A day overdue.

I wanted to blog daily throughout my detox journey. It still stresses me out significantly when I can’t keep to a schedule. Even in sobriety, it seems that motivation, energy and everything else that comes with simply living can prevent me from getting something done that I really wanted to do.

But the Day Five blog will still be done, just with a small delay. And whilst this affects me far more than it will affect anybody reading it, I think that is something I personally need to work on. We can’t all live by a script. Pressures, time and obligations somehow hover and meander between the pragmatism that is so deeply set within me.

So yesterday was Day Five. A day too late, or perhaps not late at all. Perhaps these words have arrived exactly when I was able to write them.

My medication is now being reduced, and I am noticing it far more than I ever thought possible. Relaxed is a word I have rarely used to describe myself. Even as a child my body was tense and fearful, constantly bracing for whatever might come next without ever knowing when, where or how. Waiting. Expecting. My jaw tight, a band across my head, my breathing shallow enough that sometimes even taking a satisfying breath feels like something I have to consciously make happen. My legs become stiff. My muscles refuse to let go.

And, as ridiculous as it might sound, sometimes even my brain feels incapable of simply being. As though the organ itself is crunched and cramped and hardened inside my skull.

Then long Covid came.

I’ve spoken in previous blogs about what it has done to my autonomic nervous system and how dramatically it changed the way I experience my own body. Relaxation no longer feels automatic. There aren’t enough breathing exercises, meditation techniques or cups of chamomile tea to release the pressure when my entire body becomes rigid. Massage, hypnosis, acupuncture. I’ve tried things because when you are desperate enough to feel comfortable inside your own skin, you’ll try almost anything.

But tension doesn’t even do it justice. It doesn’t describe the excruciating internal sensation of a body that will not let go. Those feelings are real. They are lived.

And on Day Five, as the medication began reducing, I could feel my old body emerging again. Except it hadn’t really gone anywhere. For a few days it had simply been quieter.

And that realisation broke something in me.

Because amongst everything else I am grieving, I am grieving those few days when breathing didn’t feel like work. When relaxation happened without me having to beg my body for it. When air could enter my nose and my chest without meeting that familiar wall of tension.

I have lost alcohol. And now I am losing those few days when I could breathe.

I know the palpitations. I know the tight band around my head that can sit there twenty-four hours a day. I know the muscles that feel as though nothing will ever persuade them to unclench. And yesterday I cried because alcohol was the one thing I knew could take some of those sensations away. After five or six drinks, something in my body finally seemed to let go. My shoulders would drop, my breathing would stop demanding my attention and my mind would become quieter. For a while, I could escape being trapped inside a body that constantly feels wrong.

Now there is nothing between me and it.

Every breath feels harder. Unsatisfying. Like it stops somewhere before reaching the place it needs to go. My body doesn’t feel in sync with itself anymore. And that is grief. It isn’t a sadness that can be washed away with a few tears and a hankie before getting back up and carrying on. There isn’t a five-minute pause that resets everything and makes it okay again.

This is scary. This is feeling like you are dying whilst still trying desperately to live. And there are no words that adequately explain to another person what that feels like internally.

Day Five hurt for those reasons.

Last night, I also did something I had been putting off all week. I gamed.

Gaming is one of my greatest loves. Sitting there and losing myself for hours gives me genuine pleasure, even amongst the symptoms that plague almost every second of my life. But gaming was also where the bulk of my drinking happened. There would be a crate hidden underneath my desk. I’d open a can or bottle, finish it within minutes, reach underneath the desk and open another. And another. And another.

Last night, that couldn’t happen.

Nobody describes the loss. It’s like reaching into a cupboard and suddenly realising you don’t have a hand. It’s stepping into the shower and discovering there is no button to turn the water on. It’s walking into a shop and finding they have sold out of everything you came for. It’s waking up one morning and realising that somehow, whilst you slept, the world changed and nobody told you how you were supposed to live in the new one.

But I gamed. I put a bottle of 7UP beside me instead. The idea was simple: keep my hand occupied. Give it something else to reach for.

Except it wasn’t my hand that needed the alcohol.

That was perhaps the most painful realisation of all. I could replace the bottle. I couldn’t replace what happened inside me after I drank from it. My body didn’t relax. My body didn’t forget. My mind didn’t quieten. I sat at the same desk, played the same game, held another bottle in the same hand, and my heart broke. Then broke some more.

My youngest child was in the room with me.

“Mam, you can get your beers now.”

He knew I didn’t drink in front of his siblings. I had never asked him to keep secrets. I never would. I could never knowingly place that kind of weight onto the shoulders of a child. But he’d learnt it anyway. He’d watched my behaviour in the astute, quiet way children do and had worked out the pattern all by himself.

I turned towards him. “Mam doesn’t have any beer.”

And he went on his way as though everything was well.

But it wasn’t well.

I was grieving in a way I couldn’t explain to him. I was grieving something that felt like a puncture somewhere deep inside me. Of course I missed alcohol. I missed the hand that picked it up. I missed the sound of opening it. I missed knowing another one was waiting underneath the desk.

But most of all, I missed the escape.

I missed knowing that however unbearable it felt to exist inside my own body, there was something within reach that could change how it felt. I missed the possibility of not having to feel like me for a while. And perhaps that is one of the cruellest realities I have encountered in sobriety so far. I thought I was giving up alcohol. I didn’t realise I was also giving up one of the only ways I knew how to escape myself.

Positivity is something I try desperately to hold onto, even in the hardest pieces I write. I want there to be a lesson, a revelation, some beautiful sentence at the end that tells both you and me that everything is going to be okay.

But I don’t have one for Day Five.

Last night there was no revelation. There was a bottle of 7UP where the alcohol used to be. There was a little boy who thought his mam could get her beers now. There was a body that would not relax.

And there was me.

Sober. Feeling every single second of it.

A void appeared so enormous that it felt as though it carved a scar straight through my heart. Maybe one day that scar will heal.

But Day Five wasn’t the day it did.