I Quit Drinking at 47. At 60, Here's What I Know.

So here's what I want you to think about if you're on day one or day two, or, you know, you're in those first early days.

What I wish I had known at the, the early phase of this journey.

Day one of this journey, you've made the decision.

You've stopped the flow of alcohol.

You've put the alcohol down for the last time, and you leave alcohol behind in your past, and that's it.

That part is done.

It sounds simplistic because it is that simple.

Now, the next job is waiting for your body and your mind to catch up, and that's what takes the time.

You're in kind of a nowhere land.

You're in a limbo, a place where it's easy to feel a bit disorientated, but it's natural.

Your body is basically gonna, gonna look after itself, and your mind just needs to learn, learning new ways of thinking, learning new ways of coping, learning new skills.

A new skill might be dealing with emotions when you get upset instead of jumping into the alcohol, figuring out how to release the tension, not seeing yourself as emotionally fragile.

You know, these are all things that I had to learn.

How to, to celebrate without alcohol, how to, you know, feel shit without alcohol and sit through it, how to grieve without alcohol, how to do all those things that you used to do alcohol, you used to use alcohol for.

You know, and it doesn't matter where you've come from, right? It doesn't matter how much you drank in the past.

It doesn't matter what you drank in the past.

It doesn't matter who you drank with in the past or where you drank.

All of that is now in your past, and it will stay in the past if you leave it there.

If you turn around and you're facing the opposite direction, you head towards the places that you wanna go, stop focusing on the booze or what you're missing out on in your old life.

You're gonna miss some parts of it.

That's just part of life.

There's, in any transition where you move from one thing to another, you're gonna miss certain parts of your old life, but that's part of growth, is leaving parts of your- yourself behind.

And in this case, a lot of the shit that you're leaving behind you don't need, has been stopping you from making that progress.

So face towards the places that you wanna go, even if you don't know where that is yet, right? You don't know the person you're gonna turn into.

How can you? You're living at this moment in a mind that it has got separate identities to it, you know? And you're growing into something which is much more grounded, much more based, and that's the exciting part.