Wasting My Time Wasted

Lately the voice in my head has been too much to handle. For those of you who don't know the voice I'm talking about, don't worry, I'm not talking about the kind of imaginary voices shizophrenic people hear. I'm talking about my own voice that is constantly analyzing my life inside my head. It makes me crazy. It never knows when to shut up and just let me be. It is exhausting and stressful to constantly, all day, every day, think about, analyze, and question my life. Always trying to decide if I'm making the right decisions in my life, trying to figure out the future and what I really want out of life, and how to get what I want out of life. It keeps my head spinning and my stress level high.

I already have high blood pressure, so adding all of this stress has been taking its toll. I'm beginning to be concerned about my blood pressure because it has been crazy high for years now. By this point it is probably doing irreversible damage to my heart, arteries, and who knows what else. I know the risks of long-term hypertension. I got straight A's in Anatomy and Physiology and worked in a hospital for a year. I've seen a doctor here and there about it, but I hate the side effects of the medications I've tried for it. Anyway, I'm a bit off topic.

I can't deal with the constant analyzation of my life anymore. It is making me crazy. Especially since I'm feeling a bit stuck with my situation in life right now and I'm out of ideas for what I should do about it. I'm feeling a bit helpless right now. Without an income, or any way to make an income I don't have the power to do anything I want with my life. I learned that the hard way.

I do have a plan for the future though. Since I'm always thinking about my life, I'm also always coming up with new ideas for directions to take my life. Right now I really want to learn to do metal work and start a business crafting things from metal. Eventually I want to get into high end home decor like lighting fixtures and chandeliers, smaller things too, but here's an example of what I'm thinking about:

These are all custom made for the mansion my husband built. For all of the metal lighting fixtures in the mansion, the owner paid somewhere around $250,000. Now I'm sure I would never find a mansion owner to buy a large amount of custom metalwork, but chandeliers and wall sconces and things would bring in a lot of money even for regular houses. Now I know I'm not going to pick up cutting torches, plasma cutters and welders and just start building intricate chandeliers. It will take a lot of practice and experience, but I think I'll learn quickly. And I have an artistic and creative side, along with a good sense of design which I think will be major assets. I'm going to get everything set up in the garage to start working on things one of these weekends coming up. We have all of the equipment around here already since they were used while the mansion was being constructed. I think it will be fun, and I'm excited to try something new, have a new challenge, have something to practice and get better at. Without that kind of thing in my life I'm lost. I'll keep going with photography too. I have a lot of fans of my photography but I need to get back in the habit of picking up my camera and actually taking pictures, because I haven't done enough of that lately.

So for now I am biding time, and I've resorted to distraction to quell the constant barrage of thoughts and questions about what I am doing with my life and whether I think my marriage will last, whether I think I am happy or ever could be happy. All the analyzations that keep me from really just living in the moment and maybe enjoying life. I've returned to the same habit that distracted me from my empty, unfulfilled life in high school and my young adult life. My good old friend alcohol. Is it healthy to ignore my life and fill the emptiness with drinking? Probably not. Do I care right now? Not really.

Since I have moved back in with my husband, a little over a month ago now, I think I have gone one night without drinking. I have a history of drinking problems. I started drinking daily my senior year of high school. My university days were even worse. Alcohol became a way of life. I had a bunch of money from investing the life insurance money my dad left me when he died. I had an income of $30,000 a year for doing nothing back before the economy was broken. I supplied myself and all my friends with plenty of alcohol. Drinking alone is never fun, so I always managed to get them all drinking with me. I bought liquor by the gallon. If we were going to drink beer, I'd buy 3 cases per night. You could have called me a bad influence I guess. I rarely went to classes. I knew every way to drop classes, withdraw from classes, and take leaves of absence. My friends still had to go to classes to keep grades up for financial aid and their parents. I was basically parentless paying for college completely out-of-pocket. I could do whatever I wanted. So I partied every night and got my friends to party with me. I had a lot of friends during that time. Yes, I kind of bought most of them, but I had a damn good time. Once I got to bar age, forget it. I was always at the bar. I started my day with what I called "morning drinks." Things like hot chocolate and peppermint schnapps, coffee and Kahlua, apple cider and peach schnapps. I thought nothing of drinking beer during the day and even when I worked I had a beer with lunch. After work I went straight to the bars. Every night I drank until blackout. My life basically continued on this way until I got pregnant. I had always been termed an "alcoholic" so when I quit drinking while I was pregnant, I never went back to drinking. I lived years pretty much sober with an occasional drink every 6 months or so.

Now my husband and I drink every night. Without drinking, I just dwell on the feeling that something is really missing from my life. Without drinking I question my marriage and whether I really love my husband and whether I want to spend forever for him. I get stressed out thinking about what I would do if I left again, where I would go, whether I could support myself and my son. The bottom line though is that right now I'm just not in a position to do anything about much of anything right this minute. I need to build a business or something before I even think about doing anything different with my life. So I need the voices to shut up. I can't deal with thinking about everything all day every day. When I drink, I can live in the moment and my worries and anxieties go away. It's a nice break from life. There are bad things about drinking every night though. The calories are killing me for one. My favorite drink has always been White Russians. After the first week of drinking them every night I gained 10lbs and realized that each drink has somewhere around 450 calories. So I was drinking probably somewhere around 8 drinks per night. That's 3600 calories a night. Ouch. So I've been trying to find the lowest calorie options. So far Vodka and Sprite Zero is the lowest calorie drink. One shot of 80 proof vodka contains 64 calories and Sprite Zero is calorie free. I drink that a lot. I only really like Grey Goose though which gets expensive. Even more so since my husband will only drink Jack Daniels. When I'm drinking vodka, together we go through at least 2 bottles of Grey Goose and 2 bottles of Jack per week, sometimes 3 of each.

But I prefer drinking beer. For some reason I get a better kind of drunk feeling from beer. I get happy drunk on beer most of the time. It makes me feel like life is all good, none of the little stuff matters. I have fun drinking beer. I do however get way worse hangovers from beer. Also, I have a high alcohol tolerance so I have a hard time drinking beer fast enough to even get feeling much more than a buzz. I mean forget a 6 pack. I like to drink a 12 pack per night if I'm drinking beer. Now here come the calories again. I was excited to see that Miller Genuine Draft came out with a 64 calorie per bottle beer, but here is a little known fact about beer: The lighter the beer (in calories, not color obviously) the lower the alcohol content. So I got these MGD 64s to try. After drinking one beer I knew it couldn't have much alcohol in it, so I looked up the alcohol content online. An average beer is around 5% alcohol and around 140 to 150 calories. Light beer is usually around 4.2% to 4.5% alcohol and around 99 to 105 calories. MGD 64? 2.8% alcohol and of course 64 calories. Might as well be non-alcoholic beer. Yeah, MGD is fooling a lot of people. I also was surprised to find that beer no longer lists the alcohol content on the label or the box, so you have to find it online.

Anyway, my father-in-law is an alcoholic, the kind that drinks all day every day. We were there for Thanksgiving so I had a conversation with him about beer. You know that awful hangover I get? Well it turns out beer is based on one of two major ingredients. Rice, or wheat. Budweiser products as well as many others are rice based. Miller, Coors, Keystone, and others are wheat based. Apparently rice based beer gives you a worse hangover for some reason. My father-in-law refuses to drink them. I trust his knowledge on the subject of alcohol. All he drinks is Coors Light, so that has become my beer of choice as well. With an alcohol content of 4.2% and 102 calories per bottle, it's not a terrible option. Still though, if I drink a 12 pack per night, that's 1224 calories per night. That's a lot considering I also have been eating like the average American, eating a couple thousand calories a day. In the summer I used to eat around 500 calories per day and not drink at all in order to keep my rockin' bikini body.

Bottom line, drinking is making me gain weight. That along with bipolar medications that have common side effects of increased appetite and weight gain. Oh, and I haven't had much time or motivation to exercise. So yeah, my body is no longer perfect, but I'm choosing not to care for now. I still look good, just added some curves to my body. I'm not a huge cow or anything. I've been weighing between 115 to 117 lbs.

So against all better judgment, and at the cost of my perfect body I'm just going to go with the drinking and see what happens. Yes, for now I'll take my drinks and deal with the extra weight and any health problems I may develop from the extra wear and tear on my body, because even if it puts more weight and stress on my body, it takes the weight of the world off of my shoulders. And right now I really need that.