5 Things Nobody Tells You About Quitting Drinking | Cracked.com
did you
a: smell bad while detoxing
No, but I smelled bad when hungover.
b: have crazy terrible nightmares
That's hard to say because I've suffered from Nightmares/Night terror since I was small. I'll say there was no change. When I started sleeping with Mary, they almost ceased--it's possible that's responsible for me still being hung up on her, even if it's at a subconscious level.
c: not able to shit
Nope, no trouble there.
d: have mood swings and shitty short term memory
Yes. I was fine for the first week, and then there was like a month where I'd get in sour moods more often, for no discernible reason. I wasn't craving, I just wasn't my usual mellow self. My family has always used me as the go to guy for computer problems, and while fixing them I was a lot more sarcastic and condescending. Short term memory. . yeah kind of. Not awful bad. Still better than blacking out 5 nights a week.
e: "For a few days after a person becomes completely detoxed, his body will get an unexpected dose of oxygen, real food and natural chemicals that will put him on a natural high. It's just a symptom, just like the pooping, and likewise it won't last. Truthfully, you don't want it to."
No, no natural high, although I did put on a fair amount of weight the first year I was dry. Food tasted awesomely good. It took running 2300 miles last year to get it back off, and learning to eat small again. Now that I'm addicted to exercise again, weight isn't a problem. Being predisposed to addictions, particularly things in white culture that Indians have only been exposed to for 150 years or so, is still a natural selective force on us, hear me out: Alcohol has been in white and arab culture for millennia, so those individuals predisposed to drinking themselves to death, have been Darwined out for the most part. You still have face-down-in-the-alley winos, but not nearly as many, proportionally as we do. Alcohol has only been with us for 150 years--after the deaths from influenza, small pox, and war with y'all, it is acting on a population with only a tenth or so of the numbers it had 200 years prior- hence the high rate of Indians that drink themselves to death.
Alcohol was invented as sugary wine and mead (low alcohol content), then circulated through European populations slowly, allowing the selective force to take place rather gradually. We, on the other hand, were given Jack Daniels and Stolichnaya straight away--the addictive properties setting their hooks immediately.
So for someone like me, already past the halfway point in life, it's easier just to change my addiction to something that's not going to hurt me as much. I know psychologists, and touchy-feely social science students will say that I need to change who I am, to really be free. My answer is that I'm lazy and don't want to; I didn't want to join AA and change my addiction to God, but I did want to stop being a drunk. . .soo, I just took an inventory of things I used to be good at, which is endurance sports, and decided to go back to it.
A lot of people are going to nay-say my solution and say I'm still sick or whatever, but I really don't care, as my drinking record speaks for itself. Four years dry, no relapses, and I run every day--even when I was nursing a second divorce and a stress fracture. Compare that to the average AA person that drinks gallons of coffee, smokes like a chimney, and relapses 2 or 3 times a year. If they want to say they're better off psychologically than me, that's fine. I'd rather be where I'm at.
