Maybe it is just years of abuse that has "trained" my body to not be able to tolerate alcohol anymore and I think the only answer going forward is going to be avoiding it altogether.
Yesterday, after spending the entire day leading up to that point living in a quite healthy manner and immediately after going on an hour long bicycle ride, one portion of which took me over a really difficult suspension bridge and back, I stopped and looked at my phone and saw that I had missed a bunch of messages from a friend of mine that I rarely see. I don't go wander to pubs to drink just for the hell of it anymore, I have to have a purpose for meeting up with anyone anywhere. Since I hadn't seen this guy for a while and he is a good egg, as they say, I went. Then I cracked open a beer as my bicycle was waiting at the door for me.
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I have mentioned in the past that I don't think I am capable of having just a "few drinks" but on this day, I wanted to prove that yes, yes I can do that so after I finished my 3rd beer, I decided to leave.
Job done right? I proved my point! Well, I went home and went about my day, cooked food, took the dog or a walk, showered, tidied up the apartment a bit, played a bit of playstation, finished reading a book (more on that later) and then took a sleeping tablet around 10pm and was lights out by 11. I woke up today at 730 feeling like I was hungover and now it is 8 and I'm nearly done with my first cup of coffee and still feel groggy and bad.
I don't like that this is the case but I think we may have reached the point in my life where I can't really have ANY alcohol at all. This doesn't make sense to me: Why would having just a few beers after eating well and exercising, going to be early and not overdoing it, why would I feels as bad as I do now?
I'm not a doctor but I have this theory that after 30 years or so of abuse, my body associates alcohol, any alcohol, with the need to feel bad the following day. Maybe that seems a bit silly but I don't really know any other way to explain it.
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It isn't as bad as a proper hangover the likes of which I had last week after drinking all day long but I am groggy, my brain isn't wanting to "do the think" very well and I am just sitting here believing that I don't deserve this. I was intentionally responsible tomorrow and still feel terrible right now.
I don't want to be that guy that can never drink, especially since most of my friends are the kind of people that always drink when they get together but if this is the tradeoff, I suppose I have no choice but to make a change.
Perhaps to those of you out there that have never been drinkers, this is a difficult thing to understand and the answer in your mind might be "just don't drink then!" and to those folks I have to say that you can't possibly be familiar with how difficult that is. It isn't really a case of me NEEDING alcohol like an addiction, but every single social situation that I find myself in, the situations that I have built for myself, involve people consuming beer. If you are not having a beer people will continually ask you why you aren't having a beer and you start to feel like it is not worth hanging out at that place unless you do have drinks. You get the feeling rather rapidly that you just don't want to hang out at those places anymore but don't really know what else to do.
Woe is me, right. haha... 1st world problems.
I have a pretty amazing life if this is the only thing I really have to worry about I guess and maybe I should focus on the good, play to my strengths, count my blessings... as they say.
In the meantime yesterday's "challenge" of hanging out and only having a few beers was a success in that I did leave after the few beers, but now I suppose the next step is to go and meet my friend the next time but just not have any beers.