Disconnected

It's been a hectic week emotionally. One of my best friends is back in town for a couple of weeks and we have been spending some time together. We've been to our local where she and her partner have been drinking while I've been trying different soft drinks. I never realised how expensive it is to not drink alcohol. I had to pay £1.35 for a baby bottle of ginger ale which fills up half a tumbler! It lasted me about 2 minutes.

I don't find it that hard to spend time with friends in the pub even though they are drinking, however, unhelpful thoughts do creep in while I'm there. In the last couple of days thoughts about whether I'm actually an alcoholic or not have appeared, not in a major way, but enough to unsettle me a little. I've been thinking maybe I was just physically addicted to alcohol because I had overindulged, maybe I'm not actually an alcoholic as such? Usually when these thoughts appear they only linger for a split second before I allocate them to the rubbish heap where they belong. This time they stuck for a bit longer than that. I put this down to the fact that me and my partner are separating, that I've been spending more time down the pub with drinking friends, that I haven't been to a meeting since Sunday night until tonight and I haven't picked up the phone to my sponsor enough. In that light it all makes sense.

It all feels a bit unreal. I felt as if I reconnected with my partner over the weekend. I felt so much love and affection for him and I couldn't get enough of him. Then Tuesday morning I caught him lying and going behind my back again, something I really can't handle sober or not. We had a brief conversation and we both admitted we're not happy and that we probably should call it a day. Since then we have hardly spoken at all. He stays up all night or sleeps in the spare room, I sleep in our bed feeling a bit out of place as it's technically his bed. I'm gonna leave it like this for a while and see how it unfolds. He doesn't act as if he's too bothered about it. A fear at the moment is that he's going to come back wanting intimacy when he starts missing it and I'm not going to be strong enough to say no as by that point I will probably be missing it too. And as we still live in the same flat, it might be hard to avoid falling into that trap. Oh well.

At least I'm sober and I feel grateful for that. I'm grateful for the meeting tonight where I had a chance to vent my thoughts and be "put right", and also to my sponsor who listened to me tonight when I really needed it. I don't think I could have made it this far without her.