Ride On

First of all, thanks for all of the words of encouragement.  It's greatly appreciated.

So yeah, I got slightly intoxicated Friday night.  Not only that, but I also drunk posted on my own sober blog.  I'm not gonna lie, it's a little hard for me to not laugh at that...at least a little.

I woke up Saturday morning feeling that all too familiar minor hangover....slight headache, cotton mouth. All things considered, I've felt worse.  I was low on energy most of the day which made me mostly useless.  The hangovers I remember.  The low energy day of uselessness that follows a night of drinking was one thing I had forgotten about.

As for the overwhelming sense of shame and regret that I assumed would follow my first slip-up....well, that wasn't there.  In fact, I didn't really feel any shame at all.  Sure, it would be nice to be celebrating my 80th something day of sobriety, and that's gone now, but I'm ok with that.  I goofed.  It's not that big of a deal....or at least I don't feel like it is.  I'll try to learn from this and be better next time.  I felt way worse mentally last year after 21 straight nights of drinking.

The truth is when I started this journey I never figured I'd be sober for the rest of my life. I started off thinking I'd go 100 days, but after about a week of sobriety, I gave up worrying about reaching some big number.  I kinda figured at some point I'd decided to have a few drinks on some special occasion, and then get back to being a sober guy.  I guess I didn't figure that being forever sober was necessarily necessary. 

The one big regret I have about falling off the wagon is that it wasn't planned.  I assumed, or hoped, that if/when I did decide to have a drink or two....or three, it wouldn't be a spur of the moment type of situation.  That's not so much what happened Friday night.  Not at all.

So the bad news is I slipped.  But the good news is I've been dying to get back on the sober train ever since....even before I sobered up Friday night.  So that's what I'm doing now. 

Part of me thinks that if I can go 80 days between drinks, then I'll have far better things to worry about than sobriety.  But I also know that this is a slippery slope.  It took many years for my occasional drunken party behavior to turn into a nightly drinking ritual.  And 80 days doesn't fix that.  My sobriety done sprung a leak.  Now I need to make sure that this slow drip doesn't turn into a steady stream.

So yeah, Day 2.