The Daily Check-In for Sunday, September 18th: Just for today, I am NOT drinking!
We may be anonymous strangers on the internet, but we have one thing in common. We may be a world apart, but we're here together!
Welcome to the 24 hour pledge!
I'm pledging myself to not drinking today, and invite you to do the same.
Maybe you're new to /r/stopdrinking and have a hard time deciding what to do next. Maybe you're like me and feel you need a daily commitment or maybe you've been sober for a long time and want to inspire others.
It doesn't matter if you're still hung over from a three day bender or been sober for years, if you just woke up or have already completed a sober day. For the next 24 hours, lets not drink alcohol!
This pledge is a statement of intent. Today we don't set out trying not to drink, we make a conscious decision not to drink. It sounds simple, but all of us know it can be hard and sometimes impossible. The group can support and inspire us, yet only one person can decide if we drink today. Give that person the right mindset!
What happens if we can't keep to our pledge? We give up or try again. And since we're here in /r/stopdrinking, we're not ready to give up.
What this is: A simple thread where we commit to not drinking alcohol for the next 24 hours, posting to show others that they're not alone and making a pledge to ourselves. Anybody can join and participate at any time, you do not have to be a regular at /r/stopdrinking or have followed the pledges from the beginning.
What this isn't: A good place for a detailed introduction of yourself, directly seek advice or share lengthy stories. You'll get a more personal response in your own thread.
This post goes up at:
US - Night/Early Morning
Europe - Morning
Asia and Australia - Evening/Night
A link to the current Daily Check-In post can always be found near the top of the sidebar.
Hello all my beautiful SD friends! I’m amberbuhbamber and I’m sooooo excited to be hosting the DCI this week! This sub means so much to me personally and to my Sobriety, so I thought embracing my inner Teacher’s Pet and hosting would be a great way to give back to SD a little.
I think it’s important to share and hear a lot of different stories to be able to identify with ones like our own, so today I’ll talk a little about how my drinking problem looked.
My first time getting drunk was on my 16th birthday. At the time, it felt like the most fun thing I’d ever done, and I was hooked. My parents are alcoholics too, and my mom fully facilitated my drinking through my teen years. Her reasoning was that I was responsible and a straight-A student, so she might as well let the kid drink beer and do drugs at home until she passes out, right? I didn’t know any better, so it sounded good to me at the time.
Over the next 12 years of highschool, college, and my career, I was never a sun-up to sun-down daily drinker, but I was definitely a hardcore binge drinker. I could never stop once I’d had that first drink. I can’t count how many close calls I had with the law, with my safety, with my life. But that’s all they ever were - close calls. I blacked out every time and made a fool of myself, but I never drove drunk, I never went to jail, I never ended up in the hospital, so my drinking didn’t feel like a big deal.
I finally realized I needed to cool it on the drinking and I actively tried, and failed, to stop for the last 4 years. It would never stick. I felt alone. I didn’t know any moderate problem drinkers like me, so I wasn’t fully convinced that I even had a problem. Then in comes this sub - SD has helped me realize that drinking problems fall on a wide spectrum, that I was most definitely on that spectrum, and that I wasn’t alone. I started to read so many stories that sounded exactly like mine. If they could realize that they had a problem and could quit, then I could too.
Tomorrow, I’ll talk some more about my experience with Sobriety these last 8 months and how it finally stuck for me.
Today, if you’d like to share, let’s hear a little about you and your story. Whether you’re new to this sub, a long time lurker, new to trying to control your drinking entirely, or an active Sober SD Vet… whatever your deal is, let’s hear it :)
Oh yeah and, most definitely, IWNDWYT!