This message was sent to subscribers by email october 14th.
my emails often have a gift or a discount or a give-away or a contest or a link to click or an audio to listen to. each email has a story or a motivation or entertainment. consider it an ethical bribe: i send you good stuff, you open your messages, you click on links. you win in more ways than one.
day 1 stories:
“I thought drinking helped”
from me: a couple of days ago, i invited you to send me your Day 1 stories. How do you know it was time to quit? What tools do you reach for? What part of Day 1 do you never want to repeat again?
I said I’d choose 4 stories to share, and that each person chosen would get a copy of the first year of the blog collected into one big PDF file (easier than reading it online).
Thanks so much for filling up my inbox. There was a wide range of stories, so i’ve selected a variety.
Here’s story #1 (of 4). If this is you, send me an email so i can send you the blog PDF 🙂
L: “My day one was 6th February 2018. I have drank a bottle of red wine every night for so many years I have lost count. The wine was a habit and I wasnt even getting any pleasure from drinking it. But it helped me cope with things like the loss of my sister who died suddenly in her sleep. It helped me cope with the loss of my mum to cancer. Or I thought it helped. now I realise that actually it probably caused me more anguish than if I had not drank it. I would only have had the grief to cope with – not the grief coupled with the hangover, the fuzzy head, the remorse, the red blotchy face, and the constant nagging feeling of knowing I was not doing myself any favors by drinking. I was upsetting my daughters. They would get annoyed and worried about me – I was always falling asleep on the sofa with a glass in my hand. I remember seeing Catherine Gray on Breakfast TV and something about her struck a chord with me. She had written a book called the Unexpected Joy of Being Sober. I read it. It changed my life. She mentioned you Belle, in her book, and your Tired of Thinking About Drinking website, and I visited it and signed up for your emails and have read them probably every day since then. You are right when you say arm yourself with tools to help you. I dont know what I would have done without your emails, and the support of other sober support tools. My day one was filled with nervous excitement. I felt uncomfortable and scared but determined. And have stuck with it since then. I never want to go back to drinking. I thank you Belle for all that you do – the time that you take to pass on your stories and your thoughts and your advice. You make things easier by understanding how we all feel. I hate alcohol so much … It is for me a part of my past, and that is where i want it to stay. Since stopping, I have bought a new house after 20 years of living in the same house. I am moving to the seaside in the next week and I cant wait. I know for certain that had I still been drinking, I would not be moving because I would never have had the energy to do it!”
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link to click today: my husband is making sober support paintings, and we’ve been mailing them all over the world (Singapore – Australia – Washington – Edmonton – Japan…). go here and look.
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from M: “Just got Mr. B’s art in the mail yesterday, in time for Canadian Thanksgiving. Thought I’d take a picture of how I’ve framed it and let you know that between the two of you it’s helped me in my resolve of going 100 days no drinking … like to read the ‘merci’ as ‘mercy’ — a reminder to be to be compassionate to myself: kind, forgiving, and thankful. I’ve done this before but it’s time to be the change I want to see in the world on a *permanent* basis. And the art from someone, somewhere in the world, who understands, helps.”
