This is Annie Grace and you're listening to this naked mind podcast where without judgment,

pain or rules, we explore the role of alcohol in our lives and culture.

My friends, this is Annie Grace and I am answering readers questions. I'm the author of this naked mind.

And today I have a question from Mark. He says, Annie, one thing that surprised me about reaching one year alcohol free this week

is fear that as more time passes, the less I'm going to remember why I quit in the first place.

Fear that I'll no longer be able to distinguish a bad sober day from a bad drunk one and that there will eventually come a time when I need to test it.

Has anyone else dealt with this? Any insight or resources you can point me to to help me stay the course would be greatly appreciated.

And if anybody has dealt with this, certainly comment below. We'd love to hear what you have to say.

And it's thrilling for me because I get lots of these one year or one and a half year messages these days and it's really cool that people have sort of decided to be alcohol free for such a length of time.

So, but there's four things that I'm going to say on this. I think that first of all, it's really insightful mark to talk about the fear of a bad sober day because it is so clear to us when we have a bad day that we can blame something.

And our minds we look to blame something. And so if sobriety is kind of top of your mind and it's something you've been doing and working on and then suddenly you're having a bad day,

blaming your sobriety or blaming your lack of alcohol is just such a natural thing for people to do.

I had a woman write me yesterday actually and she was saying that you know she really she's been almost two years alcohol free and she just can't find her joy.

And she was wondering kind of what that looks like and she gave me her date and it was two years ago and she was wondering about that.

I had a follow up question for her and I said well when was the last time you really felt joy and when she sat and thought about it, you know things that kind of been disrupted in her life for almost a decade.

And she hadn't actually felt like she'd really been authentically joyful in a decade. Yet for some reason her mind was like well it must be the alcohol.

And when we were drinking you know we could very quickly think well you didn't use to feel this way when you were drinking.

That's just not true because if you put it under critical examination you felt bad enough to seek change. And as human beings we don't like change.

We don't want to go out of our comfort zone. We don't want to do something that ventures us into the unknown where we won't know what's next.

And so to feel bad enough to actually seek change in a relationship with alcohol means that you were not happy.

And I think to think about that critically so it's so easy I think for our brains to trick us in a way to say oh but when I just was able to reach for a drink this would have been all better.

And I just would have had an outlet and you know I just was happier and we remember stuff through this kind of rose colored haze of things that are not necessarily real or true.

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