week 30: lonely

wow, has it really been around four months since i posted? time seems to be going by so fast these days. so many things have changed in my life since i last posted. it started with a trip to the emergency room followed by a week long stay in the hospital. i had pancreatitis... again.
years ago i had gone to the er for the same ailment, i had lost my job the weekend before and had gone to a halloween party soon after where i drank, alot. my body decided  to revolt and i got to spend the day in triage connected to tubes and given a prescription for vicodin. i went home that night, took it easy on the the boozing, and recovered quickly.
as soon as i felt well enough i returned to my old habits and  went back to  drank my self to sleep more often than not.
so there i was, easter sunday, in pain i cannot begin to describe, on my was again to the hospital. several years had passed and this time it was rather serious. my liver want doing so well, among other things, i later was told that those admitted for what i had been suffered a fort percent mortality rate.
i dont remember much of that week in the icu, i was given many drugs and spaced out or slept most of the time, apparently one night i woke up in a drug addled state and attempted to escape the hospital thinking i had been kidnapped, i had stuffed all the iv bags and monitors into my bag, pulled on a pair of jeans and nearly made my escape, i was watched closely after that.
near the end of my stay one morning a nurse had come in with some results from lab tests or something, in the conversation i mumbled something along the lines of cutting back on my drinking and was informed in no uncertain terms that i would never be able to drink again. this hit me like a slap to the face, i did some math and realized that it meant that i would have to live at least twenty or thirty (conservatively) sober.

this realization scared the shit out of me.

how the hell was i supposed to manage that?

well it turns out that the memory of the pain was a huge deterrent for one, after i was released i began to live my sober life.

i had gone from drinking nightly to nothing in the span of five days, to be honest, i had no idea what to do with the hours i usually spent drinking and watching something on netflix. i began to try and draw but found that difficult as i was accustomed to getting drunk before inspiration would hit, it was disheartening, all the friends i had left were drinkers and our social interaction consisted mainly in playing pool and getting wasted, so i did what i had to do and stopped hanging out with them, and my small sad little world became that much smaller.

in short i was lonely, i was miserable.

after a few weeks of promising i decided to go to an a.a. meeting, ive been going more or less daily ever since, sometime i get something out of it, insights, advice, others not so much.

i have been sober since april 16th, and havent really desired a drink in all that time since.

one of the things ive come to learn about myself, in part due to the meetings and the fact that without the option of drinking, all the problems that i had to cope with by getting wasted were still there, big scary problems, life.

so now i have to learn how to cope on different and hopefully healthier terms.

one of the things about myself that i had learned was when it comes to intimate 
 relationships i have historically chosen women who i knew on some level would not work out, people whose damage was a mirror to my own, the fear of rejection made me look for people who couldnt hurt me and that i could reject before they had the chance to strike first.

i do not recommend this, its ultimately, painful and a huge waste of time.

nonetheless, it was how i was operating, and now that i can see this pattern i can hope that i might be able to avoid those pit-falls in the future.

and while my life is still a mess, i have hope for the first time in many many years.