I'm so tired of drinking but I can never bring myself to say no.

I'm so glad you posted this. I feel like I could have written almost every single word of it a few months ago. I knew for a few years prior to quitting that something was not-right with my drinking. But not-right didn't seem like a big deal. Nothing crazy had happened to me. I knew many others who were worse off than I was. There had been no terrible consequences. "Not-right" didn't seem like a big enough problem to do something as drastic as quitting drinking.

I was still enjoying some good nights out, drinking and socializing with friends. None of them were concerned about my drinking: they drank as much as I did. Even on those good nights though, it would bother me that I could never stick to 4 or 5 drinks. And on the rare occasion, the night would go wrong and I'd act like an asshole. Or become consumed with negative feelings on the inside and turn morose. My SO (also my primary drinking buddy) didn't like the former and used to ask me, very reasonably: "If you know you might start getting weird after drink 5, why don't you just set a limit of 5 drinks and never go over it? Stick to that limit, and all our drinking nights can be the good kind!"

What a good idea. "Oh yeah, I'll do that," I said. (In my head thinking: I already am doing that. Every night I go out. I resolve to stop at 5 and I can't. Once I get to drink 5, I don't care anymore. And I am not going to admit that to you.)

Either way, something was not-right. Whether I had a good night or a bad one, I was slowly feeling worse about myself all the time, drunk or sober. And I couldn't figure out why.

I used to wrack my brain in the morning, trying to figure out why. I'd just had a fun night out with friends... so why, waking up in the morning, did I feel anxious, depressed, hatred for myself (sometimes it felt like I was practically choking on self-hatred), and why the profound sense of guilt? Did I say something awful to someone? Was I rude or obnoxious? Is so-and-so mad at me?

Sometimes the answer was "no" on all counts. I felt awful for no reason. Towards the end I tried to only drink alone, with my phone turned off, in my apartment, so I could be absolutely sure I had nothing to feel guilty about. It didn't work. I still felt awful. Like I'd committed a crime against myself or something.

And what really got me is that, no matter what I did, no matter how awful I felt in the morning, terrified and guilt-stricken and solemnly promising myself that I would stop "starting today," you just had to fast forward a few hours. One the hangover was gone, it's like I had amnesia. All memory of that awful morning evaporated like it never happened. It was no longer of any help to me. There was absolutely no psychological defense. My late afternoon, I was wide open. Feeling myself again, feeling confident, feeling pretty good about having a drink that night. The awful feelings from that morning seemed to have belonged to a completely different person, the self-knowledge I'd gained seemed to no longer be about me at all. The fact that I'd even made up my mind not to drink seemed, if anything... stupid. Unnecessary. Even a little embarrassing. I'm not weak. I'm not that pathetic, weak-willed person.

I still don't really understand how that works. Sitting down and typing all this out, it still blows my mind a little.

Anyway, it sounds like you are onto something here. Stopping for 30 days sounds like an awesome idea to me. And if you find you fail in that resolution, or if you're like me, and you don't fail at the resolution so much as the resolution itself simply vanishes... then at least you'll have learned something valuable.

/r/stopdrinking Thread