Dear me,

Look how far you’ve come over these last almost six months. Almost six whole months of sobriety! You’ve gone from drinking almost nightly to drinking nothing at all. Vulnerability has become one of your strengths. You have laid yourself bare to a community that has done everything that they can to support you through your hurts and through your triumphs. There’s been a lot of work to do to maintain your sobriety, and you’ve been doing it! Not only have you been able to survive without alcohol, you are thriving. You have become are a person who is worthy of self-love, someone to be proud of. Someone who can receive love from other people, you have softened and that is not weakness, that is strength.

 You love getting up early most mornings and drinking your coffee without a hangover. Staring at the clouds and daydreaming about what sobriety can bring you in life, brings you joy. You have dreams now! You want to move overseas when you graduate and somehow you managed to convince hubby to agree. Your husband trusts you in your sobriety and knows that you are reliable. No risky, thoughtless behaviors have been engaged in for the past six months. You haven’t embarrassed your husband or spoken out of turn, cheered on by liquid courage. Your thoughts are measured and you can react appropriately (for the most part) when your emotions are in turmoil.

You have survived memories you thought would crush you if you abstained from alcohol. The memories that you can’t put to rest at the moment haven’t been overwhelming because you’ve allowed them to co-exist with you. How you have grown! You have a special vulnerability with your husband that you have never had since you’ve been with him. Your daughter isn’t walking on eggshells, wondering if she has drunk mean mummy or drunk nice mummy today. You don’t wake up in the morning, humiliated at what you might have done the night before, trying to unsuccessfully fill in the hours that are forever lost in a black sea of nothingness. 

You are ALIVE for the first time since you can remember. In the morning, you wake up and you appreciate the breath in your lungs, you appreciate the wind outside, the rain on a leaf and the sun in the sky. You’ve begun to nurture the child-like wonder that has started to bloom within you. You finally feel free.

Take away thoughts of your family for a second and think about you. You are beautiful and you are smart, and you are actually pretty funny. You are deeply flawed but that adds to your beauty. There is an understanding in you, of deep things that not a lot of people your age understand. You have a beautiful, creative mind and a yearning to understand the complexities of your own humanity. You are creative and you have a lot of love to give. Make sure that you give yourself the love and the credit that you deserve and stop beating yourself over the head with all of your perceived failures.

A piece of advice from me to me? Don’t let alcohol back into your life. Challenge the notion that it can add anything to your life. The only thing that will do is take away the life that you fought SO hard to take back. Do you really want to blow up your entire life over a drink? Do you really think that you have control? You don’t. Remember that. You. Don’t. Drink. 

Remember when you didn’t think that you could ever stop drinking and you tried to kill yourself to rid yourself of the problem? When you realized that you were going to let a DRINK kill you, a DRINK! Remember when you washed your hands of yourself and gave alcohol control over your life? Notice how you can still remember and feel everything that you attempted to wipe away with alcohol? Remember when you almost blew up your family? Do you remember all the times that your husband had to fetch you from the hospital after being taken away in an ambulance? All of the friendships you blew up? Remember the husband that you almost drove away?

That’s it- that’s the life you choose if you choose to pick up a drink, there’s no moderation. It’s either complete sobriety or an early death. There is one drink between your freedom and the shit–fest that you called a life. You’ve been there before, you know the road, you know where it ends. Give yourself a chance to put the broken pieces back together. Give sobriety a chance. You have done a better job of blowing up your life than most people you know. Don’t even attempt to cross that line again. IF you do, you might not be able to scrape together enough willpower to leave it all behind, and you will end up the broken person you were not so long ago. Will it really be worth it? I think you know the answer.

With love,

Me.