May 19, 2010: The Sober Business Trip

I have 50 days sober. But this week was my first business trip sober. I used
to have a very specific routine when I traveled to the home office, involving
boxed wine upon arrival and oodles of unobserved drinking at night in my hotel
room.

I made many preparations to come on this trip: finding out where the AA meetings
were, making plans in the evenings to meet colleagues and friends (when normally
I would rush back to the hotel and my wine), telling my home group to create
accountability, and confiding in my husband and best friend. I was scared.

I didn't really realize how scared until I found myself laying on the shower
floor the day before I was supposed to leave. Did I fall down? Did I drink and
pass out while showering? Had I dropped something down the drain?

No. I had decided that the day before leaving town for a week was the day to
regrout and recaulk my tile shower. For 11 hours, I maniacally scraped out old
grout and caulk and and replaced it. At one point, I literally was lying down
with my cheek on the shower floor so I could work on the tiles under the shower
door for over an hour. I started at 10:30 am and finished around 9 pm. I was
completely out of control, unmanageable in the face of busyness. I woke up the
next morning with a huge scrape on my elbow from supporting myself during the
scraping work-I don't remember doing that.

Around 3 pm, already exhausted and sick of breathing in the crud that gathers in
the corners of even the cleanest of showers when one attacks it with a multitude
of sharp objects, I realized something. I didn't want to go on this trip. AT
ALL. I didn't want to be away from my family, my home, my meetings, my sponsor,
and my safe, sober routine. I didn't know how to be sober in another city on
routine business and it scared the ever loving bejesus out of me.

No one would know.

The thought curled and coiled and writhed in my alcoholic brain. Repeating over
and over in tandem with the repetition of the work. I had sought mindlessness
in the task, and found mind-full-ness instead.

So I spent the rest of that day and the next morning pissed off. I sulked in my
head all the way across the country. I actually hoped I would get in an
accident on the drive to the airport so I would have to cancel the trip. I
DON'T WANNA, my inner child whined. I succumbed to that feeling. I wallowed in
it, rather than be rational about it. Giving into it, sitting with it, not
fixing it, is progress for me.

The moral of the story. I can only get my favorite pizza in the world out here.
When I haven't already drunk a bottle of wine, I can eat a lot more of it. I
can compulsively drink herbal tea the way I used to drink alcohol. And after
the disappointment of the last two episodes, Glee was awesome tonight.