A key point of many recovery programs is to separate yourself from your drinking buddies, which is probably the most difficult thing for anyone in any situation. It’s something I still deal with in some ways: Drinking friends are extremely easy to find. Real friends absolutely do not show up everyday.

I was just thinking about some of the people this morning that I just don’t have the need to associate with anymore. There are two that I still occasionally hang out with, but there was a deeper friendship besides booze from the start.

If you are having this problem now, it gets better over time, I promise. It may take a couple of years to learn life again, but you can heal. In retrospect, having much more time on my hands just made the initial loneliness much worse.

My friends changed but also the reasons to hangout with other people also changed. This took time for me to understand. What matters to me personally has slowly morphed over these last few years and that is reflected in who I choose to associate with.

My conclusion is that I absolutely underestimated the time recovery actually takes and how my views on things like friendship would shift. As my entire personality was based on alcohol, I have found that reevaluating past decisions or assumptions can be useful, if not paramount to moving forward. This, unfortunately, takes lots time and time is not a friend to anyone fresh into recovery.

(This was just another one of my random annual stopdrinking posts. If you needed to relate to this in some way, that is awesome. For me, self-reflection is important and I choose to make it public. If this post seems self-centered, that is because it is: It’s just not unhealthy.)