I quit smoking weed 11 days ago. I’ve had nightmares almost every night since then. it’s making it really hard to stay sober. i’ve had dreams of my parents beating me, holding guns to my face. Others of just really scary situations like being trapped in a basement by strangers. it’s truly been horrible to experience. i wake up crying most nights. Is this normal? What should i do?
This year I decided to do Dry January for the first time. It went great and I decided to keep it up. Today I hit 100 days without alcohol! This is the longest I’ve gone without drinking in over 15 years!
Edit: grammar
I'm almost 6 months in, and the contrast still hits me unexpectedly in the mornings.
Last night was just like any other Friday. I didn't have any drinks. Went to bed at a reasonable hour (I'm a crazy early riser in sobriety). I woke up around 4:30 a.m. today, no alarm, and just lay there for a minute, realizing my head was clear. There is no cottonmouth. There will be no scrolling through my phone trying to remember if I said something stupid.
Out of curiosity, I checked my watch (Garmin Forerunner 570). Sleep score 96. The HRV is green. The thing literally told me I was "at my prime." Saturday morning. After a Friday night. So cool!
For about 8-9 years of my life, Saturday morning meant lying in bed until noon, feeling like garbage, drinking water, and promising myself I'd be productive tomorrow.
So nice just to not have that shit!
Currently, I am struggling. I’m looking to get into a detox. I’ve been paying for my own health insurance for the last year and now when I go to use it because I wanna go into a detox my health insurance doesn’t cover mental health or substance abuse does anybody have any ideas how to go about this so I can go into a detox
The myth of "going back to normal" was the first thing that had to die for me. In the beginning, that’s all I wanted—to return to the person I was before the floor gave out, before the labels took over, and before my life became a series of emergencies. I viewed recovery as a restoration project, a way to polish the tarnished version of myself until it looked like the original. But I eventually realized the original version was the one who didn't know how to survive.
If I went back to who I was, I would eventually go back to what I did. My "normal" was the very climate in which the storm was formed. It was a state of being defined by half-truths, hidden cracks, and a lack of the internal architecture needed to hold up the weight of a real life. To return to that state wasn’t a victory; it was a sentencing.
The real work only began when I abandoned the U-turn. I had to accept that I wasn’t searching for a lost self, but building a person I had never actually met.
This process felt less like a homecoming and more like an exile from everything I thought I knew about my own limits. It was the terrifying, exhilarating experience of becoming a stranger to my own shadow. I started to see that the "me" I had been protecting was just a collection of survival mechanisms and old scripts. To find myself, I had to stand in the wreckage of that old identity and ask what remained when the smoke finally cleared.
What remained was capability.
I began to discover that I was capable of a staggering level of honesty. I found that I could sit in the center of a craving, a memory, or a heartbreak without a desperate need to exit my own skin. This wasn't a return to an old strength; it was the discovery of a brand-new muscle. I realized I had a capacity for empathy that had been blocked by my own noise, and a capacity for discipline that was once drowned out by the chaos.
Finding myself wasn't a moment of arrival; it was a realization of alignment. It was that quiet, heavy click when my actions finally matched my values. I stopped trying to "be better" and started focusing on being real. I found myself in the silence of the morning, in the grit of a difficult conversation, and in the steady hands that no longer shook.
I didn't recover my life. I forged a new one. And when I look in the mirror now, I don't recognize the person staring back—not because I’m lost, but because I’ve finally become the person I was always meant to be. I am a version of myself that "normal" never could have imagined.
So i had an argument with a friend about how i’m not addicted to these things and as a t33n you should enjoy your freedom, to which he told me it’s not good and i should do it to better my life and we talked about how other friends in our group have said that i’m not trying to better my life which isn’t true but i told him “On my mother i will quit once what i have is gone” so as soon as I’m finished with my two carts I’m done, not promising i wont pick it up in the future when I’m more productive and stable maybe with a job and a license. But what should i expect from this?
Just for today 10APR26 "Too Busy" 321 days clean and sober today NA Recovery (@shepardscove)
It really is easy to become too busy to pay attention to the basics of recovery. I've been forgetting the basics lately. I had to remind myself about my recovery and what it was that worked in the beginning. Praying to my Higher Power, writing in my journal, going to meetings, reading just for today on YouTube, and staying busy. Not too busy...