It is sometimes said that on a trip, people get homesick in 7 day intervals: Day 3, Day 10, Day 17--after that, with decreasing frequency. I have experienced this phenomenon in my own extensive travels, but I have found that I often did not realize that I was homesick but believed that I was depressed or anxious for some other reason.
Well, Days 10/11 were like that for me. I can't imagine drinking right now, and I am in one of those phases when I think that I may never drink again. I like going to bed sober, and I like the fact that I can eat more than before without worrying about my weight. I also like that my medication can now work unimpeded. Finally, I love the example that I am setting for my children. But yet the blues hit me yesterday as I heard tales of impending budget cuts at work, and my thoughts betrayed the fact that it was not the issues of work that I was worried the most about. I felt like I had crossed some kind of Rubicon, but not to conquer Gaul, like Julius Caesar, but into a new and somewhat scary phase of my life. A phase that might be devoid of some of the routine pleasures in more ways than just giving up alcohol.
But I reminded myself of the chronology and looked out the window at a campus where most of us have jobs that are secure, even in these uncertain times. And I counted my blessings.
I hope the cis-Rubiconian landscape improves as you explore it. It could be that drinking belongs more to one phase of life than others - to a youthful phase when one can absorb its costs more easily. Giving up drinking may be part of acknowledging the transition into a more mature phase of life. That may or may not be so, but I think it's true that people keep drinking into middle age and beyond because it's a marker of youth. I'm not sold on the idea of prolonging abstinence beyond the end of the year, as my petulant post for today shows, but I understand where you're coming from.
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