Blog

if you write your blog titles like news headlines, it really drives home how your life is meaningless + that most people don’t give a shit about the banality of the lives of others

so without booze, i haven’t felt much of anything besides general indifference. no pink cloud, no hopeless depression, no fits of rage.

until two days ago, one of those days where everything is just lousy.

maybe your body aches all over (by you i mean me). maybe you’ve been sleep deprived for several days in a row + your brain + body are realizing that. maybe you have a to do list so daunting you refuse to actually write it down because then it becomes something that actually exists + must be addressed, but you have no motivation to even jot down the top few priorities.

maybe all of this culminates in you (me) facedown, sobbing into your pillow, at 2pm on a Tuesday while your well-intentioned but decidedly non-alcoholic mother alternates between advice from Loving an Alcoholic 101 and trying to sympathize by talking about her meth stint in the nineties.

this only makes you cry harder. when she leaves, you text half like six people about how fucking badly you want a drink suddenly. one is there within minutes. you’re safe. no drinking tonight.

but what about the next time?

Pinterest rabbit hole day. while half-ass cleaning up some boards to justify how long i’d been on that timesuck of a website, i found a pin i’d saved about structuring your schedule when unemployed. i laughed + laughed + laughed before remembering i am actually trying to organize my entire life. i’d love to be stable someday. i briefly remember the feeling from back in 2013 or so. ironically, i started drinking again the next year.

it always amazes me that i can be as intelligent as i am (book smarts), yet willfully ignorant of the correlation between the periods of stability + my alcohol consumption or lack of.

anyway, now that my house renovation is done + i’m transitioning back to living there, i’m going to have a lot of free time. especially since drinking was a full-time job + i took that commitment very seriously. it probably wouldn’t kill me to put a routine in place in the next few days.

historically, an unsupervised Kirsten does not do well with lack of structure + ample free time. by that i mean, she does exactly what she wants knowing damn well that it’s the exact thing she shouldn’t be doing, nor will it benefit her in any way.

the good news is, i don’t think i am that person anymore. those things i wanted to do made me feel good, or at least better than before i did them, but they consumed me + left nothing. so i’ve committed to trying something different, even if it doesn’t sound fun. god this being responsible stuff is for the birds though.

Just skimmed my 2018 post, rolled my eyes the entire time. Must have written a hundred similar ones across dozens of notebooks, social media posts, Tumblr for sure.. always sure that I’d finally figured it out that time. Well, 3 years later, I’m here and sober for real, and I don’t know shit about shit.

So uh, been a rough couple years, yeah? 2020 was a turning point for a new and different world and here we are at the end of 2021 still trying to figure this shit out. I’ll just straight up tell you 2020 was a walk in the fuckin park for me compared to the shit 21 threw at me. Last December I joked about coasting through this year but joke’s on me because this year got me down real low, lowest I’ve ever been.

I am tired. My body, my mental health, my spirit, what I have to offer my loved ones in conversation, support – all tapped out. I have an autoimmune disorder that’s the worst it’s ever been and COVID did a number on me in September (I was able to quit smoking then, the one silver lining). At the end of the month I finally put that goddamned bottle of vodka down and got sober, thank you baby Jesus or ant man or faceless deity if one of y’all is out there, but also a big thank you to myself. Because I finally realized I am worth more than an existence centered around alcohol. I realized that I deserve sobriety and to be happy, and I actually believe I can stay this way (with tons of hard work).

Which is where this blog comes in. I got a lot of shit to say, ok? Lol. Guess no support group exists for trauma dumping on a bunch of anonymous humans for 60 minutes every week, and therapists want me to pay them for some reason.

So I’m cobbling together a raggedy ass toolbox of coping mechanisms, healthy outlets, to keep me sober and become better. FB groups, Scribd, meditation, BP meds for the damage my drinking has done, PINTEREST! I can’t praise Pinterest enough for all the invaluable resources I’ve found. Now, this blog, I guess, unless I promptly forget it again like the hundreds of neopets I abandoned over the years.

I’m gonna use this space for other stuff I wanna share too but I gotta figure out what exactly this account means for me so I’ll be posting again soon once I do just that!