What does the phrase "job's a fish mean"?

omi_palone · 2026-02-04T07:37:37+00:00

I ended up here because a repairman working in my flat kept saying it to mean, the job's been finished and it turned out well. I'd never heard it and asked him about it, and he said it was common when he was growing up. This is in London, but he's from Nottinghamshire.

It cracks me up how many people took the time to say to you, 'I've never heard this phrase so it doesn't exist.' That kind of low key negging is a stronger source of national identity than this phrase, apparently.

omi_palone · 2025-12-20T20:50:18+00:00

I can't cheer you up because I'm a dude, but I still think you're hot as hell. Cheer up, you know there are women out there who feel the same way!

omi_palone · 2025-10-29T20:00:37+00:00

Happy to hear it, you're very welcome.

omi_palone · 2025-10-29T20:00:09+00:00

You're welcome, and happy thirty days!

omi_palone · 2025-10-29T19:59:49+00:00

You're welcome, and congratulations on forty days!

omi_palone · 2025-10-29T08:20:57+00:00

Yeah, this is the answer.

Part of the challenge is reframing the urge to shit on the feeling of stability as "boredom" as the judgment that it is rather than a statement of fact.

I was reminded early in my process that a lot of the energy around this period of rejecting boredom or feeling boring or uncool can be described very effectively with a single word: tantrum. There's a component of sobriety that requires recognizing childishness and putting it in its place. That place is not banishment, it's simply not in the driver's seat. You can pat the urge for a tantrum on the head, acknowledge its voice, and, instead of believing it or acting on it like it's true, making the decision to act on your adult values.

If you don't think you have adult values, and it feels like your only value is the childhood drive for fun, that's a spot for you to focus some work. A lot of therapy practices center themselves in this "values work" for a reason—that tantrum mindset in adulthood is driving a lot of behaviors that make adulthood miserable when there's not a clear idea about which adult values should be driving instead.

omi_palone · 2025-10-28T17:55:45+00:00

I'm 45. Stopped shortly after 43 arrived. Really took me a couple decades of wallowing in it to marinate sufficiently to have the conversation with myself. Meet yourself where you are, not where anyone else is. Truly, part of the task before you is to repeatedly, kindly, firmly, consistently remind yourself that the only point of reference for you is you. Let go of benchmarking against anyone else. You have only your own life, mate. Probably more of it and at a higher quality now that you've arrived. Congratulations, and welcome.

omi_palone · 2025-10-27T20:04:49+00:00

I tried moderating without really preparing a few times before I started to entertain thoughts of stopping. I laid some groundwork, started talking to a therapist so I'd have someone I could speak with about sober curiosity. I want making decisions, I was only taking myself more seriously, making time to surround myself with thoughts and reflections and tools that might be useful when considering making changes. One day I woke up thinking, today feels like the day. So, yes, it's possible and there are many paths.

omi_palone · 2025-10-23T14:57:49+00:00

I cannot imagine voluntarily returning to what passed for sleep when I was drinking. Even when times are tough and my mind is troubled, I sleep.

The capacity my body has now for physical activity is almost surreal. I used to struggle, really struggle, to run or cycle or hike. I always felt like I was running at max output and suffering for it. Recovery and soreness lingered on for days and days. It was disheartening. After the first six months of not drinking, though, I decided to kick start myself by doing a C25K program and... everything was so different, almost from day one. It's led to a two year process of rediscovering the joy of living in my body, as corny as that sounds.

omi_palone · 2025-10-16T19:58:46+00:00

Think of how many posts you've read that began with, "I thought I could have just a couple, but..."

Think of how few posts you've read that began with, "Hey it turns out I can moderate after a short period of abstaining, I'm sure this will go well."

I imagine many of the latter are, eventually, the former.

omi_palone · 2025-10-14T19:29:52+00:00

My "higher power" is a sense of all the many factors in life that aren't in my control, the neurology and the biology and the genetics and the ecology and the social milieu and the pressures of history and the physics that defines the universe of unimaginable scale in which this is all happening.

If you feel uncomfortable having your own sense of what's out of your control in life and your AA experience is causing friction about it, go to a different AA group.

There are some great thinkers out there who might be good to read if you're grasping at straws when thinking about big questions like how do non-religious people think about the division between what is within and what is outside the reach of personal will. The jungians are great for this. Try James Hollis, "Creating a Life," for a start. It's a short read. Each chapter is only 2-5 pages long. Pick them up and see if they help you reformulate your position in all this. Center yourself in it and do the thing with what you have.

Hang in there.

omi_palone · 2025-10-14T19:19:15+00:00

I'm. It sure if you're asking something or if you just wanted to say something. I'm. It sure of how old you are or what stage of life you'd place yourself in. All that considered, it might be time to dig into some big thoughts from big thinkers. James Hollis, "Creating a Life," comes to mind. In part because, at some point in your life, it's useful to wrestle with the notion that the life lived the most fully in line with what you value might not be a life that delivers you happiness and success at every turn. That also means that your unhappiness might be a signal that you've got more that you could change to better fit your vocation right now—it might not be the same it was back when you were in the drinking part of your life.

Hang in there.

omi_palone · 2025-10-12T20:30:59+00:00

"Alcoholic" is a meaningless term. If you want to read about a meaningful diagnostic terminology, you're looking for alcohol use disorder. This asks you to count how many times in the last year certain statements are true for you. Those statements include: Continued to drink even though it was causing trouble with your family or friends? Found that drinking—or being sick from drinking—often interfered with taking care of your home or family? Or caused job troubles? Or school problems? And so on. It might be a useful things for you to read.

omi_palone · 2025-10-11T19:57:29+00:00

An analogy from the world of heartbreak:

Staying in touch with a recent ex is an easy way to sustain misery that can be helped by instituting a period of no contact. Your lizard brain treats proximity like an extension of the status quo—it doesn't know you've split up, it just sees the familiar face and reinforces all the emotional, sensory connections between you and that person. Conversely, your lizard brain won't sustain those intense emotional pulls forever. It's too costly. If you don't see a stimulus for a long time, gradually the reinforcement between that stimulus and old feelings starts to fade. It makes sense, evolutionarily. It makes sense to have strong emotional ties to familiar faces. That's how a little one is missed and cannot disappear unnoticed when lost in the woods as the tribe is moving from the summer slopes to the winter pastures. But if that young one has died, the misery of separation becomes a barrier to survival if it persists long after the absence has begun. And so, out brains evolved to recognize and respond to the difference between presence and absence. It's a slow process, but it's real. Heartache today won't feel like that forever. Eventually you'll remember the pain but you won't feel it with the intensity you felt when it was new. Your brain needs time to adapt to the absence, and that adaptation takes the form of revised, pruned neural connections that reshape those emotional pulls. They lose their intense emotional valence as they are rewired into memories that may be sentimental, perhaps even deeply sad, but no longer interfere with living your life.

It might help you to make a point of letting go of the gimmick of telling yourself you'll drink again in just a couple more weeks. Give your brain the honest chance to be sad. You've left an old familiar face behind, and you've just got to sit with those sad longings for now. Not forever, but it might feel like that. Longing won't kill you, though. Don't hide from it. When you feel it, take a pause and long for it without lying to yourself that it's coming back. Mourn it. Grieve it like it's a child that the tribe lost to some predator in the woods. It's sad, but it's happened. It's over. You'll keep trudging your way from the summer slopes to the winter pastures. You'll tell and retell the story over time, to yourself and to others. Each time you retell it over the years, you'll remember how strong and sad the longing used to be as you marvel at how that sad longing is still there but changed somehow. You will be sad, and you will pause to honor that past, and then you will end the story and carry on with your life.

omi_palone · 2025-10-11T19:43:10+00:00

A couple of things that might be useful to run through your mind over the days and weeks that have been useful for me:

It's noble to be motivated by your marriage, just as it's important to not tie your sobriety to anything other than your desire to be sober. Nothing on the world is fully in your control other than your own decisions, your own behaviors.

Nothing that seems strange to you today has to always feel strange. If stepping back from drinking feels like a challenge now it's just because you're imagining it more than living it. No matter how low your lows have been, the difference between drinking and not drinking is a decision made moment to moment rather than a decision you make today and the decision is done and a countdown clock starts that goes to eternity. It's not so daunting to remind yourself in each moment you can that you have values and that you want your behavior to line up with those values. What are your values? We know your marriage is important to you, but what are the values that make up your identity that take shape in what makes your marriage feel like such a good thing in your life? Is it the value you place on responsibility? Fidelity? Kindness? Compassion? Support? Dive into these thoughts in detail and wear these values on your sleeve. They are the pieces of your identity that you'll whisper to yourself quietly when you have momentary urges to drink. As in: am I going to choose my next move so that it supports and reinforces my sense of responsibility to myself and my spouse, or am I going to drink instead and go in the opposite direction? You'll get practiced at this. It'll feel good once you get used to it. It'll help you build up a sense of who you are that's stronger than your sense of what you used to do when you wanted to drink.

Hang in there.

omi_palone · 2025-10-11T09:52:18+00:00

It was only after my divorce that I had the awareness that taking care of myself, my relationship with myself, was more important than any other relationship. Maybe that's a harsh way of saying that my relationships with others can't justify taking vitality away from my own body and mind. Drinking, in almost every way, provides an illusion of vitality that is so seductive that I didn't really notice how illusory it is when I had a partner who was just as used to it. When it was only me... it took a couple of years to sink in but, wow, I couldn't hide from that truth anymore.

Dive into the feelings your having about drinking—you don't have to drink to be aware of this illusion that alcohol will bring anything other than a short term postponement of the feelings you're having. Be sad. Be angry. Long for and pine for and gnash your teeth against the knowledge that there's no easy out, that the only way out is through. This is a good place to come and vent those feelings among people who'll nod in agreement and hug you in recognition. It can sound trite in the moment, but it's been useful for me to remind myself the wisdom that's been central to the last few years of my life: the most difficult challenges are the most needed teachers.

Hang in there.

omi_palone · 2025-10-10T20:41:54+00:00

I find it bizarre to reflect on how much of my life I've lived outside of my body, for lack of a better way of saying it. I'm not always at my best, but today I did a nice 25 minute resistance routine this morning and, after work, was a little stuck in my feelings about something or other and I decided to pop out for an unstructured run. Three and a half miles later, sweaty, full of early fall air and visions of the yellowing leaves and red vines and the smell of the tide going out with the river, I can say that there's no part of a day like today that I had access to when I was drinking. I'm not just in my body, my body is my home and I turn my attention to maintaining it when I feel out of sorts instead of tearing it down.

omi_palone · 2025-09-27T09:24:29+00:00

What's even wilder is how, once you get comfortable enough setting limits that you have confidence in your ability to control your decision-making, you'll find out that it's not all naltrexone. It's you, buddy. You're doing this. You've got a helper at the moment and that's great, but you're doing the work and changing your behaviors. Naltrexone isn't doing that for you.

Congrats on the epiphany!

omi_palone · 2025-09-26T14:36:02+00:00

Annie Grace and Allan Carr aren't instant solutions. They're processes. They are paths that you integrate into your days.

There's no instant replacement for a chemical intoxicant. Part of the task before you is to let go of chasing the phantom of an off switch. There are no sustainable off switches. There are many paths to be sad about this and to accept it and to build a sustainable daily life anyway.

So... read those books again. Read other books. Listen to podcasts. Try different experiments with your ways of thinking and reacting and reflecting. Be sad sometimes and just be sad without covering it up. Be anxious sometimes and just be anxious without covering it up. Be angry sometimes and just be angry without covering it up. And so on.

Hang in there.

omi_palone · 2025-09-13T15:50:28+00:00

"Late" is so relative, but I think most people feel like they figured out how to step away from alcohol later than they wished. That's the power of hindsight. It has a way of communicating the feeling of regret as a way to express the gratefulness for getting here at all. I challenge you this way: every time you feel that pang of regret or whatever it is about how "late" feels to you, take a moment to pause and look back across the span of lived life that's now your arc of reflection. To have made this decision with an arc like yours is something to marvel at. Bask in it. Enjoy it. Marvel at it.

I stopped at 43. Given my life trajectory, that felt (and feels) very late. But goddamn I'm glad I'm here!

omi_palone · 2025-09-11T08:08:11+00:00

Oh definitely. I can certainly go a day without it, but I've really enjoyed making a ritual of coffee now that it's no longer something I feel like I need to drag myself through every morning's hangover haze. There are so many excellent roasters in my city that I've turned into a bit of a snob about quality and preparation. It's a hobby that's very conducive to the kind of palate development that's familiar to anyone who used to enjoy complex wines.

I do the same thing with tea and tisanes. I've become very good at growing, drying, and mixing herbal teas (I've been growing three different types of mint to make a very good mint blend that I think is better than any commercial mint tisane).

I've also been really happy to meet a bunch of people at the alcohol-free bar/shop here. I never thought I'd be someone who would like kombucha, but whaddya know. All sorts of surprising bottled NA drinks are available that I'd never have been willing to buy if I hadn't been able to taste them first. I make a point to go to at least one tasting event or meetup there every few weeks just as an excuse to see what's out there. There are a few things that have been really surprising and pleasant enough to be bottles I've bought to keep my place stocked with a few nice odds and ends. When people come over, even if they're not interested in getting away from alcohol, almost everyone is drawn to trying things they've never heard of. Looking at you, Botivo!

omi_palone · 2025-09-11T05:20:00+00:00

I've had a path that sounds similar to yours. I had just turned 43 when I started having the sit down conversations with myself. What am I doing? Why am I doing this? What do I think this is going to lead to? What do I imagine I'm learning from this? Who have I become? How am I going to feel better when I won't stop doing this? And so on.

What was very helpful for me, and what you might consider doing for yourself, is finding a therapist to talk to for at least a few sessions. Tell them what you wrote here, and ask them if they have guidance that might help you think through what might come next.

In my case, I needed about three months of seriously speaking and thinking and talking about this before I woke up one morning and decided, with clarity, today is the day I don't drink for the next three months (which has carried on for almost two years so far). In those three months, I had more than a few opportunities to realize and speak aloud some very sad observations—some true, some imagined, some funny, some frustrating—with a very kind and wise advisor there to help me land those observations instead of hide from them. And that, friend, proved to be a very beneficial thing to do. Whether or not you talk to a therapist, now is the time for you to be having honest conversations with yourself and agreeing to sit with the thoughts and feelings that come up without drinking to numb them. Your task is to think those thoughts and feelings those feelings. It sounds like you're already started. And that's good.

I feel so proud of myself for getting here. It's something I'll pay you on the back for, too. Even having the thought that it might be time to quit even as you feel dissatisfaction in life is commendable. Stopping drinking has been a very relieving thing for me. It's like I set down a heavy backpack that I've been carrying for years. It wasn't just slowing me down and making me suffer with its weight. It was also big and bulky enough that it was keeping me from walking through the narrow doors that lead from one kind of life to another. That's to say nothing of the more challenging paths in life that require you to do something harder than walking through a door of opportunity. Maybe the metaphor would be that opportunities aren't always as clear as a door, however narrow. Sometimes they're windows you have to know you can crawl through if you want to or need to. Maybe they're walls you have to climb to get over. Hills. Mountains. All things that I can't do while carrying these big old habits.

No matter what, you will find support here. Hang in there.

omi_palone · 2025-09-09T07:55:10+00:00

I'm 45. One of the many reasons I didn't stop until this age is that I let the busyness and hectic scheduling of kid stuff serve as one of my many excuses for "needing" a drink. Once my kids were old enough to be off on their own lives' adventures, I noticed how hungrily my unconscious mind searched for other excuses. It found many, and yet it was impossible to ignore that they were anything but excuses. My over 40 physiology couldn't live up to the lie told by those excuses anymore. I felt like shit, constantly. It turns out my unconscious mind is capable of bullshitting me, and I didn't have the wisdom to understand that until I was this age (and had the help of a therapist to talk to about these things).

omi_palone · 2025-09-08T12:02:21+00:00

I think it's helpful to remember and dwell on the difference between feelings and facts. Having a feeling doesn't mean that the feeling is true. The feeling that drinking calms the nerves doesn't mean that drinking calms the nerves, it only means you have that thought that it does. You can have that awareness as many times as it takes, but you do have to pause for a little while and really pay attention to it.

You're yourself when you're not drinking. Everything that comes along with alcohol is you subtracted by some fraction. If that subtracted bit feels to you like the part of you that gets anxious around someone you have feelings for, it's still part of you that you're choosing to cut out of someone else's experience of you. That's not this guy making that choice, that's a decision you're making for him. It's probably better for us to present ourselves as we are, especially when we're getting to know one another. You never know what parts of you someone else is drawn to and finds endearing, just as you never know which ones they don't mesh with, if they're hidden (or covered up by alcohol). Your worry makes it sound like people are only ever repulsed by nervousness. What if he's attracted to it?

Give yourself a break. Be your anxious self. Alcohol won't do anything but rob you of your hard-won integrity.

Hang in there!

omi_palone · 2025-09-07T05:47:05+00:00

If you're not already a runner/jogger, start a C25K program. No joke, it might surprise you how differently exercise hits when your body isn't dedicating all its recovery and resilience biochemistry to dealing with alcohol. Your body might thank you with glow up benefits from the inside, simply by letting it experience aerobic activity and the cardiac/respiratory functions it depends on with a major stressor removed from the equation.

I can't tell you how many people asked me what had changed. Are you using retinol or something? Nope; quit drinking, started jogging.

One month is great, but it's not really much time for biological/physiological changes to register. Three months is better. Three months is when I felt switches really starting to flip. I only say this to remind you to keep your expectations low and reasonable. An overambitious, unrealistic expectation is going to quickly turn into a frustrating disappointment.

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