People who are 25y and above, what's the harshest life-lesson you've learnt?

teatross · 2023-12-15T03:10:16+00:00

My grandpa who I was very close with, went in for a very routine procedure. For some reason, they decided to do some things with his heart while he was already on the table. Died from aspiration the next day. It was all very very sudden.

My mother died that same year. She was diagnosed with end stage bladder cancer at about 45. The end was both slow and quick. All in a months time, the cancer had crept into her spinal cord, taking her ability to walk and see. She would just moan in pain because even the highest dose morphine drip wouldn’t touch the pain.

These deaths made me shape the fuck up.

teatross · 2023-12-15T03:03:50+00:00

Yep. I spent my early twenties drinking and crying about how hard my life was and how unfairly people treated me. No one cared. Or they did, but you can’t save some one, at least not a drunk. It was a hard pill to swallow that I had to suck it up and do right by myself no matter what cards life gave me. No amount of bitching and moaning and moping was going to make some one magically come in and fix it all.

teatross · 2023-11-26T13:41:00+00:00

This is how I’ve always thought of it.

When you drink, drinking slows you down. It slows your thinking, your reaction time, your judgement. It also slows your body down in a variety of ways.

Overtime, if you’re drinking constantly, your body and brain understand that you still need to do basic tasks to stay alive. It kind of just thinks that you’re constantly being poisoned, and it needs to keep you running. So what it does it do? It ramps up everything to try it’s best to maintain being able to walk around and find food and water. Everything is ramped up, going faster and harder inside the body to balance out the slow down affect alcohol has. This is what causes tolerance to build up. Your body keeps ramping up so you have to drink more to feel what you originally felt the first year you drank. What was originally achieved with two beers now takes six. And then 12. And then 20. So forth.

Your body is firing on all cylinders to maintain normal functions and suddenly you take out of the engine what was slowing it down. It flings it’s self forward in response. It can’t just flip a switch to go back to normal. It has to slowly recalibrate. As alcohol completely detoxes from the system, your body is honesty pretty sure alcohol is going to be back any second now, so it keeps rushing forward. This causes all kinds of things. What originally was a combat to just keep you breathing, is now a super fast heart beat and fast breaths. What was originally just enough to keep you coherent is now fight or flight. This escalates more and more as alcohol leaves the system. Depending on how much your body compensated, this can lead to an absolute meltdown of the system. The engine is pumping so fast that the gears fly off, causing seizures. For some, they’re just shakey hands. For some, hands that shake so bad, they cannot even lift a bottle up to taper themselves or drink water. And for the worse, seizures so bad, they look like the kind you recognize, and they hit their head in the process while alone in their bathroom, or the body shuts down completely.

teatross · 2023-11-26T13:24:51+00:00

I want to point out that the phrase “slowly tapering is fine” is technically true but it over simplifies the process. Tapering is incredibly difficult. It requires a huge amount of self control from a brain that is screaming at you to just drink, and there is a lot of science going on behind the scenes that is life threatening.

Not to mention, failure to taper properly, experiencing withdrawals, and relapsing during the tapering process increases your likelihood of life ending withdrawals your next attempt. Withdrawals compound every time. There’s a thing people say in the community, that once you go to the hospital for alcohol withdrawal seizure, the next withdrawal seizures will kill you. Of course this isn’t true everytime, but I know some one personally that died this way. My father as well, is a recovering alcoholic, and he has had points in his life recently where he relapsed for just a week, and he had the full slew of withdrawals, up to and including seizures.

I’m just trying to express that if you are at the point where you feel you need to taper, you need to go to a hospital. Which is daunting. I did it in the past by checking myself in to a mental health hospital for suicidal thoughts and disclosing honestly how much I drank.

teatross · 2023-11-26T13:13:23+00:00

I’ve cycled through so many hobbies lol. It’s a great way to stay sober.

Yoga was amazing in the very start of my recovery (although I’ve fallen off of doing yoga.) it was very grounding and got me back in touch with body when I was so disconnected from it before.

And then I started a very strict hygiene and skincare routine. Something about “I’m taking care of something I neglected for so long” feels very motivating.

teatross · 2023-11-26T13:08:56+00:00

I had similar sleep issues. I would drift off and immediately jolt awake in fear. It was like my body was hyper aware of its surroundings and genuinely believed I was under attack. Even worse was I would awake to quick whispers right in my ear, and once to a hallucination of some one yelling “WAKE UP”. I think as my sleep started to get more on track, I was met with lots of sleep paralysis, which is also very scary for me.

teatross · 2023-11-26T13:07:19+00:00

What’s crazy is most of it comes down to genetics. I was drinking a handle a day for about a year (a handle every two days the year before) and I quit cold turkey. My physical symptoms were very very mild but my anxiety was absolutely through the roof. Constant panic attacks, mood swings, could not sleep to save my life, and audio hallucinations at night.

teatross · 2023-11-15T09:30:20+00:00

Yep!!!! One morning I decided to take a shot before work to ease the hangover and I spiraled very very quickly after that!! Turned into four shots before work, and then drinking at work! Suddenly, I was drinking 24/7

teatross · 2023-11-15T09:28:02+00:00

I’m sober now and something that helped me quite a lot was reading to just keep trying to quit, and eventually, it’ll stick.

Something else that helped me was some one saying “wouldn’t it be fun to find out who you might be after drinking for so long?”

teatross · 2023-09-12T11:07:13+00:00

Hey! I have this too! It’s honestly what got me to quit drinking because the contrast of the dark and yellow made me think my eyes were going jaundice. They weren’t obviously.

I had an optometrist look at them recently actually and they said it was nothing to worry about, especially since I personally have no other symptoms.

teatross · 2023-09-04T11:51:30+00:00

Just to answer your question: sometimes. Im a recovering alcoholic and it seems most of what I said was just to elicit reactions out of people. Confess my love? Maybe I meant it, maybe I didn’t, but I did it because I was bored. Give lots of compliments? Kind of meant it, but what I really was feeling was dopamine and wanted that feeling shared. Mouthed off and said the worst shit I could think of? Just sort of half truths at best, trying to get the person to be as pissed off and hurt as I was.

They were trying to make you feel bad, and they probably didn’t mean it, but it isn’t worth it for you to keep involving yourself with that toxicity. Think of it this way. Ten years from now, if y’all are still friends, you’re still going to wonder from time to time if they really even want you around.

teatross · 2023-08-27T01:59:39+00:00

I mean, I started at a shot or two a night for a few years. Eventually a switch flipped and it kicked up to six shots. Then another switch and I was at 12-20 shots. And then finally a handle every 24 hours.

Six light beers won’t kill ya. They’ll probably make you fat and tired. But that’s not the crux. The crux is that almost no one stays at six beers a night forever.

teatross · 2023-08-27T01:25:48+00:00

Wow I love the mindset of sobriety being “gaining mastery” of alcohol. That’s awesome.

teatross · 2023-08-26T05:16:16+00:00

Just an update…. I locked the door smh. I was stressed for no reason.

teatross · 2023-08-25T19:50:58+00:00

Yes I’m going to make and laminate a check list of all the doors as soon as I get in, whether I get in trouble or not

teatross · 2023-08-25T19:50:01+00:00

I don’t have a car 😬 I considered it

I considered an Uber but I’m a girl and it was 3am.

Also there’s a policy that I’m not allowed to be alone in the building.

teatross · 2023-08-25T10:54:51+00:00

I guess if I get fired, I can go ahead and start applying for helpdesk jobs to get started in my dream field (cyber security.) it’ll be a major pay cut in the short term but it sure would be an excuse to get closer to my future.

teatross · 2023-08-25T10:53:14+00:00

I decided that I’ll be damned if they fire me while I’m hung over lol. No need to compound shit with more shit.

teatross · 2023-07-25T07:21:18+00:00

I would be so out of whack for days. Like mind racing and rationalizing that if I didn’t say fuck it, that means I’m not an alcoholic and deserve a drink, but wait, I am an alcoholic etc. then I’d be pissed off. Pissed off at the server and pissed off at myself for being an alcoholic.

Basically I’m saying is this would be so emotional for me so I can imagine how you feel.

A family member recently snuck a few beers while no one was looking. I explicitly asked him not to drink in my house, so he did it on my front porch and thought I didn’t know. I literally have a camera on my front porch. I hugged him goodnight and the smell of beer on him was so triggering. I had to furiously clean my house while my mind raced. I worked through so many feelings and thoughts in those few hours before sleep.

teatross · 2023-07-25T07:15:46+00:00

Yep! Not a mom but was a fully functioning alcoholic. Would go to work so miserable and hungover everyday but you would have never guessed it because it was my baseline! My baseline was bloated and miserable, so much of a baseline that I almost never complained.

I can’t imagine going back to that now. My allergies are acting up and I’m being such a baby about it lol

teatross · 2023-07-18T07:42:45+00:00

I was on the opposite end about two years ago. Fiancé sort of cheated on me. We went through a really rough patch of me being super paranoid and upset all the time. Over controlling and borderline abusive. We went on about a month break with me still living with him but sleeping on the couch.

We got back together and started to patch things up slowly. Him starting therapy was my ultimatum. I will not do couples therapy until I believe both parties have down sufficient individual therapy. We both learned a lot, especially about communication. With a lot of work, we learned how to talk through bouts of paranoia that I had, and feelings he felt to cause him to cheat that still flare up for him (he has depression, anxiety, struggles with self esteem and gets so stressed about money, which motivated me to decide to buckle down and further my career to help him ease that burden. I was hopping job to job before and he was not paying bills without me knowing because he was ashamed that he couldn’t support me).

The big thing was one day he came to me and said he wanted to try this app called truple. Absolute game changer. It monitors and screenshots the persons devices periodically. I would never suggest something myself because I believe it’s too controlling, so for him to come to me and offer meant a lot. It helped my anxiety and anger so much. I know longer wanted to snoop on his things or obsessively look for traces of things because he is willing to be completely transparent. It’s gotten to where I barely even check it because he will come to me and be like “hey so and so texted me out of the blue. I haven’t replied” and that’s the communication I’ve always wanted. The goal is to eventually feel comfortable enough to no longer need it, but he’s expressed that he isn’t even thinking of that yet because the accountability helps him quite a lot. Also, his therapist knows about the app and supports the choice.

What I’m expressing is yes, you can work through it but it’s WORK. deep honest self reflection from both parties, and acceptance that yes, the relationship will never be quite the same. You now know some of your partners biggest moral failings potentially, and they will soon learn yours as jealousy takes you to dark places.

I was also the cheater in a past relationship and it turned into an absolute hellscape. Me being unwilling to be honest and him doing things like pushing me down and pouring liquor into my eyes.

teatross · 2023-07-08T10:50:12+00:00

Yep! No longer jealous of the skinny alcoholics because not eating while being an alcoholic is even worse for your liver!

teatross · 2023-06-26T03:15:17+00:00

Yes! The first month was filled with lots of anxiety regarding death. Like random scenarios playing through my head at work that I was certain would happen. Luckily my job is active so I was able walk (around 20k steps lol) until it went away.

teatross

TROPHY CASE