So here goes…..I drank on the week-end…beer…. I don’t even like beer,

Paintball week-end……has passed and I have had a drink, just one, my bravo in trying to show my friends how easy it is to scull beer, stupid really, regretful, you bet.

But perhaps the power of being able to say no, it would have been easy to just keep drinking after the first scull, but I just couldn’t do it.

I have more to write, but it’s a beautiful day outside and I refuse to waste it!

I have been a slack blog writer….I have an excuse for that, getting over a guide camp has been like one big hangover for the past three weeks….no joke. Combine that with crazy work hours, and full on week-end in between, this is the first time I have been near a computer.

I am 6 weeks in, and loving it! At first I was consumed by not being able to drink, and by the third week I would have happily sold my soul, grandma, for just one drink. However that feeling passed, and I have now entered this stage of being content with it all.

I’d be lying if I said it want hard though, because it is. I have over the past three weeks had the chance to hangout with two good mates, and I have realized a few things. I am the one that peer pressures friends to drink. This hit me like a ton of bricks, and I still get this uncomfortable feeling talking or thinking about it. I realized it, about 2 am Saturday night, when I had the amazing thought, that we would have all been a lot drunker, if I had been drinking…. I mean we would have been totally smashed.

When I asked a friend about this, she agreed, confirmed what I had been thinking, and went on to say, that when I drink, I knock back what I should be drinking in 4 hours, in about 20 minutes,  that when I want to drink, that I encourage the people around me, to drink more too…. I never thought I was like that.  It’s certainly given me a lot to think about for when my HSM finishes….

Not to say we didn’t have fun, in fact, we’ve done more since I have been on hsm than we ever did before. Our only stop hasn’t just been the bottle O.  Think bowling, arcade games, virtual reality (from 1995! It was so bad it was funny!) Roller coaster simulators from 1996 (where the hell did they get these machines??) and tickets, which means you can buy the crap behind the counter…… well for us that meant sticky hands. These provide more than a few hours of fun.

I am looking forward the challenges that lie ahead, in two weeks, I  going paintballing, a rather silly idea because anything remotely dangerous this year, have ended in some sort of accident. However I am looking forward to be being tested with everyone drinking around me; I’m thinking it’s going to be hardest challenge yet!!! (or maybe just for the that week.)

This kind of turned into a verbal vomit that I hope make some sort of sense…

Three weeks in, and I could have easily killed for a drink last week, busily organizing a camp for Guides and it was all just a bit too much, but I got there in the end.

However, after getting to camp, in the middle of the bush, it was like all of the outside problems, where swept away. I had bigger problems on my hands like scraped fingers, a few burns, a bump to the head (mine thank goodness) dealing with other leaders and organizing the girls.

But really the week-end was full of laughter, watching the girls come out of their shells, cope with being away from home and a lot of memorable moments from the first camp as a Leader.

It made me think: When do the weekends stop being like this and turn into a ritual of getting tanked, making silly regrettable choices and hungoverness the next morning??

I saw the sunrise on Sunday morning, and it was beautiful, no pictures taken because I wanted to just remember it in the mind. It was raining slightly and I had a chance to think about what’s important in my life, what I value and how I am going to stop thinking about the drink and look a tad deeper inward…..

In summary an awesome week-end, and a shift in the way I’ve been looking at things!

My highlights of the week-end were:

reading bedtime stories to the quietest group of girls and having them ask half way thru that if they found more books would I read more to them, and then watching them source a few more books!

Red bull at 6:45am……coffee was just not cutting it on day three….

The wildlife, was just amazing, sometime I forget we live in such an amazing place.

Spider patrol……. And trying to explain to the girls that we were in the bush and therefore the cabins would have spiders in them

Campfire with camp songs, s’mores and sticky fingers….

Not thinking about drinking at all over the weekend…..

Over and out! LOU!

So, just over a week into this, and it’s a lot harder than I expected. I had read a few people’s blogs when I first started and naively thought that it would be easy for me. It would seem that everywhere I went, everything I did in the past week or so, there was alcohol tempting me, on billboards, on tv, in the newspaper, and being around my friends.

  Last night, was the hardest, a going away party, and who knows when I will get to have drink with this friend again. I was drinking Ginger Beer, so it wasn’t obvious that I wasn’t drinking.

But what did strike me, was had I been drinking, how disgusting my behaviour would have been, think ladette to lady, but worse. I was more aware of how my drinking behaviour, would have influenced my friends, and it makes me cringe. ..

It has certainly made me think more than I thought it would, about what I want my drinking culture to be, and how the Australian way of life, certainly involves alcohol, isn’t it time that this changed.

So it’s the First day of spring and the start of Prohibition in my life for 3 months. I am looking forward to challenge.

The biggest question I have right now is, does lemon lime and BITTERS, count as an alcoholic drink???

The next few months are going to be an interesting game of snakes and ladders, or at least that’s the way I am going to be tackling it. The YES’s will be the ladders, and the snakes, are the ones I will be avoiding. Alcohol in animal form. No roll of the dice though, my own choices and wanting to do my best will dictate how this will play out.

Drinking and I have not been friends in the past, and I know this isn’t about the past, but I need to explain why I don’t drink a lot already, as it has to be an aspect of moving forward. Sliding down the snake to when I was 20-21, and I was drinking every week-end, Friday, Saturday, and going to work hung over, or sometimes still drunk on Sunday. It got to the point that I would drink to numb the pain of any drama or stress in my life, and by the end of the night, I would be self harming in the toilet, not pretty, but the ugly scars of the past.

Read the rest of this entry →