuses, but made me think about why I have so much trouble kicking this.
1) I have friend and relatives who like to drink.
2) I can't manage stress. I do yoga, I take hot baths... it doesn't seem to help me manage it.
3) I don't hold out for the long-term benefits. Having worked on Wall Street, I saw the downside of managing for the moment, and not the long-term. I have the same illness.

So what do I do about it? 1) Get rid of all my friends and family members who drink (which means I'll be a single mom) 2) Walk about all day long with stress relieving acupuncture pins in me, or get on some kind of medication (better? I think not) 3) Do visualization exercises focusing on the long term? Write my own life business plan?

Yes. Now we are talking. Can't hurt. But not until next weeks 'cause the drinkers arrive tonight...

Success!

So no drinking yesterday. Although my Master Cleanse diet only lasted half the day this time. I blame PMS  again (I can prove I had PMS, I ate an entire bag of potato chips in one sitting.) But I've made it this long before. Let's see what today brings. And then tomorrow, with visiting guests I have no option, but "manage" is the key word.

Day Five, Enough is Enough

Still drinking. I was absolutely prepared not to do it today. But as I was putting my daughter to sleep, my husband drops a drink next to me. I'm PMSing - and cannot resist the temptation. Excuses, excuses, I know. Now I'm on drink four, and it's only 4:30pm. Tomorrow I start my Master Cleanse again. I did it for a day and a half last week, this week it's going to be two, almost three days... and next step will be the 10-day haul. We'll see.

I used to think that if I could just meet the perfect man, and a beautiful family, and a wonderful job, I wouldn't need the booze. But guess what... I had it. My husband is gorgeous and absolutely attentive. I have a beautiful daughter who so bright and imaginative it's sometimes frightening. And I had the job that many young MBAers would tear out the eyes of their fellow students for. So what was the problem?

I'm guessing it wasn't my exterior, but my interior. If you are reading this, you may have guessed the same a couple days ago. So what to do?

Will it Ever End

Nope. Didn't make it tonight. A cocktail and most of a bottle of wine. My fault, we celebrated my husband's birthday today and I got him the requested presents - books on cocktails. So of course we had to try one out.

Thinking about it tonight as I indulged in my first glass, I think part of the attraction is that it makes me feel cool. I blame shows like Sex in the City - although I don't blame them in the same sense that people blame video games for child killers - I just think it is encouraging. Anyone who is anyone sips cocktails on a regular basis. And still makes things happen.

I also think that because I live in Manhattan, it's totally ok to have this habit. Think Woody Allen movies. If I were in the middle of the country, I might not have such a convenient reference point - think Beautiful Girls. Although the drinking might make me feel closer to the cool people if my location was a disadvantage. Did I mention that I wake up with my fingers numb?

Tomorrow will be different. I'm sworn to no alcohol, and on Monday, doing The Master Cleanse for at least most of three days. (see future post on Master Cleanse)

Day Three of my Total Realization

So you can see the problem. I went in for one, and slammed back five. I guess that the nature of an addiction, you just can't stop. Sometimes I can, but lately, it's harder.

I woke up in the night and my fingers were numb. That's got to be a bad sign, it's been happening quite a bit lately. Probably something terrible like diabetes... great. The drinking is related to other things. I have this weird eye thing, when I'm tired, or stressed, or drinking, my left eye gets bigger. The reality is that something is behind my eye and gets bigger, pushing it out a bit. It's nothing you would notice unless I pointed it out, although sometimes it gets bad. I've been to five doctors, who had no clue what it might be. I've had the MRIs, the CatScan's - had it all. A mystery. But I've also had an acupuncturist,  a chiropractor, and a medical intuitive tell me not to drink.

So the question is why do I sacrifice twenty hours a day for the one or two when I'm buzzed? I don't know.

Sometimes I think I should just accept my lot in life. I'm a drinker. I'll never achieve what I dream of, but not all of us do. But then I realize, this country wasn't build on people who accepted their lot in life. Plus I think about my daughter and I don't want her to have the same type of challenge. My mother has been a bit of an alcoholic since a young adult, something I only learned a few years ago. So does that mean my issues are nature or nuture? I didn't know my mother drank, or maybe I did and buried it. Who knows. My daughter has got the odds stacked against her - my husband's father is an even bigger drinker than my mother. And my grandfather was a hard-core alcoholic. Maybe I don't have a chance.

But maybe I do. Today/tonight I do not have a reason to drink. Although it is Saturday...

It's 10:30pm Friday night and I'm on drink five. Why, don't know. Cause one drink feels good, more feels better. I guess I don't want to stop the good feelings. It feels good until it feels sick. But already, I'm eaten more than I need, more than I want.

Morning of day two of self-realization

It's morning and I feel like crap. I drank most of a bottle of pinot grigio while watching The Housewives of Orange County. A perfect show to justify my drinking - they are always drinking on that show. And while I certainly don't believe that they are a mentally stable crowd, nor are they or will they be particularly successful (come on Gretchen... a make-up line?), somehow it makes me feel that my behavior is a-ok. They are still rich... or were... they are still cool... not. So why do I feel good about associating myself with them through four or five glasses of wine for hours and hours (was Bravo's regular Thursday housewives marathon)?

Last night my daughter wouldn't go to sleep, so I yelled at her and had my own mini-melt down. Exactly the right parental tactic for getting a two-year-old to sleep. Had I not been drinking, and wanted to get back to my friends in Orange County, I would have taken a few minutes to snuggle with her - like I had the night before when I did not have a drink - and she would have gone to sleep in minutes. But no.

I have made some progress already. There is at least one night a week that I don't drink. But I went for many years... more than a decade... where I didn't miss a night. It started in college, probably junior year. And only a few years ago did I manage to grasp this tiny bit of control. I had made a lot of attempts.

I remember calling my mother and telling her that I thought I was an alcoholic, an attempt to get some support on the issue. She asked me if I drank before I went to work. I said no. She said then I wasn't an alcoholic. Hmmm... the plot thickens about why I have this problem.

And I'm probably not an official alcoholic. There doesn't seem to be a real definition out there. But I was particularly disturbed when one of my work colleagues made a comment about how I liked to drink. How did they know? Did I over-do it at one of the after-work mixers? I doubt it, because I had honed, over the years, the skill of being drunk but not appearing so. I remember in my late twenties, I would black-out, but I didn't pass out, someone else would just take over. My friends had no idea. So how would they know at work? Did I show up reeking up fermentation? Was I blurry eyed? It wasn't the type of question that anyone would give me an honest answer to in that environment, so I didn't ask. Or maybe I didn't want to know the answer.

More disturbing to me than this is the hours lost on the hobby. When I resigned from my job to take care of my daughter, I also had the ambition of becoming a writer - my lifelong dream. But writing in a haze of pinot noir didn't seem to produce anything good, if anything at all. I justified this process with famous writers like Ernest Hemingway (turns out, old Ernest didn't really start his alcoholic binges until later, and all his good work was already done) and Stephen King, my hero. But Stephen didn't drink wine and try to write, he mainly did hard drugs when he produced his best work. I guess I could transition, but probably not a good idea.

So another purpose of this blog, if anyone ever actually reads it, is to share how much time is lost if you're a drinker. All the hours I could have been producing some work (maybe I drink because I'm afraid my writing won't be any good) or I could have been at the gym (I've tried to go after a drink or two, not productive) or spend with playing with my daughter - although I only mostly drink when she's already in bed, or on her way.

I'm going out to dinner with my husband tonight. The goal is to only have one drink during dinner. Maybe two. See the problem is I don't want to give it up all together, I just want to get it under control. Why? Why not just get on the wagon? I think I'm afraid I'll change as a person. I mean, this is who I am - I like good food and good wine, is that a crime? It's just that good food and good wine turns into crap food after a couple glasses and crap wine is what I can afford when I'm glugging it back every night. But the fear is still there. What if I gravitate to new, boring people when I stop drinking? What if I don't like my husband anymore? What if I'm not as funny as I think I am?

So the objective is reduction, not elimination. Now I know the double A theories are that you give it up - all of it. And for hard-core, stumbling, stealing money for booze, beating your wife alcoholics, that's probably the only way. But I don't fall into those categories, I'm totally functioning, just not at the level I want to be.

So let's see how it goes.