One week of Sobriety.

Well, I have been sober for one week.

For the first time in my life I am actually seriously considering sobriety.
Let me give you some back story.

I started drinking when I was 13 years old. I have done and used to do harder drugs, I no longer do harder drugs, I have never had an issue with harder drugs and haven't done harder drugs in 4 years now.

I have always been an alcoholic. When I started drinking it used to be at parties and stuff like that. I would drink to have fun with my friends.
I do not know when my life took this turn. I can't put my finger on it and say "Ah, ha! Yes! this is the point in my life I became an alcoholic. It just became this way. I like to think that after my friends slowly started dropping off. Having children, getting jobs, etc etc I kept turning to the same vices; around the age of 20-22. Eventually, before I knew it I was drinking every single day. I was homeless for a little bit and was drinking and traveling. Even at this point in time I did not see these times as bad times and even still to this day look back fondly on those times and the people I met.

Then my mom got sick.
In 2017 my Mom was diagnosed with COPD. Obviously, this was quite devastating to me. I am not stupid, my mom did not raise an idiot. I knew that the writing was on the wall. It started with the breathing machine, then she was unable to bathe her self. She eventually had to be put in a nursing home. I think some part of me still believed she would come back to the apartment we used to share....At this point in my life I was still doing harder drugs. I should probably mention, I had a friend of mine who lived in Washington who I had known for years. My mom had been in and out of nursing homes for maybe 5 months at this point. One day, finally, I decided that I did not want to be high anymore that I didn't want to be fucked up. So my friend from Washington, well call her Kim, I hit her up and told her I was looking to get off drugs. We talked and the nearest rehab in my area was over 6 hours away. I called my mom and told her what was going on. I went to rehab for 6 months, left that rehab and here I am. A resident of Washington state. I was sober for a year and then it happened and My mom died from complications related to her condition on mothers day 2019. I had to make the call to pull the plug on her. I was drunk the night she died.

After my mom died I can't really describe how I felt.
There are a lot of things left unsaid that I wish I would have said.
I was unable to be with her when she died and I still beat myself up over that, a lot.
I felt empty and alone. It had always been me and my mom. Through everything. All of my other family is gone and passed away while I was still young. She really is all I have had and now she was gone.
It's not possible to articulate the way I felt.

So I did what I had known best. I turned back to drinking. I managed to stay away from the other drugs. If not by my own will through circumstances of my location. I kept drinking. I drank and drank and drank until I couldn't stand, or, move, or feel, well, anything really.
Long story short, it accumulated in my first DUI. After a night in jail I was back out and drinking again. I drank right up until my court trial 5 months later. Of course, like I Said I am not stupid, I knew I would have to stop drinking because of this, at least for a short period. Well, I managed to avoid prison and landed on a year of probation and my license got suspended. For the first 10 months of my probation everything was fine. I didn't drink. I chose not to drink (mainly because I didn't want to go to prison) The only time I drank on my probation was mothers day 10 months after the dui. People can say it is a crutch, and , to some extent they are right. People can say I am using it as an excuse to drink and, to an extent, they are probably right. Drinking makes the pain go away.

After I got of probation it was back to the same shit. Drinking and drink and drinking. I managed for a long time to keep a handle on it and not drink until after 5, or, whatever arbitrary rules we alcoholics like to put on ourselves to justify our total annihilation of ourselves.  But, ultimately, that would prove to be to great of a task even for me. Some more background, at this point in the story, after the end of my DUI, I ended up getting my own apartment. I suppose I am what they call a "functioning alcoholic."
I work and can hold a job and don't live on the streets which I guess that means I don't totally fall outside of the norms of society, whatever; I have my own place. At this point I am living alone, I am 30, I have no family, and no children. I have dreams and goals, but, the depression, the isolation, the loneliness; I use alcohol to cover these feelings up. By the time christmass 2020 was over I was drinking a 30 case in 2 - 3 days regularly.
I would get my meger wages from work, pay my rent, pay my internet and then drink the rest of it away. I know I needed a savings, I knew, by this point, I needed help. I just didn't care.

I saw a tictok and I think it describes what drove me to finally, consciously, seek out sobriety: A narrator asks: "How do you know that it's time to get sober" - A man responds: "When you don't have the courage to die, but, you no longer have the will to live."

Yeah, I think that is about what describes the way I felt one week ago.
No desire to live, but, no desire to die. Limbo, in-between, simply wasting my time. I am not going to say it was some great epiphany, or, that I came to go, or, anything like that. One week ago I made the decision to seriously take and consider sobriety. I know that I might fail, I know that it will not be easy, I know that I will struggle with myself and the way I feel and the vices I so easily turn to to erase my emotions and the way I feel. But I know that the alternative at this point is death.
It is not a spectacular story, or, like something you will read in the AA books. But that is it and this is me now.

I am just trying to do the best I can one day at a time~