I’ve given myself until Old Lady Day to replace items on the 50before50 list and then I plan to stick to everything for the remaining year (no pressure!).
I’m replacing another item today and there is likely to be some minor additional reshuffling in the coming days as we count down to The Day (eeep!).
#12 on the list was go skiing, but it is pretty unlikely that we’re going to get skiing in next year. Especially as skiing is so hideously expensive and we’ve already planned next year’s not inexpensive holiday.
So I’m replacing skiing with … stop drinking alcohol.
And I mean stop – for, like, ever.
<gasp>
I know.
I’ve given this a crack before for just under a year, but it has a nasty habit of creeping up on you. There’s been no horribly drunken event to trigger this, just a realisation that “hey, I’m drinking regularly again”, an acknowledgement that I’m feeling a bit dusty some mornings and that evenings just seem to slip away. Drinking is preventing me from doing a whole lot of the things I want to and stops me carpe-ing the diem. I’m pretty sure that I can’t do moderation, so quitting is the only thing for it.
There’s a lot of things coming up that would normally include drinking – Old Lady Day, various SML events, Xmas, New Year &etc. It can be quite a challenging thing to do – Australia has such a huge drinking culture and loads of otherwise quite sane people can be very confronted by someone not drinking and attempt to coerce you into “just one”. But I’ve survived most of this before – I can definitely do it again (positive thinking!).
So I’m currently in the midst of reading a whole bunch of giving-up-drinking memoirs to get me through the initial rough patch. Today is day five and all is well!
I’ll need a fair bit of luck with this one!
Good luck with this. I too found moderation difficult so making the decision to give up for ever was definitely right for me. When I gave up for set periods I found myself all throughout the period thinking about when I could start again. When I stopped for good I felt very deprived for a few weeks and then I just got over it. It is of so little consequence to me now that I have to think really hard about how long ago it was that I stopped drinking but it must be 12 or 13 years ago.
Ack! Fat fingers – hit reply too soon.
<edited>
I can’t believe I made it through almost a year and then quickly was pretty much back to where I started!
You’re definitely my role model on this! And your experience very much aligns with a lot of what I have been reading. I feel pretty good about it – and to be honest it is a relief not to have to think about it. I’m sure I’ll be cool with most things because of the experience with the year off. Holidays sans drinking will be a new and challenging experience AND I’m not looking at all forward to having to ride through the colleagues and their renewed interrogations/trying to get me to drink/crazy drinking justifications.