I'm in a similar situation at the moment-- it's not that I want a drink per se. I don't have any illusions about it being fun, and I can't get oblivious enough to not realize what a horrible mistake I'm making so there's no relief there either. But between COVID, the race riots, and being laid off from a tech job, my stress level is as high as it's been since I got out of rehab in June of 2018. I don't sit around thinking "man a drink would sure help" or "I wish I could get drunk", but I'm in this perpetual stress state where little things like my three-year-old not doing what she's told just push me into this stratospheric level of anger and frustration and the thought of a drink pops into my head. Mix in what TexArcher was talking about, and I feel pretty combustible right now.
And I'm with you, more than anything else, it's fear keeping me in line: the fear of returning unmanageability, the fear of how hard it would be to sober up again, etc.
But, I really do not think any of this, or even all of it simultaneously, would feel as insurmountable as it feels right now IF I were working the program. But thanks to the COVID shutdowns, my options there are Zoom meetings and phone calls, both of which I fucking hate. I don't hate 'em more than relapse, but goddamnit if I have to listen the audio pixelization of Zoom trying to manage thirty people mumbling the Serenity Prayer one more time, I'm going to go nuts.
There's just a lot of anger right now. I am having to learn, painfully, how to live in anger and move past it without trying to drink it away.
Agreed. To me, relapse over time went from flipping a light switch on or off, to there being an entire house's worth of breakers that have to be flipped. Right now, really being outside the program, I'm barely setting them back before something trips them again. I'm not close to relapsing, but I'm much closer than I've been at any point since June of 2018, because I'm angry.