Hello again, sober blog world. (Alt title: Round 3, day 2.)

Hello. It's been 2 months since I wrote online, and at that point, I wasn't sure I would again. However, I kept up a private version of my blog in a word file, so I could keep track of my thinking without having to worry about how what I said affected anyone else, or how other people's comments would affect me. Thanks to the kind souls who cheered me on anyway. I appreciate that.

Now I have a few threads of things I want to write about, and I'm not sure of the order. Please forgive me if I seem a bit cranky or even defensive here. I am both. But I am OK.

The quick recap is this: about four months ago, after 16 months not drinking, I decided to try drinking again. And now I am quitting again, at least for a stretch of time. And I expect some readers will quietly but knowingly chuckle to themselves, if not in the comments, and maybe trot out that old saw about idiocy being doing the same thing over and over and it not working. But listen: I have not been doing the same thing. I really did want to test the edges of whether drinking with awareness would work for me. In some ways it does, and in some it does not.

Overall, my experience has been somewhere in the middle of what I might have hoped for. Nothing terrible happened. I had lots of fun, and often enjoyed myself very much. I'm not going to sing the pleasures of drinking here, but I want to acknowledge that there are some, and they are not illusions, in contrast to some authentic pleasure that can only be had without booze. I genuinely enjoyed a lot of the occasions on which I drank. Only a few are regrettable, and even on those, the regret is pretty minor. I made a deal with myself when I started this: no guilt! No waking recriminations only to drink again and go through that again. I regularly checked in with myself to see how it was going, and tried to weigh up the goods and the bads, and I did my best to do that rationally. I don't mean to say I used a checklist or any such simplifying tool, as I can't abide the contemporary need to boil everything down to a number or a category. Nonetheless, I regularly asked myself whether it was still fun, what I liked about drinking, what I didn't like, and how I felt.

My biggest surprise is this one: over the past couple of months, I started to realize that I missed being sober. OK, that's not what I would have expected to feel at all! Sometimes I hate the whole sober thing, with all its talk of glorious sleep and clear skin and self-improvement and yoga and gratitude and new age healers. My god, I can get ranting about all that! But I think that's not what "being sober" is, it's just the direction a lot of people go with it. Not my thing though. For me, "being sober" is something less tangible, and I don't think I can entirely put it into words yet. I missed the ongoing feeling of being clear-minded. Sometimes I can start to feel like I am living at a partial remove from myself, and I think drinking makes that worse, like there is too much blur in the world, and I myself am too much made of blur. I missed the more crisp edges I had started to get used to. (Nor crisp as in me being separate from the world. It's more like having a clearer sense of what's going on. Having a better grasp on the world might be a better way to say it.) And then, though I can enjoy a bit of denial, I can't deny that for the past two months, on and off, I have been feeling awfully low. Oh, it's a fierce drain on a person, feeling like this. And I know this old feeling very, very well. I don't know that it's brought on by booze, as I have had some of it when I wasn't drinking, but I sure do think that drinking makes it worse. Also, when I feel that low, drinking starts to become a way of checking out, and part of the deal with myself was that drinking had to be fun and lovely. If I were just checking out, then I would stop again. And while I wasn't at that point, I could feel myself sliding into it.

Anyway, I made a plan. I did a few spells of no drinking for a few days, or even a week, during the four months I was trying drinking, and I usually felt better during them. For me, it's not so much the craving and caving in that's a problem (though I know it is for some, and I respect that) as it is the trying to reason through why I should drink or not drink. In the end, four months ago, I lost track of my reasons, and though I was desperately trying to find reasons in what other people said, I ended up feeling alienated in this whole sober gig, and very, very lonely. (Not blaming here. Just saying how it went for me.) The four months has been a good bit of investigating my own reasons, and I think by now I can find my own feet beneath me once again. So here's the plan: no drinking for 100 days. I kind of liked that the first time around, though getting tangled up with someone else's challenge turned out (though great for some folks) to be terrible for me, and I won't do that again. I decided this yesterday, and talked with my partner about it. I'm committed. And then I counted, and 100 days brings me to Christmas day, which seems easy enough to remember, and a nice date to work towards.

To be honest, this feels like an enormous relief. Whereas sometimes quitting drinking feels like a deprivation, deciding to take a fixed-time break feels like a present to myself. I've also made a few other changes. School was feeling ridiculously busy--I felt like I was standing in a video game that was going faster and faster and I was still keeping up but waiting for the big kerpow! So I withdrew from a few projects and made what I have to do feel manageable. And some things that were awful have improved tremendously: my partner (now my husband!) has largely healed from his terrible accident, so my time is more my own and I'm not swamped with medical/financial/ life worries. With the time freed up in all that, and once I climb out of this dark place I've been in, I will soon be able to be running and biking at my usual pace again.

And I will come back to writing about how it's going. I'm sure I will remain cranky on that front at least. As I keep on saying, I am not much given to certainty, and I find cold comfort in the absolute certainty of many of the sober platitudes. But I will keep on trying to find my own way in all this, and for at least the next 99 days, that will be without drinking.

Thanks for reading of you're still here and not put off by my cranky temper. It feels a little bit good to be heading back to being sober again. Peace.

What changed my mind?

I'm not sure I'll be able to write clearly about it, but I wanted to describe why I decided to try drinking again after being sober for 16 months. (As I mentioned last post if you're reading sober blogs mainly to read like-minded people and you're going to feel uncomfortable reading about trying drinking after being sober, you should probably not read on. I understand. I wish you well.)

But for those who are still here: A few weeks ago, when my partner was recovering nicely from his accident and I had a little time to spare before school got super busy again, I took a few days off and lay around reading mysteries. It's something I do from time to time when I'm exhausted and I really want to relax. I had come across a new mystery writer (for me), Susan Hill, and I was gobbling up her Simon Serrailler mystery series. Hill is a great writer. Her mysteries deal with interesting social issues--hospice, end of life care--and the characters are well drawn and engaging. She's not a cozy writer--it's not all cats and recipes--but her mysteries are set in an English cathedral town, and they aren't drenched in gore in the way that many new mysteries are, so they are a good balance for me.

Now, just before that I had read "The Girl on the Train," and I guess I disliked it about as much as it seems people are liking it. I found the character's drinking was somehow too pat, too easily explained by the story, and her blackouts and embarrassing episodes were convenient for the story but alienating for me as a reader. I thought the writer wasn't quite striking the right notes, somehow. When I sold my copy, I was relieved to talk to a bookseller who had also disliked it, as it's always strange to genuinely dislike a book that everyone is raving about.

So that might have set me up somehow for the Susan Hill books. Because something I noticed as I read them, besides all the great writing and characters and so on that I just mentioned, was this: I liked how the characters drank. They sometimes had wine with family meals, or a drink with friends. And they sometimes looked forward to that. But they also often said no, because of having to work the next day, or because they were taking days off between having wine, or because they were driving, or because they just wanted water. In conversations in the books in which drinking came up, there was always due consideration given to whether the character would drink, and what else was going on.

I was surprised to find myself drawn into that way of thinking. Not in the way one can be drawn on when the drink is falsely romanticized--it wasn't about candlelit dinners or picnics on beaches or picturesque nightcaps. Instead, drinking seemed like a normal, pleasant thing that people did sometimes, the way they sometimes heated up leftovers for supper or made a salad or ate some rhubarb crisp or stopped at a cafe and had a coffee or a bite to eat. No one seemed fixated on having a drink, or on not having one. And other than a few characters in one book who were on wacky new age healing diets (because new age healers featured in the plot of one book), no one obsessed about food, or sugar, or caffeine.

Reading the books, I kept noticing this. And then I thought, I wish I could do that. I want to have pasta with wine, and dessert and a coffee, and not worry so bloody much about it all. And then, a while later, I thought, you know, I think I could do that. In the same way that the sober blogs spoke to me a couple of years ago, showing an alternate vision of how to get through without drinking too much, these books seemed to show a way of life that included alcohol as a part of life, neither the central problem nor the central pleasure in that life. Cake wasn't central, either. People were portrayed as finding their way through the problems and joys of ordinary life. It might be the best modelling of what gets called "moderation in all things" that I've seen. And it looked appealing to me.

I know there's more to it than that, but I think those books were my wee turning point. Obviously this is something I have thought about from time to time. When I quit drinking, I wanted to stop drinking too much, and not drinking at all was the only way I could see my way clear to that. The first time I tried drinking again, it may have been too soon (after almost four months without). At that time, I know I felt pretty alienated by the self-improvement focus that can creep into the sober blogs, and I wanted to get away from the therapeutic worldview altogether. But I was also a little bitter about some of the sober "support" that ended up ringing a bit shallow to me, and I turned back to my regular life, without being able to take in what I'd learned by not drinking.

This time around, I had stopped for just over sixteen months. I could accept that maybe I could never drink again. And somehow, that meant I could accept that if I were to drink, I would have to do it very differently. Also, I think I have learned a lot by not drinking for so long. I like keeping a clear head, sleeping well, remembering my evenings, and lots of those things that I lost when I drank too much. And I'm not bitter about anyone or anything. Plenty of things aren't for me, but we are all gloriously different, and that's just grand!

So far, it's been an enjoyable experiment. I've had wine with dinner a few times, with food, and in company. I've enjoyed it. I've been looking to see whether I would get that old familiar "wanting more" feeling, but so far I have not. I've liked the taste of the wine, and the experience of drinking wine with my meal, something I really did enjoy for years. One thing that's hard to describe is a feeling of having come home to myself in a strange way. For the most part, after I stopped drinking I didn't experience abstinence as a great restriction. I enjoyed doing other things, drinking other drinks. After the initial struggles, the obsession with drinking waned, and that was an enormous relief. Drinking again is a different kind of relief. I feel like I'm not keeping a part of the world at bay, and I'm not paying now for not having learned to drink properly as a younger person.

Over the past couple of years, I started to notice that when I am drinking a really great coffee in the morning, I have often thought, "I'll have another one when this is gone." Same with eating a cookie or having a sweet treat. It's bizarre to me, and it's the exact same feeling I used to get with wine. (Though I only noticed it when I stopped drinking and started to pay attention to a lot of things. I hate buzzwords, but "paying attention" or "mindfulness" has been a great help to me.) I think I was somehow keeping myself on a set of restrictions and doling out pleasures to myself, something I likely learned from years of restrictive eating. When those thoughts crop up, I have been acknowledging them, not yelling at myself or chastising myself for them, but also not having that second coffee (makes me jittery) or the second sweet (makes me sick). Recently, it seems I have found a way to be less restrictive, to want what's good for me in reasonable amounts, and not to sing for more like a deprived child when I have some nice thing. What I'm hoping is that I can do the same thing if I do sometimes get that "moreish" feeling with wine. If it works, and I think it will or I wouldn't be trying this, then it seems like a nice way for me to live. If it doesn't, I'll figure out a different way. And as I probably said before, I already know I can enjoy life without drinking, so if drinking doesn't work, that's always an option.

So that's what I've been up to, and how it's going. As I said before, I get it if you think I'm wrong, or this is too dangerous for you to read. I won't hold that against anyone who does stop. (You don't all have to so kindly chime in again to tell me you're still here now, though that really was super sweet after my last post!) I'm not especially interested in anyone's scare tactics or advice about alcohol always being the road to hell and doom, either. I mean, we all know alcohol can become a problem, so you'd have to think I was some kind of moron if you thought I needed a reminder of that, and if you think I'm a moron, I'm guessing you're not still reading my blog. That crankiness aside, if you're still here, thanks for reading. I probably won't post all that often, but in the interest of painting a picture of how trying drinking looks for me after 16 months sober, I'll keep the blog posted. Holding to the wider use of the word sober, as in "not drunk," I'll still think of this as being sober, though I know that's a minority view here!

Happy sunny weekend to you all.

Not so sure.

Sometimes I'm not so sure about the whole sober gig. I'm glad I stopped drinking a while back, and I'm glad I have figured out how to not rely on drinking to get me through things. I needed that, and I still need it. But I get suspicious of the recovery world. It just seems rife with the kind of perfectionism that I'm not sure is helpful, a kind of endless self-improvement project that I don't quite trust and can't buy into. Or maybe it's not perfectionism, but the sense that there is a narrow range of how we can be in order to be OK. Whatever it is, I'm not so sure it's for me.

Every now and then I do a whole batch of reading about moderate drinking. You may know the resources. You may read them, too. When I do, I don't talk about it here, as the word "moderate" seems to call up a heated debate, although the positions are pretty clearly marked out in advance, so not much is gained in the argument. But some people do seem to find a way to drink occasionally, and no, those are not people who keep writing sober blogs, since it's kind of de facto in the sober blog world that sober means abstinent. Another school of thought argues that sober means "not intoxicated" and that doesn't mean absolute abstinence. I'm getting curious about that version of sober.

So I'm writing here to say I'm reading this sort of thing these days, and I'm thinking about it. I don't want a warning, or ominous talk about wolves or witches.  And I'm not trying to start a debate. I just want to say I'm reading this stuff, and thinking about it. I might drink again to see how it goes. After more than a year away, and with some good support to help me figure this out for myself (which I have) it might be fine. If it isn't, I'll stop again. If it is, I'll be pleased with that.

This sort of thing upsets lots of people, so this post is a kind of fair warning. Please don't read my blog if this is going to bother you. I'm doing this to find my own way, and writing about what I think is part of my way. About every third post I talk about refusing to edit my posts to fit with some idea of a recovery world that I didn't sign on for. But I do get it: reading someone who has stopped drinking thinking about drinking again can be hard if you're using sober blogs as sober support. So I won't take it badly even if you all go away and I'm left back where I started, writing for myself. Promise!

That's about all I have to say on this for now. All is well here. It's a sunny day in May, the first shorts day for me, and life feels good. Whether you're sticking around for a while or you're leaving, keep well.

Spa Week returns!

OK, I admit it: my recent attempt at moderation was a crashing failure! I was moderate for a little while, sure. But then I decided I didn't want to restrict myself, and I returned to enthusiastic wine drinking.

I don't recommend it.

It wasn't all bad. I really do like wine, and I'm not prone to hangovers or doing stupid things while drinking.

But it wasn't all great. Here's a list of things that I think are not so great, not in any particular order:

• My hands hurt. I know that sounds weird. But they do. And they didn't while I was not drinking.
• I look hungover sometimes. I don't get the killer headaches or whatever people talk about. But I do look a bit hellish some mornings. And on those days, my hands shake as well as hurt.
• Sweet Jesus, wine costs a lot of money. A lot. At least $100/week. More money than I can afford to spend on it.
• I am less sure of myself, somehow. This is a big one. When I quit drinking I shed a lot of this kind of insecurity, the "they're probably not interested in what I have to say anyway." Drinking wine, it's back in full force. 
• I have gained almost five pounds in less than two months.
• I miss reading at night. After wine, I try, but really I just fall asleep.
• I don't sleep through the night. Ever. Four AM wakeup, need water, takes an hour to go back to sleep. Same old, same old.

I could go on, and I probably should, but that's the gist. It doesn't sound like a lot of fun after all, does it?

When I was planning to take down the blog altogether, both Lilly and Christy suggested just going quiet for a bit instead. I'm not much of an advice taker, but I'm really glad I took their advice there. Thanks to you both, if you see this.

So I'm making a radical change in direction, again. This is going to be Spa Week, an indulgent week of drinking sparkling water with cranberry, reading mysteries, riding my bike (if the weather holds). And no alcohol. After a week, I'll see what I think. I don't want to commit to anything longer than that. Though even saying that last part sounds a bit silly to me. I'm going to keep blogging after all, because I see how the blog works. You say something out loud, and then if it sounds ridiculous, you have to rethink it.

I know I should maybe have enormous regret about having tried this, but I don't. I had hoped the compulsion to drink too much had faded. One thing is sure: it had not faded. So that's a lesson learned, I think. I'm not sure what's ahead, but continuing to drink too much, or returning to old habits of drinking too much, really isn't what I want to do.

OK, I should make my lunch and head to work. Here's to spa week! And to the many fine people here who are such good encouragers, good enough to encourage a poor listener like me.

Peace and joy.

T

My moderation thing: how it's going

I haven’t written in a couple of weeks. This blogging is tricky stuff. I think I’d written myself into too small a corner here with my moderate drinking experiment. If things were going well, I felt I couldn’t talk about it because I don’t want to be smug about what I’m trying. Smug is definitely not my game. If something wasn’t working, I felt I couldn’t write about it without people telling me that just giving it all up for good is the better way. But in not writing, I felt like I was stopping paying enough attention, and this thing I’m trying requires me paying attention.

So, after about a month of trying moderate drinking (following 100+ days without) what have I got?

There are some things I definitely like about drinking. When I stopped for a while, I found it easy to be hyper-critical of the drinking part of our culture. I had to be if I was going to set that aside altogether. So here I’m trying to balance that. Give the culture some credit.

Good wine tastes very good. I like it, much as I like good food and good chocolate. (Apparently I think chocolate is a separate category than food.) Jason Vale is just plain wrong on this one. Maybe he doesn’t like it, or something. I do. It’s best if I accept that, and not try to buy into pretending I don’t. I can’t keep that up for too long.

People like getting together for a drink. It’s fun. Last week I went to the pub with some folks after a meeting, and we had a really enjoyable conversation that just wouldn’t have gone that way over coffee. This isn’t about the chemical effects of alcohol. People start to relax once they’ve made the decision to go out, before they even arrive, much less order drinks. This is a social change, a shared anticipation, and it is real.

I like the rituals of drinking: nice glasses, pretty liquids. Going to the store and choosing the wine to go with the lamb you’re planning for dinner. It’s fun, and festive. These rituals are rooted in the culture I’m in and the habits I have. It’s best to acknowledge them, rather than pretend they don’t exist. In part, the rituals of culture make up who we are.

Having said that, I want to take a good square look at when drinking goes wrong. And that’s pretty much one thing: drinking too much. There is a point past which drinking really isn’t all that much fun. Worse, it's dangerous, especially for women. In Amy Gutman’s excellent article Why feminists don't get drunk, she points out that excessive drinking lessens personal agency because it disables a person’s ability to make decisions. So it’s best not to drink so much that decision-making is impaired. I think this is, over time, what most people do. They find that "enough" feeling, the place to stop. If you can't learn that, you just can't drink. Our culture is big on taking personal responsibility, but we're really gapping out on that one.

I think I'm learning. Yesterday, I took myself out to a fancy lunch with wine, which is something I love to do. Then I came home and had coffee and did some work, and then went to a movie with friends. No more drinking for me that day. I didn't want to. Still, I realized I should have had one glass with the lunch, not two. The first one was good. Partway through the second one I thought, oops, I don’t need this, but I had ordered it, and I drank it, and yes, it made me fuzzy in a way I didn’t like all that much. No big regrets, just noticing what works and what doesn't. 

I am trying to set up new norms, to structure my routines so that they become real new habits that aren’t much work. So some things have to be off limits—easy “no’s” for things that can trip me up, and that I can avoid. No more than two glasses of wine at a time, and always with a meal. Sip slowly and enjoy. And pay attention here. One might be enough. If it is, stop. If two doesn’t feel like enough, work through that tension somehow. Take a walk. Have some tea. Eat a little chocolate. Do the dishes. But don’t have more. And don’t let it ruin the evening. Part of this is I need to make sure I keep up the new evening rituals I started when I stopped drinking. Sparkling water while cooking is a good one. Herbal tea after dinner is another. Wine has a place and it’s a lovely one. Contain it, enjoy it, and move on.

I know there were a lot of people talking about moderation being torture a week or two ago. For me, it isn’t. It’s not automatic, and I expect I will feel cranky sometimes when I have to say no to myself, but I was cranky sometimes when I couldn’t have wine at all. Mostly, this has been really enjoyable for me, but of course it’s not for everyone.

One final note: guilt is off-limits! I am trying to figure our how to do this. It might not work, but I think I’m getting somewhere. I can get caught in a trap of perfection and guilt, but that just doesn’t make sense here. I’m not trying to prove anything, or be the best darn moderator who ever lived so I can win some bloody prize. I’m just trying to change some habits, using what I know about how habits form and change, so I can live a good life. So far so good.

If you’ve read all this, many thanks. And peace.

Enough.

When I started this blog, I wanted to get a handle on my drinking. These days, I'm trying to grapple with the wider issue of my own greed. I have always wanted more of everything. I'm not talking about money here, or stuff. I'm talking about good things happening. I am greedy about moments. I want them to go on forever. It's like I don't believe anything good has ever happened before, or will again, and so when there is something fun or lovely or good on the go, I become some sort of glutton for the experience. Whether it's a good book, or an evening with friends, or a three day camping trip, when it's over I am always bereft.

That's no way to live. I know our economy, and our way of life, is based on competition for scarce resources. But I don't really think life is like that. What if somehow, enjoying the moment means letting go of that urgency to keep it going? Accepting that the moment will end, and other moments will happen, instead of trying to cling fiercely to the fleeting one you're in right now. As I wrote last time, I'm pretty good at the extremes, so I can do self-denial with the best of the self-deniers, or indulge myself as well as many gluttons in the crowd. I didn't learn the middle way when I was a young person figuring out how to live. But I think it's worth the effort to see if I can learn how to live it now.

I am trying this with learning to drink moderately. And it's going well. I am not, as feared, beset with cravings, or spiralling into an out of control mess. During my 100+ days not drinking, I did a lot of mental work. I paid attention to the things make me want to drink, and found other, better ways to cope with some of those things. I realized that being drunk is an awful feeling and a waste of life. That I was using drink as one giant "get me out of here! That being clear and able to remember evenings was a better way to live, one I wanted to stick with. All that stuff I wrote about before.

So now that I'm trying to learn how to drink like a normal person, one who enjoys wine but doesn't go overboard, what I'm learning is a revelation. One amazing thing is, a little really is enough. One glass of wine, maybe two, is a good amount. That means two people sharing a bottle of wine have two whole glasses left over, without any deprivation or hardship. That's astonishing to me! I have never, ever been someone who has had a sense of there being enough. I always wanted more and more. I thought it was come sort of congenital condition. But it turns out that learning to pay attention to the taste and the effect of the wine means I can feel my limit when I hit it, and then I genuinely don't want any more. This is what I wanted to happen, and I had some hope that it could, but I wasn't at all sure.

Another thing is, different situations are different. At home enjoying a quiet dinner with my partner, one glass is lovely. Out in a noisy restaurant with a long relaxed meal, splitting the bottle feels OK, but that's not something I'm going to do very often. One night I had a glass of my favourite kind of beer, a locally brewed extra special bitter, and the single glass was plenty for me. After that, I had a glass of sparkling water, because that's what I wanted. Only once did I see how things fail for me when they fail. I had a glass of wine and then a brandy, and the brandy hit me really fast, and then I did have that old more more more feeling. But instead of resisting it, I had a little more, and stayed with the feeling, and I could feel how wrong that wanting more had been. The extra didn't taste good, and I didn't like the buzzy feeling. I didn't feel guilty or scared, though. I just learned from it, one more bit of knowing what "enough" feels like for me. The moment hadn't lasted, and nothing I could have done would have made it last. In fact, the panic that the moment might end is what makes the moment end too early. Relax into it and it's yours until it's really over, and then there's a whole new moment, with its own promise. This is all new to me. I think it's worth learning.

I do have some absolute restrictions, though. I don't have anything to drink is when I think, "I really need a drink now." When I hit that tired, antsy frame of mind, I drink a large glass of sparkling water instead. If I am going to learn to enjoy wine in moderation, the way people do, it's important that I don't use it in the old escape ways. So I don't pour a big glass of wine after work when I come home feeling beat after working the evening shift. Instead I have a cup of herbal tea, and go to bed. I don't mindlessly pour wine as soon as I come through the door at dinnertime. I pour a sparkling water, and enjoy it, and I always realize I was more thirsty than I had realized.

In this new way I'm learning, wine is something I can have in small amounts, with food and with other people. I am seeing whether I can learn the practice of social drinking that I wish I had learned as a young person. So far, it seems promising. Don't get me wrong, it's not like I have magically fallen into some perfect zone of moderation and now it will all be fine. I am just trying to use the same mindfulness I use in the rest of my life. If I don't want to ride my bike because I'm tired, I have learned to pay attention to know whether I'm really tired or just feeling lazy. If I crave something sweet (or savoury, more likely!) I have learned to figure whether I am hungry, or whether I just want some comfort, and then whether food is really the thing for that. Learning that with wine feels like part of the same process for me. No, it's not going to be perfect, nor does it come naturally to me. That doesn't mean I can't get good at it, though. Learning to ski wasn't natural, but I'm glad I did it. Becoming a fit adult after a couch-potato childhood wasn't natural. Nor was going back to school after years out. I think we can learn to make some changes, slowly and carefully. I'm not saying  this is all OK now, or that I am sure it's going to work out easily from here. But I am trying, using the things I learned from not drinking, and using what I have learned in other changes I have made as well. Mostly I am kind to myself, but not indulgent, and that feels right to me.

I'm not out to convince anyone to do something different; I'm just saying what works for me. Someone mentioned to me that one reason people are afraid of moderation is that people who become moderate drinkers simply drop out of the conversation. (I think more often, people try to do the same thing they did before and just call it moderation, and big surprise, that leads back to where they were before. I know, because I have done that. ) So I plan to drop in once in a while and say, honestly, how this is going for me. I'm actually not doing this for other people, though. I am writing because I want to pay attention to what I'm learning, noticing it so I can hold onto it when I need it.

And for now, I am learning that there is such a thing as enough, and I can recognize that when I come to it. If I really get a handle on that, I won't have to oscillate between my usual poles of deprivation and greed. So far so good.

If you've read this, many thanks. Peace.