Group was incredibly emotional. Monday I didn't go, shot pool, did yoga, cooked and just had time for myself for a change. Wednesday was the return to normal schedule and was run by a substitute who happens to know me from the workshop that normally precedes group. She's noticed that I've been off lately, overly tired and apathetic, so she chose to quiz me first. Of course I brought up the weekend, the family denial, and the parade of nightmares that plagued me.

As I described my experiences in the hospital in 2000 to the group, waking up with the ventilator, the botched surgeries, the damaged lungs and respiratory treatments, and the excruciating pain from the damage done to my abdominal cavity, I realized that it was an objectively terrible ordeal. I also realized that the chronic scar tissue pain creates a constant reminder, which sets off emotions and feelings that has led to these nightmares on and off for the past 17 years.

In short, I have a form of PTSD, and my recent hospitalizations over the past year brought back the horror stronger than ever. The last straw was when my dad went in for his appendix this past August and had complications of his own. At that point I literally starting having flashbacks while awake whenever I talked to my mom about how he was doing, or heard the weakness in his voice and knowing all too well what he was going through. Not coincidentally that's when my drinking and resulting ER visits increased, leading to my spiraling crash ending in December.

However, it helps to put a name to it and have corroboration from others that this is a real, valid problem. For now I'm just living with the pain and occasional nightmares without my crutch of numbing alcohol and working on reducing the suffering however I can. I don't think the dreams will disappear, since it's part of my life, but like so many other things since I got sober I have to use every mental tool I have to accept the situation, do the best I can to cope with it, and realize that like everything in life, this will go through cycles.

I will not let it drive me back to old habits. I've already paid, and will still pay more in pain and nightmares, but as always there are worse things. Better the devil you know, I suppose, and the one that won't kill you in a year or two. As expressed in The Princess Bride, "Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something." Words to live by.

The weekend was good, and I got to see my aunt and uncle (different sides of the family) who I haven't seen since Thanksgiving, as well as deliver a belated Christmas gift that I finally finished. I spent some quality time with my parents, and it's a different experience now that I'm not staving off withdrawal or lying about my extracurricular activities or why I want to get home as early as possible. Something I'm truly enjoying is that I'm finally able to be honest about the simplest things about my current life.

Unfortunately, being home revved up my internal nightmare machine so I didn't sleep well. I think I've been repressing a lot of things in my life that my parents were involved in, health crises as well as recent unpleasant events. While they were hugely supportive during those times, there's some subconscious connection when I'm with them, so tonight I'm hoping I'll sleep well before going back to work. Someday I hope that I get past these nightmares which have been around off and on for almost twenty years; that's why I'm going to try therapy to finally get some closure.

And as always, when I mentioned to my sponsor and the other woman I've met in AA that I was going to be gone for the weekend they suggested a NJ meeting. As always, I said no. I'm not desperately craving a drink (although still wanting to not be sober), and can handle that without running to meetings. I also see no point in trying to make connections there since I'm not down at my parents often enough to get much out of the effort, and right now my efforts are focused on the most gain for the least energy since I've got little enough to work with. Some things seem not to be changing, but at least I'm consistent in dealing with it!

So it's day 74 for me. Two more weeks and I'll be at the "magic number" of 90 days. I'm cautiously optimistic that I will feel better then. Spring will be arriving, I hope I'll be done with or at least have an appointment for my taxes, the IOP may lower me to 2 days so that I'll feel that I have some time to myself again, and I can stop working Saturdays! Yes there's still the long-term to acknowledge, but for now I'm just projecting success for the next two weeks. At 90 days I think I'll take the week following to reevaluate what's working and what's not, and set new milestones, god willing. Good enough for now.

I'm feeling a little better after sharing in group and getting some sleep this morning. I'm off from work today and Monday, and heading to Jersey, so hopefully spending time with my family and having a long weekend will help to normalize my emotions a bit more.

In the meantime I've still been doing what I'm supposed to, working (even though I fell asleep at work again, dammit!), resting as much as possible, and I finally got my 60 day coin on day 71. So for now I'll just focus on enjoying the weekend, try not to overthink things, and start a new to-do list to occupy myself and continue to get my life in order. Someday this will pass and I'll believe it's worth it again.

I've had a lot on my mind, but nothing to do with Valentine's Day (Happy V Day everyone!) although I did buy myself flowers and chocolates. I can afford that and have no shame in doing so.

What's really been bothering me is that I'm doing all of the right things, but I'm not getting the mental peace that I so desperately need. I've discussed it with my psychiatrist, and while therapy's helping to organize my thoughts and bring my subconscious discomfort to my conscious mind, I still have no answers.

In early recovery there are certain AA sobriety milestones, 24 hours, 30, 60, and 90 days, 6 and 9 months, then a yearly coin. My 60 days was February 5th, and I'm having trouble putting it into a positive perspective; all I really want to do is get fucked up. We're told about urges and cravings, but the desire's been constant for a week and half, and that combined with the long days and lack (for me) of adequate sleep is wearing me down even more than usual. I didn't expect a pink cloud or miraculous blessings to fall from heaven and make my life more tolerable at my worst times. Intellectually I know this is a long, long process that may take many years to show material gains.

The emotional part of myself, however wants stronger reasons to keep going and I want it now. I want to not be lonely, having barely connected with one person I met in AA. I'm going to most meetings out of responsibility, not a desire to participate, so I feel like I'm just killing time. I want my aches and pains to be numbed away and the exhaustion to be masked, even for a time. Most of all I want my mind quieted and altered so that I can only handle one thought at a time and my worries disappear. I'm tired of fighting my own brain and body to stay on the straight and narrow, something that "normal" people simply do without thinking about it.

I kept hoping these feelings would mitigate or even go away if I waited it out. For eight days I've conquered my worst impulses. I just have to keep on going and trust that this too shall pass, hopefully in the next week. I'm still sober, and I need to remind myself that counts for everything right now. I will do this.

It's still amazing to me how even seemingly simple things can take far longer than anticipated, and cooking is proving to be one of those things. Last night was couscous with chicken, garlic, spinach, sundried tomatoes, and gorgonzola which turned out rather well. Between prep and cleanup, however, it was about an hour.

Today I figured that since I've been determined to learn to cook vegetables (since all I usually eat is pasta or other carb heavy foods), I decided that leeks, as a greatly underused vegetable, were the way to go. Garlic, onion, shallot, and leeks were cleaned and chopped, plus I made a vinaigrette of oil, apple cider vinegar, mustard, salt and pepper. After switching from sauteeing to braising, everything also took a little over an hour.

Judging by these experiences, I still wonder why people choose Blue Apron, Hello Fresh, or any of the other so-called ready made meals. Chopping and finding bowls to hold my mise-en-place took up the majority of my time; the actual shopping was a breeze in comparison, even counting the lines at Fairway. Paying someone else to do just shopping but still having to prep and assemble everything just seems useless to me. For lazy days, delivery is the way to go. If I want a whole meal fully prepared hot and ready, or even heat and eat, I will pay the premium!

I'm also developing a soft spot in my heart for working mothers, who prepare a main dish and usually two sides in one hour, let alone restaurant staff who serve an entire restaurant dinner with a 20 minute turnaround! Cooking for one sucks, but I think for now that's something to work on without aspirations for a greater career in the field. Next up maybe broccoli or cauliflower? Time to dig up basic recipes (couscous came from the back of the box, and the leeks from two cookbooks) and tweak to my particular tastes. There will be missteps, the largest so far was curiosity about how cinnamon would work with egg salad (never again!), but it's a learning curve. I just hope it's an exponential one!

Tonight was SMART Recovery instead of AA, and while those meetings can vary widely in terms of quality depending on the facilitator, there are parts of I like quite a bit. AA is very rule-bound, no crosstalk or advice is allowed, and its very much an all-or-nothing program where slips are an automatic smack back to Day 1 no matter how much time you had. SMART focuses on DBT skills and is more of an open forum for anyone to come and air their opinions on addiction and recovery.

If that sounds like I'm more of an advocate for SMART then yes, in some ways I am. However for sheer volume, AA definitely wins, especially in Manhattan. If you need to be with people at 2am on a Monday, AA is your program. No other recovery program has reached more people or, ironically, gained national attention in the same way, so even with the above flaws, there are thousands of alcoholics with 20, 30, or more years of sobriety who are living testament to the fact that it does work in spite of, and maybe because of, those rules. This is the major reason I keep going back to it since I am aspiring one day to be one of those oldtimers.

SMART can be more helpful to me in another way though. It welcomes addicts of any type, gambling, sex, food, so-called hard drugs, as well as alcohol, so you hear more varied and dire stories. I sympathize more and have more in common with those since I'm dealing with a life and death situation myself whereas in AA you find more people who quit when the "progressive and fatal disease" hadn't turned quite so immediately fatal. I'm a cautionary tale there, even though I'm the one looking for support and help. I also appreciate that as an open forum, I can both give and receive direct advice from anyone attending instead of simply having to raise my hand, hope I get called on, and then not be able to talk on any topic, only saying an "I related to...in your story..." instead of a true response.

One of the best gifts I was given in rehab, though, was time to truly commit to recovery in all of its forms. As a result, I left there with a fully open and willing mind, I haven't excluded anything as a possibility, and that is still in force now. I don't want or feel that I need to pigeonhole my recovery to follow only one path, and each program has their pluses and minuses. I'll still go to both and the IOP, get everything I can use, and know it will have to be enough. For now though, off to bed.

I'm guilty. I've been working all day, but I just tuned in to a Rock of Love marathon. While I'm not a huge fan of reality TV besides Worst Cooks in America, which is borderline reality TV/schadenfreude that makes me feel like a relatively decent cook compared to true disasters, ever since I started reading RoL recaps on Television Without Pity, that show sounded like such a trainwreck that I had to see it in all it's glory. I actually Netflixed the DVDs back in 2010 (before streaming was invented) and still lament the fact that seasons 2 and 3 were never available.

However, just judging the first season is enough to declare it a full-on guilty pleasure. Basically take one aging rock star, dial up 25 skanky strippers with balloon-sized breasts, turn on the cameras and voila, you have arguably the most unrepentant trashy and unnecessary drama ever filmed. The threesome night! The Vegas trip! The fight in front of their parents about how many times Lacey has sucked Bret's cock! Reality TV at it's finest, ladies and gentlemen.

Time to sit back and enjoy.

Yesterday I went to see a rheumatologist and thank god, no RA and the X-ray came back normal for my knees. Whatever I have it's not another health crisis to deal with, just another run-of-the-mill daily thing. It doesn't lessen the pain, but one fewer thing to worry about is a good thing in my book; I have enough to watch out for already!

It does mean more hours that I have to work on Saturday, but I've found myself retraining my brain to not obsess over things like that or resent it. That I'm able to take time out of a workday for a doctor's appointment and make it up by working from home, even on the weekend, is really a best case scenario compared to most other jobs. There's no hassle of finding coverage and swapping shifts, or even having to be physically present, and that's enough to quiet any negative reactions. I'm learning to think more about what I do have instead of what I don't.

That's a key piece that I learned in rehab and through some immersion in AA culture. Gratitude. It took almost losing everything, my apartment, job, family, health, and life to really instill a seed of that in me, but it was a necessary price to pay. I needed the time in rehab to wrap my head around the physical and mental trauma of the cirrhosis diagnosis, subsequent month-long hospitalization and the multiple ER visits when my liver started giving out over the past year. It provided distance from the immediacy of living the way I was to find a reason to come back, have the strength to stand up to this new paradigm, feel at the core of myself that this was worth living for, and most of all that it was worth living period.

For that and more, I freely admit that I'm grateful. And while I wouldn't say I'm happy, I'm content with where I am, acknowledging that there is more to look forward to and enjoy once I continue to make changes to my basic patterns. I keep reminding myself life is a marathon, not a sprint, and I'm hoping that the longer the run, the better chance you have to create a life you love without focusing on the daily slings and arrows.