Hope - Recovery

I am not an alcoholic but I thought I would share my source of strength with all of you. Above is my favourite photograph - I took it in the woods behind my garden a couple of years ago after a three day fast and thought I was hallucinating something as beautiful and as pure as a daisy. I sincerely wished I could be that daisy, that I could bloom into perfection for one day and then wither away satisfied. 


This is what keeps me from returning to that place -


The Promises ©1939 Alcoholics Anonymous


If we are painstaking about this phase of our development, we will be amazed before we are half way through.
We are going to know a new freedom and a new happiness. 
We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it.
We will comprehend the word serenity and we will know peace.
No matter how far down the scale we have gone, we will see how our experience can benefit others.
That feeling of uselessness and self-pity will disappear.
We will lose interest in selfish things and gain interest in our fellows.
Self-seeking will slip away.
Our whole attitude and outlook upon life will change.
Fear of people and of economic insecurity will leave us.
We will intuitively know how to handle situations which used to baffle us.
We will suddenly realise that God is doing for us what we could not do for ourselves.
Are these extravagant promises? We think not. They are being fulfilled among us - sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly. They will always materialize if we work for them.


I find the twelfth sign of recovery the most inspiring and is what I remind myself of everyday I wake up:
We are restored to sanity, on a daily basis, by participating in the process of recovery.

"I am so proud of you, like, when I look at you, I'm like 'God, Daisy has really changed, you seem so happy, so stable, so content. It's wonderful see."
"It's lovely that you think that... I really do feel so much better these days. God, I sound so bloody self-righteous these days. I must have changed!"
Joking around in the kitchen with my housemate I realise just how obvious last year's apathy and general disgust must have been to everyone. Giving up drinking seems to everyone like my latest attempt at reforming myself. In a sense it is. I'm sick of waking up with no memories and a rising sense of guilt. I'm also conscious in 25 days I will be in a bikini on a beach and I can't afford to be wasting calories on alcohol. That said for the first time in my life I'm restricting without counting calories, without purging and without obsessing over binges... too much. It's so fucking hard.

A year ago I slept with a complete stranger an hour after meeting him. We had great sex, although at one point during foreplay I text the American, who at the point I was also sleeping with. As he walked me to part of the way home I kept forgetting his name and when he asked me for his number, I answered: "why? so we can meet up and spoon some time?" and left him. He was in the bar last night. As he walked across the opposite side of the room, our eyes locked and I felt that pure libidinal rush I thought had simply dried up. He came over, we talked. I had a few drinks. I felt old Daisy resurface. I called him a cunt. I insulted him repeatedly. And as we flirted at the bar, people kept coming up to us, interrupting, girls obviously cockblocking, and it was only when a girl I'd been briefly chatting to came up to him and kissed him on the mouth, I realised.
"Is that your girlfriend? Well done, you've done better than I'd have expected"
So as his girlfriend and all her friends swarmed around the bar, he carried on flirting with me. And whilst I know she has a better body than me, I had the arrogance, the scorn that kept him there, leading me to a dark corner of the bar to evade the observation of their friends.
"How long have you been together?"
"Don't ask. Too long. Tomorrow is our anniversary."
Watching a man make the moral decision whether to cheat or not whilst his girlfriend is in the room is an extraordinary thing to watch.
"Daisy, are you propositioning me?"
"Perhaps, if I couldn't see your girlfriend"
I made my excuses, and left. I'd seen enough of the male ego. He offered to walk me to the gate. At the gate, he told me he wanted to walk me home, passing a club he sees his friends in the queue, and in full view of them, hugs me. As he turns to walk away, I tell him to enjoy his anniversary. He grimaces.
I go home and cry.

"If you don't want to fuck me, you must be straight"

After my last post - another awful night out. Three hours of blankness, absolutely nothing, just waking up with terrible, terrible guilt. Lots of crying and friends shouting about how crazy, out of control, selfish I am. So I decided to give up drinking. Decided that was impossible. Decided to give up getting drunk. Somewhat easier.
This weekend I was meant to go away and stay with the Beautiful One for the weekend to celebrate her birthday and make up for that disastrous weekend in which I got with her not-ex-boyfriend and slept with some guy I went to school with. When she called to cancel I wasn't exactly distraught having spent the last week contemplating the appropriate social etiquette when in a room with three people you've had sex with in recent memory.
I've been so good recently. Virtuous even. No sex, not even a kiss. The other night in the bar, a beautiful girl tried to seduce me. As she told me how much she wanted me, how fucking hot she thought was, as she drunkenly groped me, I felt that familiar shudder of anticipation knowing that here was sex. As she told me I was the reason she felt comfortable coming out knowing how well respected I was, I felt that other aspect of sexual anticipation I find impossible to ignore - contempt, scorn, disdain. I could have you, and I could leave you, and no one would know. And I saw myself in her. She couldn't believe that I'd rejected her. I made out with her, bored, for a while. And then I told her she was too drunk and greedy and to go home.
This weekend I just wanted to get drunk and get fucked.
I ate instead.
Progress?