It's Almost Later Now...

I've noticed recently that, the closer I get to my one-year-sober anniversary, the more I'm craving a drink.

I haven't had a chance to discuss it here yet, but I am planning to let myself have a drink that day, and see what happens.  If anything.  (Hopefully, nothing will.)  I've always said that I made the decision to be sober for "at least a year," because I didn't want to set a hard-and-fast deadline for it.  I wanted to play it by ear, and do it for as long as I felt it was necessary, and not as long as some arbitrary date I thought was a good idea before I'd even started.  But I also always knew somehow that, by the time I got to this point, unless there was a really compelling reason to extend it, then it was just going to be a year.  Because the fact is, after making it one year, I'm very proud of myself, and I feel that is a really significant accomplishment.  Enough so that I don't feel the need to keep it going indefinitely.  I'm satisfied, for now.  And the other side of that coin, is that it's been difficult, and unpleasant, and I'm really just tired of it, and ready to see what change, if any, this year has bought me.  And the only way to see what effect it has had is to experiment, and see what happens.  So, that's the plan for Walpurgisnacht, 2013.

Anyway, that's a topic that deserves its own entire post, and I've been wanting to get to that for some time now.  But I had to at least mention it here for this post to make sense.  Because as I've been thinking about this upcoming Witches' Night, and planning out what I'm going to do, and how, and why, I've found myself getting really excited.  Wow, it's been almost an entire year!  Only one month to go.  Then I finally get to have a Guinness and a bourbon again.  I can't believe it!  And the more I think about it, and the more excited I get, the more I start to crave it.  Crave it in a way that I haven't craved it for almost the entire year I've been sober.

I don't want to say this year has been easy, but it also hasn't been especially difficult.  There have definitely been some very difficult moments, where I really wanted a drink and had to try really hard to avoid it.  But, by-and-large, on any given day, I haven't had to think about it.  I certainly haven't had to deal with resisting strong cravings on a regular basis.  But as the anniversary day approaches, I'm finding myself doing exactly that.  Knowing that I'm going to finally get to have some again so soon is making me really want some right now.  I'm like a kid at the beginning of December, counting down the days with my advent calendar.  And every day I'm getting a little more excited, a little more anxious, and it's a little harder to resist, and I'm wishing harder and harder that it could just be Christmas already!  

Until recently, the end of this period has always been in some half-formed "future."  Whenever I wanted a drink, I'd just tell myself, "Not now; I'll have one later."  And I didn't have to think about when "later" was.  It was just "later."  But now I can see that "later" quite clearly.  So instead of telling myself, "Not now; I'll have one later," it's become, "Not now; I'll have one in five weeks."  And pretty soon that's going to be, "Not now; I'll have one in a month."  And so on.  And the smaller that number gets, the louder and more insistently some part of me says, "Fuck it!  Close enough."  And then the more energy I need to expend shutting that voice up.  (Because there's no such thing as "close enough."  I'm going to see this through.  I didn't work this hard and this long only to fuck it up right here at the end.)

I didn't anticipate how much simply defining that "later" was going to effect me.  But as soon as it went from Vague to Specific, everything changed.  Such a minute distinction, but it apparently made all the difference.

Lesson learned.