Day One
I didn’t sleep well last night. I didn’t sleep well last night because I was sober, and I often have difficulty getting to sleep without the aid, at very least, of NyQuil. I’m told that this trouble will ease as time goes on, and in fact I did find, earlier this year, that as I got more practice at going to sleep without booze in my belly, it got easier. And the sleep itself was better, less likely to be interrupted, more refreshing. Now if only I could convince myself not to have Netflix running the whole time, I might be able to genuinely get a good night’s rest. But one thing at a time, right?
A curious thing happened yesterday, which I had decided was to be my first day of trying out prolonged abstinence. For the first time since I don’t know when, I found myself with the urge to smoke a cigarette while completely, stone sober. It was the strangest thing. For years now I’ve smoked 5-10 cigarettes a week, and never, ever when not intoxicated — I found, as a rule, that they held no interest for me anymore when I was sober. The problem was that I drank 6 or 7 nights a week, so I still managed to get a few of them into my system. As I’ve been rehearsing sobriety for the last year or so, one of the refreshing things I discovered was that, if I didn’t drink, the urge to smoke didn’t come crawling around after dinnertime. The cigarettes stayed in the cupboard over the refrigerator, which is where I hide them from myself. I had hoped — expected, really — that if I managed to quit drinking, the smoking would just go along with it. I hate smoking. I wish I’d never started it. It smells bad and is inconvenient and makes my lungs feel crusty and dry the next day. Sometimes it seemed like I wanted to quit drinking explicitly so I could finally quit smoking, after 18 years.
I figured, operating on the theory that if I tried to just cancel out all my vices at once I was liable to fail and cancel out none of them, that I ought to give in. So I smoked a cigarette at about 11 o’clock yesterday morning, the first time I’ve had a cigarette while sober since maybe 2004. I haven’t had the desire to have another one, but writing about them now has got me thinking about it. What’s that about?
In some degree I think it’s about pleasure-seeking, though the truth is that I get almost no pleasure out of cigarettes. Some part of me is worried that I’ll never really enjoy myself again if I succeed in quitting drinking, and is trying to find a substitute. It’s an illogical, almost subconscious thought process, but I can kind of feel it happen. I know — because people have told me — that quitting drinking isn’t easy, and a lot of people have difficulty having fun or feeling joy or other positive emotions after quitting, but that eventually you sort of figure it out, or remember how, or whatever it is that you’re doing. I’m trying not to worry about it too much, because it seems like there’s a lot of other stuff to be done first. And worrying about whether or not I’ll ever feel good again seems like a pretty good recipe for ending up back in a bar, taking the first shortcut to happiness I can find.
In the meantime, I have to get to work on my book, I have to clean my house, I have to finally suck it up and start looking for a job. For a couple of years now I’ve been taking pie-in-the-sky potshots at jobs I probably wasn’t really qualified for, and either getting no response or getting interviews that I bombed. In reality I think this is good — with my drinking the way it has been, an actual, career-track-type job in radio or print journalism was likely to result in spectacular, possibly future-wrecking failure. Graduate school almost did. So what I’m looking for now is something low-stakes. My low-stakes employment record is mostly in the field of bookstores. Who knows if any are hiring; it often seems like nobody is hiring for anything in Portland, though people tell me that’s gotten better. I worry about having a boss, though. I’ve always hated having a boss, as perhaps my least favorite thing in the world is to feel like somebody else has power over me, can tell me what to do. (This is why I’ve always been suspicious of cops, despite the fact that I almost never break the law anymore.) I guess the truth is that being an adult, and getting your shit together, just involves doing some stuff you don’t really want to do very much. And I would much rather take the guaranteed time out of the house, and the money, of some menial retail employment, than I would falling off the wagon and spiraling downward because I’m bored and lonely.
Anybody know anyone who’s hiring? I haven’t had to apply for work since 2009, which I’m realizing is a long time ago. I worked at a bookstore then. Then I was in graduate school and teaching. Then I was writing my novel and drinking and moping. It feels alien and scary. But then all of this does.
Now I’m going to try really hard not to have a cigarette.