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The F Word

It's a four-letter word and I read it a lot in the Sober Warrior community. I'm talking about Fail. I Failed. Last night was a huge Fail. Why am I such a Failure? 

Of course, this word and the state of mind it implies can lead to another F Word - the F*** It moment - when you get so cross, frustrated, upset, disappointed, that you throw in the towel. This is by the way just as true for the sober journey, as it is for diets, or marathon training, or learning a language, or...  

My view? If we see an episode of drinking, epecially when you had planned not to, or drinking excessively when you had planned to moderate, as a Failure then, if we're serious about making a long term lifestyle change, we need to think differently about what happened. 

I also think it's important to use words that recognise the importance of what happened. Calling it a 'blip' or a 'hiccup' might make light of that drinking event. So much so in fact that we could lose sight of how important this journey is for us and maybe make it too easy to have another 'blip'. 

Equally, writing ourselves off as Failures, and (often) talking about 'going back to Day 1 all over again' goes to the other extreme and this kind of catastrophising can lead to despair and (worse) not even continuing on the journey.

I do need to remind you here that my own view is that this IS a journey. It's not a driving test, where we pass or fail. It's not an exam where if we try a bit harder we get a better grade. It's not Snakes and Ladders where a bad throw of the dice sends us all the way back down to Square 1. 

It's also a LONG journey. It's literally the journey of a lifetime (15,151km in the image, the longest possible overland journey in the world).

So when something happens on that journey, when we hit a pothole, or run out of fuel, or encounter a traffic jam, we don't go back to where we started. We are going to think about what happened and learn from it, and we would be wise to make a plan to deal with the situation better just in case it happens again (which it probably will).

But most importantly, we recognise that nothing will be gained and nothing will change by berating ourselves about what happened. What we do is wake up in the morning and get right back on track. We CONTINUE the journey from where we left off. Because the journey is the most important thing.

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