As I continue to read more on the subject of alcoholism, I’m coming to the realization that perhaps there is at least one noticeable sign of withdraw.

Irritability.

I’ve been irritable most of my adult life, but over the last two weeks, it’s been magnified. I’m finding it extremely difficult to deal with things that should be easy to push to the side. This doesn’t play out well when my son, Mr. Grey, acts his age. See, the thing is that he’s five years old. And five-year old boys, well, they’re loud. Really loud. Not only that, but they have poor listening skills. Really poor. So, you’ve got to repeat yourself a lot. And I’m not a fan of noise and I don’t like repeating myself.

Over the past two weeks, I’ve gotten really frustrated with the little man over simple things that he really doesn’t have a great deal of control over – like playing too loud or not hearing me because he’s too busy playing too loud.

At any rate, while I have maintained that I’ve not suffered any major withdraw symptoms over the past two weeks, I’m conceeding that my irritability is likely a sign of withdrawal.

I’m not sure what this means for me at this point.

Filed under: keep monitoring this situation.

On the upside, my sleep continues to improve. My endurance on the bike is improving and in general, I’m finding that I’m much more happy most of the time.

Yesterday could have been a really hard day. It was my dad’s birthday. He would have been 66. It would have been easy to drown myself with booze, but I didn’t do it. Instead, I made crab cakes for dinner to remember Dad.

He would have liked that. And I know he’d be proud to see me addressing my drinking.