Happy Birthday Ketch!

Happy Birthday!!! I hope this hangover isn't too bad.

I hope you had a great birthday Ketchikan!

Oh yes and happy birthday

Thanks for the birthday wishes. I am happy to announce that it was a totally uneventful day. I needed to just be after that eight day drunken excursion. That's for sure.

Now I see a pattern in my life. When I am ready to leave a job, I turn to Jaegermeister to escort me out the door. That's what I did recently. It was last Thursday, Sept. 15th and I was to open the cafe. I was on the tail end of this last binge. So what did I do? I drank a whole bottle of Jaeger-- that's right-- in the wee small hours of the morning, I was downing shot after shot at 4:15 am in the morning while getting ready for work. Why? To sabatoge my job, of course.

Now here's the saving grace. Chad, the cook, was late coming to restaurant. He usually gets there before I do, so when I stumbled up to the place around 5:35 a.m., Tina, who has tourette's syndrome and helps every morning fill the creamers, was lingering outside. I had left my restaurant key at home, which was perfect since it bought more time. More time to walk (to the best of my ability) in the fresh air and to sober up.

I walked home and retrived the key and made my way back. Please understand, I was in total grey-out. Chad was still nowhere to be found. He likes his Jack Daniels and I thought about writing a sign and putting it on the front door, "We are closed today because of addiction. Thank you and sorry for the inconvenience." Then decided against it.

Now, the owner's son/cook lives upstairs. I went up to knock on his door and he very quickly started calling the masses.

Then I thought with a hint of deviousness, "Hey, this is my "get out of jail free" card. It's Chad on the hot seat afterall! I am home free!"

Being the actor that I truly am, when the other waitress came in, I told her, in grave seriousness that I needed to talk to her. I will spare the details, but it was a shady white lie pertaining to the ill health of a family member in Florida and as my tears fell, I explained that I might have to fly out earlier than my booked time of Oct. 20th. She just hugged me andd said, "Go! Just go! And let us know how it turns out."

The sneaky tactics of the alcoholic in me... I swear!

The next day I was to supposed also work, but it was the final and most blacked-out hazy day of the bunch. There was no way I was going parade around in that small, ill-florescently-lit cafe attempting to be normal. No way. No thespian could pull that performance off.

So the moral of the story is that tomorrow (Sunday) is my last day. I will end this year-long gig. But I will exit with my head held high. I really don't know if I am even scheduled to work. So I'll dress for the last time in the less than sexy white polo shirt/black pant/practical shoe number. Whether I stay to work a shift, I really don't care.

I am that ready to go.

This is my second AF day in a row but I am hoping for many more in the weeks to come.

I definitely pinpointed a trigger: Escape. Escape from reality, responsibility and employment.

Living and learning,

Ketchikan1

It's great that you were able to pinpoint a cause to this bender and learn something from it. Hopefully the next time this sort of situation rolls around TSM will have worked its magic!

Ketch,

Self Sabotage... why do we do it? I understand precisely your thinking, but we make life so hard don't we?

Now will you make a promise? Promise me you won't drink Jagermeister again? It's always such a bad idea.

Hold your head high; know that you are dealing with your problem. Don't give up, believe in yourself. You will get there soon.

Take care A x

I hear where you are coming from Ketch. I think we all do it to a degree. Maybe its got to do with our lack of self belief- ie deep down (maybe subconciously) we think we a fraud and don't truly deserve what we have achieved so we do our best (again subconsciously) to pull it all down. Alcohol is perfect for that. I suppose the answer is that we have to convince ourselves that we do deserve to achieve things and allow ourselves to develop our self belief. TSM should help with that in the long run. In the meantime maybe try to pull yourself back and ask yourself why am I doing this to myself? I agree with Andy to, try to stay away from Jager- there is a good reason they are called Jager bombs Hope you have a good week

Hi, Ketch, and belated happy birthday! Before I forget, I just wanted to correct something, you came into the world via the vagina- signed Pedantic Patricia :0P

I'm sorry that you have had such a rough time recently. I wonder would upping your dose of Nal to 75 mg help? for a while at least until you feel you have more control? 50 mg was too much for me, maybe it's not enough for you? It's just a thought.

AAers would have a ball psycho-analysing your recent bender, suggesting emotional immaturity and god knows what but I do think that the fact remains that there is a fundamental reason why you did it, can it be "just" biochemical?

I've been suggesting a book to a few people here, it helped me a lot in my early sobriety and it might help you too, bty, apogees if I'm repeating myself, it's called The heart of Addiction by Dr. Lance Dodes. His is a theory, like many others, but it might be helpful. He argues that an overwhelming sense of helplessness and powerlessness drives addictive behaviour. The addictive act (drinking, in our case) permits the addict to regain control (no, the irony has not escaped me ), or at the very least a momentary autonomy, thereby reversing the sense of powerlessness and helplessness. So, maybe you felt a sense of helplessness about your job? you knew you had to do something about it but you either didn't know what to do or you felt that what you could do wasn't doable... but you had to do something, so you binged??

I hope you have some AF days and that you feel better soon. A good sobriety trick that has helped me on TSM is to always make sure you're neither hungry nor thirsty, hunger and thirst often make us feel like a drink.

Good luck.

Curi

Happy belated, Ketch!

I'm with Andy on this one - PLEASE promise you will never drink Jaeger again. I don't know what they put in that stuff, but it turns mild-mannered people into raging beasts. If you were craving liquid crack, I really hope Nal did its thing and weakened whatever neural pathway was linked to Jaegar. Brutal stuff.

I hope this week has been a welcome reprieve from the bender. We're all behind you!

-H