Trading the Drama of Drink for Serenity

Almost everybody, problem drinker or not, is familiar with the Serenity Prayer. It is so synonymous with alcohol abuse that I think it creates this idea that serenity should be an automatic result of going Alcohol-Free. I can’t say that’s the way it worked for me. Most of my attempts at sobriety were anything but serene, and in all honesty, I wasn’t really looking for serenity. A life filled with drama was all I knew.

As anyone who has been through detox and early sobriety knows, it is an absolute rollercoaster of physical, mental, and emotional turmoil. The drama of drink replaced by the drama of detox is a rough road. It was a constant struggle for me. Whenever I tried to stop drinking I felt as though the world had been ripped out from underneath my feet. I would do ok for a while, but then either Snidely ( my drink now voice) would get too loud or I would get frustrated because living without alcohol seemed to make everything feel worse, and I would give up.

Not that my life with alcohol was any better. I never seemed to be able to make anything work the way I wanted it to. My relationships were either rocky or actively falling apart. My job was absolute torture. Parenting was exhausting. Trying to manage life on my own was overwhelming. I tried and I tried and I tried to fix things, to find some way to make corrections to the life I had in order to make it run smoothly, but never succeeded.

I think the best analogy is that I was trying to fix a life that was broken in the same way people continue to replace small parts on a truck that really needs a new engine.

I was trying to hold on to relationships that no longer served me instead of gracefully letting them go.

I was trying to stick it out in a job that was not the right fit for me instead of looking for something new.

I was trying to parent without demanding the support I should have been getting from my son’s father.

I was stubbornly refusing to ask for help when life overwhelmed me instead of opening up to the possibility that things would be easier if I had a little backup.

I applied alcohol as a band aid for all of these open wounds without stopping to think that it was only causing me more pain.

In short, I was neither accepting the things I couldn’t change nor changing the things I could, because I absolutely, positively, did not know the difference.

I think one of the hardest things about the concepts in the Serenity Prayer is that you really need to have the third thing first, and wisdom is hard to come by if your mind is constantly clouded by alcohol, sleep deprivation, and hangovers. In addition, the early days of being alcohol-free do very little to help clear the fog. Don’t get me wrong, it does clear a bit, but it’s more of a gradual clearing rather than an immediate switch to sunshine and blue skies. This is where I kept getting hung up. I would sober up, realize that every problem I had been drinking to run away from was still there, have no idea what to do about any of them, and dive right back into the bottle.

Ultimately, of course, that just made things worse. Not only did my alcohol problem intensify the longer I continued to drink, but I also got myself into a position where I kept doing the hardest part of sobriety over and over again. Imagine, for a moment, what it’s like to learn how to ride a bike. It’s difficult at first. You fall. It hurts. You get frustrated. The longer you stick with it, though, and the more you practice, the easier it becomes. You find your balance and learn how to pedal and steer and break all while staying upright. It even becomes enjoyable. On the flip side, if you give up before you get to the enjoyable part, you are always going to view riding a bike as a miserable, painful experience. Going Alcohol-Free is no different.

When I finally gave up drinking once and for all in August of 2020, I had no idea what came next in terms of my life. All I knew was that if I did not stop drinking, I was going to kill myself, period, end of story. I didn’t worry so much about my other problems because I gave all of my time and attention to the one problem that I had to overcome.

After about three months, being alcohol-free started to feel more “normal,” even though I still had to put a lot of work into it. After about six months, I was in a groove where staying sober didn’t occupy as much time and energy as it did at the beginning. After a year, I was mostly just living my life, part of which was being Alcohol Free.

Once I got to the point where just staying sober didn’t occupy the front of my mind all the time, I started to see my life quite a bit differently. If we go back to the bike analogy, I learned that approaching a bump in the road doesn’t mean I have to grip the handlebars for dear life and pray I stay upright when I hit it – I can change course and go around the darn thing. I started to understand that I had the power to make a different choice rather than being a victim of circumstance.

It started small, with things like realizing that if I’m overwhelmed, I can find a way to alleviate some of that stress. I can’t change that I have to go grocery shopping, but I can change whether or not I do that today. I can’t change that work is stressful, but I can put in a PTO request to take a long weekend and get a little bit of a breather. I can’t change that winter weather makes driving a pain, but I can replace my old tires so I at least feel a little safer. In other words, I started to figure out the third line of that Serenity Prayer, and once I stumbled upon the wisdom to know the difference, finding the serenity to accept what I couldn’t change and the courage to change the things I could became much, much easier.

My biggest test yet hit in November of 2020 when I was not quite 15 months sober and I realized that the company I worked for was never going to get any better. I had been holding out hope for months that the continued promises of improvement were going to manifest one day, but then three incidents in the span of one week caused me to wake up and smell the proverbial coffee. Unlike in my drinking days, I realized that these problems were well beyond my ability to fix. I had no choice but to accept that this is the way things were going to be in this particular job. Understanding that I am not a victim of circumstance and that there are no points for suffering, I knew that the choice I did have was to leave and find something else.

Trying to find something new during the holiday season proved to be a fruitless endeavor, and I realized that my best bet was to wait until after the New Year. I spent a lot of time working on my resumes and cover letters for the different types of jobs I was looking for so I would be ready when that day arrived. When, after a handful of interviews, I realized that not having put in notice at my current job was hurting my chances of obtaining a new one, I understood that I needed to give notice. Ten days after giving notice, I had a new job offer in hand.

It wasn’t an easy journey by any means. I had a rough three months. My emotions were all over the place. I didn’t like the way I felt, and I didn’t like that I had to get comfortable with that discomfort until I worked my way through it. The thing is, though, that tuning into the message in the Serenity Prayer allowed me to take the steps I needed to take in order to get out of the mess I was in. I never would have done that if I were still drinking. I would still be in that job, would still be miserable, and would probably be on my way to getting fired because I was drinking so much to “alleviate” my suffering that I wasn’t bothering to turn up for work. Honestly, if this test had come about much earlier in my sobriety than it did, I probably would have struggled to find my way through it as well.

The point I’m trying to make in a rather long-winded way is this: stay the course. If you are in early sobriety and wondering if it is even worth it, I am here to tell you that it absolutely is. Staying alcohol-free will change your life. It doesn’t happen all at once, and it is so, so frustrating sometimes, but one day you will realize that you have grown in ways you never imagined you could. You will still be you, but you will be the version of yourself that you could only wish to be when you were drinking. So find what works and stick with it. Reach out to us here on BOOM when you need support (or even just a safe space to vent). We have been where you are and we are here for you. Won’t you join us?