Member-only story
Anxiety, get a grip.
Anxiety was an abusive relationship
When I was still someone who drank, anxiety promised me just a few drinks and I would keep it at arm’s length. I could stop being anxious. But, it was wrong. The more I drank, the less I was anxious about things that mattered and the more I was anxious about things that didn’t. I could go from having negative thoughts about work to wondering why the lady at the cash register was being so rude to me.
Alcohol gave anxiety a way to get to me when I was most vulnerable.
Anxiety, it’s not you. It’s me. (but actually you)
Naively, I thought that when I gave up drinking that I would be giving up anxiety. Boy, was I wrong. I used to think about when I’d get my next drink or if the place I was going to had alcohol. Anxiety, you were an abusive relationship. I would end up drinking so much that I couldn’t go to the gym or wake up early like I had wanted to. It caused me to push people away. There were goals, aspirations that couldn’t be achieved. I wasn’t handling anxiety well and parts of my life were paying the price for that. When I gave up alcohol, I had everything I tried to drink away to think about and it was starting to overwhelm me. I realized I didn’t have a healthy approach to treating anxiety and now that I didn’t drink, it was like a…
