Exercising self care: stuff to buy in the early stages of sobriety
If you’re newly not doing alcohol any more, and you can honestly say you’re saving money, then you’re probably setting yourself up for a fall. Now is not the time for austerity measures. Now is the time for all the cake. Now is the time to spend the same money you were previously shelling out to dull your emotions on making your life easier, prettier, brighter, and more beautiful. Consider it an investment in yourself and your quality of life.
Later, once you’re on an even keel, you can think about saving money. For now, concentrate on saving yourself.
I know, I know: capitalism is bad...but sometimes you need the right tools for the job, and that can mean buying stuff. In the earliest stages of my own sobriety, certain Things made that damned tricky, tentative, teetotal duckling stage much easier. Given that you’ve been frittering away a small fortune killing yourself slowly, don't you think you can justify ‘wasting’ your money on living well instead?
The answer is, "Yes, I can."
Here are a few Things...Bits...Items that have made a difference to my recovery, and with them, some ideas of the ways I've changed as time has marched on.
Stories of the way forward
Items: a Kindle and quit lit. I plumped for a Kindle Paperwhite, because I’m a bit fancy like that.
If you’re anything like me, you’re going to read a bucketload of quit lit in the first few weeks of sobriety – because It’s natural to seek comfort in stories of people like ourselves, taking heart from the idea that if she can do it, I can do it.
The problem is that books tend to have covers.
Covers can be really annoying, because they constantly advertise what's inside...
Maybe you only want the whole sobriety shebang brought to mind when YOU say so: perhaps you simply don’t want book covers, inevitably emblazoned with drinks glasses, twerking their triggering imagery all up in your field of view all the damn time. Maybe you’re going to spend a whole lot of money on books about recovery, but don’t want to be left with a bookshelf of bad memories. Perhaps you plan on reading in public, and just don’t fancy being seen reading books that proclaim your alcohol-free status, or any suggestion of addiction or recovery.
Early sobriety is challenging enough as it is – why choose to make your life harder? You’re at a delicate stage and maybe you feel a bit vulnerable; be kind to yourself. There’s no shame in recovery, but there’s no law that you have to shout it from the rooftops either. Take it at your own pace. A Kindle can help keep all this under wraps.
As an aside, one problem you (like I) will likely run up against is that a lot of quit lit isn’t about the process of recovery at all.
Sure, some quit lit is brilliant writing, packed with wake-up calls and wisdom, which focuses on moving forwards...
Then there’s the other quit lit, which comprises page upon rancid page recounting someone else’s Sam Beckett-style timeloop of alcohol abuse – with a few token pages at the end about recovery and being All Better Now.
There’s only so far that wallowing in stories of the bad old days can take you, but in amongst the replays of other people’s shame, you may find things that resonate.
Regardless, read all the quit lit you can stomach, because it’s all helpful on some level – even the beautifully-written, if sometimes self-indulgent, timeloop-of-abuse books.
I did so on a Kindle with a nice cover I chose. I could put it away when I wanted to and felt super luxe about it to boot. Win.
(Which quit lit I recommend is a whole ‘nother article for a whole ’nother time...)
Reeling in the years
Items: all the face creams, serums, toners, masks, and exfoliators you can eat. (Please don’t eat them, it’s just a turn of phrase.)
I’m sure there are graceful alcoholics who can follow impressive thousand-step Korean skincare regimens every night – but I wasn’t one of them. My night-time cleansing involved occasional vomiting, at best. Even if I had been capable of applying layers of products, the hideous effects alcohol has on the deep tissues of your body are nigh-on impossible to offset with expensive tubes, applied superficially.
Once I stopped doing alcohol, I started a proper skincare regime – because I could. Because it feels nice. When you don’t fall into bed any more, you can cleanse, tone, and moisturise. You can do sleep masks! (WHAT A CONCEPT! I COULD USE A LITTLE FUEL MYSELF!) You can set time aside to scrape away the husk of alcoholism, and emerge renewed.
The second you stop self-sabotaging with alcohol, your liver’s in there doing good work – but it can take a good while for your skin to get the memo. Once she does, you’ll look better than you ever have, and great skincare cranks that up to 11. I personally looked like utter crap the day I stopped drinking, and it took around 250 days for my skin to start looking and feeling incredible. It happened, ironically, just a few weeks after I’d written a post about how all the promises of great sober skin and weight loss hadn't happened yet.
In time you’ll see that taking care of yourself is worth every penny, to both your complexion and your self respect. I did. Be patient, do it anyway (even when you're not seeing effects yet), and use nice products because you’ll keep going if it feels good.
(The skincare products I recommend for your best skin ever...is a song for another time!)
The revolution will be streamed
Items: an internet connection, a subscription to something that’ll give you shows, and something to watch them on
When I was adjusting to the alien feeling of seconds being too long (i.e. when I was just learning about not propping every living moment up with wine) being able to turn on, tune in and drop out of my own thoughts was great for my sanity. I recommend you flip on the Netflix (or Hulu, or whatever,) pick a show with plenty of seasons to mainline, and while away some of the sticky hours of earliest sobriety by immersing yourself, quite literally, in someone else’s drama. I found Fridays and weekends trickiest when I first stopped drinking, so being able to time travel through those without the usual chemical aids helped.
Upside: now is the time to watch all of DuckTales, or Mysterious Cities of Gold. You have the time.
Reclaim your rituals
Items: a nice coffee machine, glass mugs, glass teapot, silicone straws
Drinking alcohol is so much more than simply imbibing to get alcohol into your system: there’s the artistic presentation of alcoholic drinks, the rituals of popping corks, the feel of sliding in a straw or a cocktail umbrella, the clinking of ice cubes. There’s a specialness to alcohol. When you stop drinking, having Special Drinks can go missing from your life, if you let it.
(It’s a similar thing with smoking: when you smoke regularly, you get to do an action for a few minutes that makes you feel like you’re taking a moment for yourself now. Taking that away and not replacing it with anything can take a psychological toll, delivering a feeling of deprivation magnitudes more acute than is actually real.)
I decided that I would subjugate those rituals into other things to get my Special Drinks, so I bought a coffee maker and a bunch of glass mugs.
Popping a pod into the machine.
The CHUNCLICK of closing it.
The few moments of anticipation.
The whirr and buzz as it churns out something that smells amazing.
The presentation of a perfect, layered caramel macchiato.
All these little sensory steps establish a new ritual for a Special Drink.
(While the pods aren’t great for the environment, I offset wherever I can by recycling and using eco-conscious brands elsewhere. For now, it’s worth it for me.)
I also actually started using my dusty SodaStream machine, and purchased a glass teapot – plus a whole load of those 'Gram-worthy flowering teas. And 'Gram them I did. This also does the job of establishing ritual and artistic presentation for a Special Drink. I made a rule to always have a (silicone) straw and ice in my cold drinks, and try to stick a lemon slice in it. Presentation, and the feeling that comes with it of something being a bit premium, helped me to offset the psychological pleasure loss associated with Special Drinks when I stopped drinking alcohol.
As a side note, turns out for me that mocktails, alcohol-free beers and alcohol-free wine also hit the spot of a Special Drink – without setting off any negative behaviours or temptation. It’s great to blend in at a party, holding a beer bottle just like everyone else, and it’s still a nice image and taste I associate with calm and relaxation. I just don’t have the mind-altering part in my Special Drink these days. And that feels good.
Getting clean, and cleaning house
Items: a robot overlord that lives in your house, great kitchen cleaner, fridge organisers, spice racks, shelving, ukulele wall mounts, boxes, new cushions, textile freshener
Taking charge of the environment In Here inspired and empowered me to take charge of my environment Out There too.
My house is so clean now. It sparkles. Over the past several months, it has gone from, “Okaaay but where is that thing?” to, “I know where all my stuff is, and my house looks like a picture from a magazine!”
Previously, I thought I was pretty clean and fairly organised. In hindsight, my house was secretly kind of grubby under the hood. Grubbier than I realised – because I hadn’t really been looking. Or if I did, I couldn’t see it or didn’t really care deeply about it.
I care now. Because I notice things now that I didn’t notice a few months ago.
Scatterings of bits on the floor; little tumbleweeds of cat fur accumulated in corners.
This is where Mazinga Clean comes in. He’s a vacuuming robot I bought, and promptly anthropomorphised with a cheeky name.
He’s not clever: he doesn’t map my house and he doesn’t go back to his bed to dock himself for sleepytimes. I love him anyway.
He’s a simple fellow: I put him in a room, place a shoe or two to stop him wandering out the door, and set him going. He bumbles along until he hits an obstruction, then changes heading and bumbles off elsewhere. Every now and then he does big spirals which means he ends up quite impressively edging the room. All the while he’s sucking up dust and bits into his mechanical belly. When he gets tired he screams like a toddler – or rather, he beeps his terrible beep protest, and his amiable blue signal light turns tantrum red. Then I plug him in to nom some tasty energon cubes until he’s ready to do another room. Empty out his belly into the bin, and off he goes again. Cleaning, for great justice.
Bonus: he doesn’t create tons of heat like a regular vacuum cleaner, so it’s possible to hoover in the heat. Huzzah!
Double bonus: it’s really easy to get into the habit of sticking him in a room and setting him going each day.
You would not believe how much crap he picks up. It’s ridiculous how much low-level detritus accumulates on the floor. I hate hoovering, so didn’t force myself (or my Kind-Eyed-Boy) to do it anywhere near as much as we should have – but a clean floor makes a very noticeable difference to the general cleanliness level of your home. And having a clean house makes me feel like I’m really adulting.
I love Mazinga Clean. Because he's the cause of a revolution.
It started with a vacuuming robot (best 100 quid I’ve ever spent), but it quickly extended to:
dusting with swiffers regularly
organising the fridge with plastic drawers
sorting out my spice racks with cool perspex ones so I can see where the damn Five Spice is
mounting my ukuleles on the wall
finally sorting all those disparate teabags into a tea stand organiser
cleaning the clutter from the bookshelves into fetching, brightly-coloured boxes
replacing my bedside cabinets (oh, the spills and stains of alcoholism) with vertical shelving
using sink caddies to organise scrubbing brushes and sponges
getting some more longboxes, plus bags and boards, for the comics and filing everything in order
buying a steam cleaner and searing the place clean, plus defrosting the freezer with ease
getting a drying stand for my makeup sponge
stick-on hooks EVERYWHERE for flannels, hair ties, fairy lights, you name it
cable tidies to organise my bunches of trailing wires
plants everywhere so that my house feels alive
My house has never been cleaner.
I would never have been this clean, organised person months ago. I like the me I am now better.
Past times and pastimes
Item: that thing you used to want or like...
When you’re addicted, you never have enough time to do anything – except alcohol, of course. You get home Friday, open a bottle, and then suddenly it’s Saturday and your head hurts. It’s an illusion, because you actually have plenty of time, you’re just wasting it getting wasted. When you stop drinking, all that time becomes yours again, but you have to adjust to this brave new world by intentionally filling it.
What did you like doing when you were a kid, before every interaction with the world involved a beer? What stuff did you want to do when you were a kid but could never afford, because you were a kid? What stuff did the ‘cool girl who had everything’ have, that you coveted?
Was it an overpriced Warhammer box-set? Some other craft, like quilling? Jewellery-making? A home gym? Ice skating accoutrements? A violin? A video game console?
Go get that.
Do that.
Be that kid. Now.
Get out and do stuff, or stay in and do stuff.
Just do stuff.
Why wouldn’t you?
What small things can you purchase today that will make this part of your journey easier?
In the grand scheme of things, it’s just money. When you die, you won't wish for more of it.
And you can’t put a price on your life...
Love always,
Fay
xXx
P.S. I know this article has been Stuff and purchasing-based, but if you can’t purchase Stuff, what can you use that you already have? What can you repurpose? The principles remain the same. What can you do to choose to live differently? The Items are just props, like alcohol was. It’s really about choosing what you do with your time, and who you choose to be during that time.