This is a story about the beer fear...

My mood and my perceptions swing wildly between a cautious sense of optimism and overwhelming defeatism. On a good day I can be thinking about how far I've travelled and how much improved my circumstances are; I can feel really hopeful about the future and I say to myself "not long to go until I'm quite financially comfortable". On those good days I'm pleased with my achievements; proud. On a bad day I think I've made a huge mistake and I've wandered up a one-way street; I'm convinced that I've been wasting my time and I haven't made any progress at all. On the bad days the uphill struggle seems impossible to sustain and it's pointless to continue flogging a dead horse; I say to myself "there's still so far to travel and I'll never make it".

I was doing some Google searches yesterday and by accident I discovered that there was a problem with my site's position in the rankings - searching "manic grant" wasn't bringing my site back as the number one hit. I was distraught. For a moment I felt as if I'd been living in a fantasy world - hallucinating - and everything I'd worked so hard on for 3 years was just dribbling nonsense which had been identified as spam by Google. I started to doubt my ability to write. I started to think that perhaps I'm semi-brain-dead and nobody's had the heart to tell me yet - everybody is just humouring me. Tiny mistakes became magnified in my mind. I misspelled the word "novelist" and I was crushed with embarrassment; cringing at my pseudo-intellectualism. I felt dumb.

The first day of the working week back in the office was every bit as dreadful as I hoped it wouldn't be, and perhaps even worse still. There were a lot of moments where I felt like walking out, because I couldn't stand to be so bored with nothing to do; nothing to keep me busy and allow me to escape my own thoughts. I so desperately needed to escape my own thoughts, because all I can think about is how many more boring days I've got to endure when I've already reached the limit of what I can tolerate.

I don't think the problem is Mondays (or Tuesday in this case).

I don't think the problem is the job.

I don't think there's a problem.

What's happening is that I keep having very boozy weekends with teetotal Sundays (or in this case bank holiday Monday) because I have to get up early and drive for the best part of an hour and a half to get to work. My brain keeps suffering repeated periods of alcohol withdrawal at the beginning of the week. While this might be tolerably OK for the majority of people - and indeed getting drunk at the weekend is the norm - my brain has been highly sensitised to GABA agonist type chemicals, because I spent most of 2017 highly medicated with neuropathic painkillers, sleeping pills and tranquillisers. As a result, I probably have a high alcohol tolerance and I feel the unpleasant withdrawal symptoms very acutely.

A friend of mine describes a phenomenon he calls the "beer fear" as a gnawing anxiety, sense of hopelessness and generally unease; the sensation that the world's about to end, even though you can't put your finger on why. This very much tallies with how I've been feeling.

When I take a break from drinking, after a few days of insomnia, anxiety and negative thoughts, the "beer fear" goes away and some energy, enthusiasm and positive thinking return. All the hopeless thoughts seem nonsensical and are forgotten - it's a complete mindset change.

Since December I said to myself I was allowed to eat as much junk food as I wanted, and to get as drunk as I wanted because I deserved to have those things as a reward for the stress and hard work of working away from home. For most of the past 9 months I've drunk at least a bottle of wine every day, plus I've had periods where I've used leftover prescriptions of painkillers, sleeping pills and tranquillisers, all in a desperate attempt to make the time pass more quickly and less painfully. I was desperately stressed at the start of the year but now my circumstances have improved remarkably, but I guess I'm still paying a bit of a price for those bad habits I got into.

If I drink far less I know that it'll be easier to get up in the mornings and the working day will pass more bearably. I know that I'll lose weight, get fitter and have more energy and motivation to do things. I know that I'll have fewer periods of feeling like everything's hopeless, pointless, ruined and unbearably awful.

The question is: how do I get through my working week, my lonely evenings and my lonely weekends without alcohol? I've become habituated into having a couple of bottles of red wine on a Friday night and spending most of Saturday wishing I hadn't. It's ludicrous, because my rational analysis quite clearly indicates that alcohol is causing more harm than good, but yet I can't quite imagine not having it as my dependable reward for the miserable drudgery of the working week.

Comfort eating and comfort boozing is not bringing me much happiness, ultimately. I want to be fit not fat, so things are going to have to change. I'm 99% certain that the origin of my existential crises and overwhelming self-doubt is driven by the violent mood swings and altered perceptions caused by alcohol withdrawal.

I imagine that tomorrow I will feel a little better than today, and on Thursday I will feel much better... but then the drinking starts all over again. Need to break the cycle somehow.

Tags: #alcohol #medication