Quitting Alcohol Made Me Realize I Don’t Know How To Live

Life is like the ocean, it’s unpredictable, unforgiving, and cannot be controlled.

There are also sharks.

Trying to control everything in life is like swimming against the tide. A lot of effort is exerted but you get nowhere; just wet, tired, and in pain.

I’ve treated every problem in my life like a wave I’ve been trying to swim through, ignore, or worry away. I always end up one step forward and two steps back.

My problem is I don’t like waves. I don’t want waves in my life. I want linear progress with no hiccups or setbacks.

Smooth linear progression like in a video game would fit me nicely but alas, life does not work that way.

It hurts the ego to say, but I have been living life wrong.

I’ve been seeking out a way to have no problems in my life, a highly unattainable goal at the least.

Especially since life is just a series of problems that you try to figure out how to solve while trying to enjoy things along the way.

I guess that’s why I turned to alcohol in the past to self-medicate.

Since I couldn’t stop problems from showing up in my life I would drink to make them disappear.

It certainly worked for a while. After a few drinks, all the waves disappeared, my ocean was as smooth as a pane of glass.

Then I woke up the next day, the waves came back with a vengeance, more vicious and powerful than before.

So I took another drink, then another, and the waves slowly faded away again and I had some peace.

This created two life-changing problems for me.

Alcohol makes all your problems worse despite the immediate feelings of peace and relaxation. When you do wake up the next morning none of your problems disappeared and now your brain is in threat mode from the alcohol making everything more terrifying.

I robbed myself of the chance to learn how to solve problems. Every time I tried to escape or run away from my problems I stole away a chance for myself to build up resilience and get better and problem-solving. The opportunity cost of escaping things versus facing them head-on is huge.

Now at eight weeks sober I find myself at thirty-three learning to live life on life’s terms, facing problems as they show up in my life without excessively worrying about everything.

The secret is to ride the waves. Go with the flow.

Whatever situation life throws at you, act like you were the one who chose it and tackle it with everything you have.

Go with the grain and not against it.

Stop wishing your problems would go away and fight with all your might, developing your problem-solving skills and resilience as you go.

That’s what I’m doing.

I’m now going with the flow. I’m a novice problem surfer at best for now, but that’s okay.

Without alcohol in my life, I have no way to escape or forget about my problem so I am forced to deal with things that come up.

With each problem solved adding a much-needed confidence boost, I am less and less afraid of the future with each passing day.

I’ve learned that worrying is pointless. Life throwing you problems that you’ve thought about endlessly would be too easy.

None of the problems in my head come to fruition and if they do, which is rare, I am much more capable of dealing with them than I think I am.

So, if you find yourself drowning in an ocean of problems, wishing you could escape or numb your feelings to forget about them, remember this.

Life is just a series of problems that you try to figure out how to solve, while trying to enjoy things a long the way.

So don’t be afraid of your problems, don’t run from them.

Accept them as part of life and don’t worry about the imaginary problems in your head. Life will throw enough of it’s own crap at you, you don’t need to make up your own problems as well.

So learn to live life on life’s terms.

With time, you’ll gain confidence, be less afraid, and become a professional problem surfer.