Guess what? →[More:]
I'm ten years sober today! Holy crap! How did that happen?

Ten years ago I was a mess. I was really lucky to get sober when I did, because I still had a job, home, husband, and a semblance of a 'normal' life. But I had no dignity or self-respect, and I was consumed by fear and self-hatred. I couldn't have put words to those feelings, though, because I'd numbed myself with drink for years, in an attempt to stop myself from feeling anything at all.

As soon as I stopped drinking, my life began to improve. I stopped losing things - handbags, keys, jackets, chunks of time ... I haven't peed myself once since I got sober, or come to in a strange bed with a strange man.

But it was the big changes that took time. I read something only yesterday in a novel that describes it well:

"It's delicate - this process of waking up, coming in from the cold - you can't do it overnight."
"Why not?"
"You'd die. You don't know how to feel - or more accurately, what to do with what you feel. When a person comes in from the cold, it's not like they immediately feel warm. If they've been out for a while, they come in and everything hurts, and the warmer they get the more pain they're in. It's excruciatingly painful. For, as much as you want to feel nothing, you feel everything, you feel too much to bear, like you'd explode, or go crazy, if you knew how much you felt."

That describes it very well. Learning to feel again was very hard, learning to love myself even harder.

The last ten years have had some big ups and downs - divorce, love, death, illness - and I have to take the good with the bad. I can't feel joy unless I also know what pain feels like. These days there's far more joy than pain.

Tonight I'm going back to my first home group, which is an old geezer meeting in East London. Anyone who's ever been to AA will be familiar with the old geezers, sober a million years, telling the same old war stories over and over (as they'd probably be doing if they were in the pub), but so, so kind to me when I was a raw newcomer.

A few years ago one of the old geezers told me that they all thought I wouldn't make it, because I thought I knew it all and couldn't be taught. I had to learn to become teachable, to learn a new way of living that's giving me an incredible new life today.

I am grateful. So, so grateful.