The general pattern of my relapses

That pattern there is the recently discovered shape that permits an endless non-repeating pattern. I'm not a mathematician so I don't really understand the significance of it, but I am trying to find a pattern in my ongoing series of relapses so I can minimise them or avoid them altogether.

I started this blog because I was frustrated and scared: having delighted in my over 12 months total sobriety, I was really frightened that I would be unable to repeat that, and stay off drink for good.

I am still worried about this, but I don't want to sell myself short: I am much better off today than I was at the height (depths) of my drinking and I am grateful for that.

I won't be able to learn if I can't acknowledge that things have got better, or see how they have got better, and why they are not quite right just yet.

I start everything - writing projects, exercise, playing music - with a rush of enthusiasm, and I lose that drive and need to work very quickly. There's a lot on the internet at the moment about self-diagnosing with ADHD and I have sometimes wondered if I might have it. In fact, though, I'm just as happy to call myself lacking in discipline and easily distracted.

Every time I give up drink, and string a few weeks together, I feel: happy, grateful, superior, saved; disgusted by the idea of drink, horror at the times when I have damaged myself - body and soul - through alcohol; determination that this will be the last time ever.

The most I have ever gone without lapsing, though, is about 100 days, and more often it is less. What seems to happen is that I lose the fear, and I forget how nightmarish it is to be caught in the grip of the drug. I am happy that my relapses tend to be less destructive and horrific than they used to. I recognise what is happening and I take steps to stop it, but each time I take a drink it still floors me for a week.

Before I started to think of myself as an alcoholic, I had a friend who told me about the old AA acronym HALT. You are more susceptible to take a drink if you are Hungry, Angry, Lonely, or Tired. (I didn't realise it was an AA thing at the time, and just thought it meant that if you are feeling generally out of sorts, it might be because of one of these factors.) Being Bored or actually Thirsty also make me vulnerable to drink (Boredom and Thirst might come under Loneliness and Hunger).

But I only recognise this when it is too late. When I am newly sober I look at happy drinkers sitting outside respectable cafes and feel sorry for them, the victims of an alcoholic culture. A few weeks later, I envy them and I remember beer as being a lovely grown-up refreshing treat, rather than a poisonous fraud.

So I have one, and it doesn't seem to do much harm. And if I want another one I can have it. Two beers isn't an outrageous amount to have on a sunny afternoon. My judgement goes, I start repeating myself, my voice thickens and my attention wanders. My child notices this. I am not unsafe, or negligent, but I am diminished by drink. Every single alcoholic drink takes something from me, of integrity, dignity, self-respect, attention to what is important.

Every alcoholic drink depletes me. Even if I sleep OK, and am OK in the morning, even if nothing bad happens, I am less than I was before I took it. Partly this has to do with my simple failure to stay away from the drink, partly it is because being used to sobriety I feel the dullness and slackness, the emotional incontinence and the intellectual looseness fogging my normally pretty OK brain.

I know that if I were reading this a few years ago I would be scoffing slightly at my distress at having two beers in the middle of the afternoon. And I suppose it is progress in a way that I am holding myself to higher standards than I did then. But it's not the two beers: it's the sleepless night and the hangover after those beers; and then the early beer that clears up the hangover, and leads to another beer; and then the string of days when my well-being depends on the day being punctuated by regular small injections of alcohol. It's the disgust and the dependency and the endless mindless repetition.

This post is saying nothing new, but that's the nature of the addiction, I suppose: the endless tedium of the thing is a big part of it.

All I can say today is that I am not drinking today. I'm not smoking weed (I may have a little joint later after the child has gone to bed). It's a sunny day, I have walked the dog, and the child will be back from school soon. We may go for a Coke or something, or just flop in our sunny flat and I'll put on a record.

I'm grateful and happy for sobriety today, and I have nothing insightful or important to say except that I hope this lasts.