Pre-Holiday Pep Talk For Those In Early Sobriety

While everyone on Facebook is flashing glasses of alcohol.

I am flashing glasses of healthy goodness.

Summer is upon us, and the holidays are RIGHT around the corner, so let's have a little pre-pep talk. The holidays can be a stressful time for people. Lack of money mixed with high expectations of what Christmas should look like can lead to over indulging in the magical poison that makes you forget your worries. Like our own little Hakuna Matata potion.

I am here to tell you two things.

You don’t have to have a drinking ’problem’ to quit drinking alcohol. Many times individuals think that if it’s not interfering with work and family or if it’s not something you HAVE to do every single night then it’s perfectly acceptable and there is no need to quit. False. I quit drinking over 14 years ago. I only drank on weekends, I only drank only if I was around other people and I had zero cravings to drink alcohol ever. There was no addiction, but that does’t mean there was not a problem.

I quit drinking because it was clearly not good for my body, I could tell that from the next day headaches and bodyaches. When a night of drinking makes you loose the entire next day by having you laying around in bed watching tv to repair your mental and physical state. That is unacceptable in my book. I quit drinking because it was a total waste of money, there was no visible benefit. I quit drinking because it didn’t make me a better person, it made me a crappy person, slurring words, tripping over my own feet, endless amounts of meaningless I love you’s to everyone I met and entire pieces of my life missing from blacking out, the list could go on and on.

Maybe you can relate. Maybe your circumstance is different, maybe you aren’t ‘as bad’ maybe you are ‘worse’. It is all your perspective. But this is what I can tell you. Drinking alcohol is not something that should be glorified, it is an addictive substance that causes us to lose our ability to think logically and perform at our highest abilities. Maybe it is time for you to sit down and analyze why you drink, what benefits are you getting from it? Are there other things you could be doing, healthier things, that could get you the same or maybe even better results? Dig a little deeper into the reality that is your life and think about what kind of life you are creating for yourself.

Let me leave you with something to think about. I am 38 years old. The average female in the US lives to be 78 years old, let’s round that up to 80 years old. I have already lived 38 years which means I have 42 years left. 42 years might seem like a long time to you, but when you break that down into days, it is 15,330 days. That is it, in 15,330 days I will more than likely be dead. That is a reality. I’m sure by this point you are thinking of your age and how many days you have left. I have a question for you, how many days of your life do you want to waste?

Some of you are thinking. I only drink on Saturdays. Let’s put that into perspective. I have 2,184 Saturdays left to enjoy. Which would leave me with 13,146 days.

How many days of your life are you willing to lose to mindless actions? Ten? One Hundred? Two Thousand?