Hello World!
Tough times don’t last, tough people do. – Robert Schuller
My name is Ciana ‘Ci’, and I am an alcoholic. I’ve struggled with addiction for most of my life. As a teenager I experimented with drugs and alcohol but was always able to stop using drugs without any significant withdrawals or impact. Alcohol on the other hand, was not so easy.
I’ve maintained sobriety in the past for long periods of time but always given in to ‘one drink’. For those of us suffering from addiction you know that one drink is too many, and one more is never enough. I wanted this time to be different, I needed this time to be different, because no matter how much I lied to myself and tried to lie to everyone else, I could see the effects in every aspect of my life.
So, I went to rehab! I started journaling as part of my daily routine in rehab. I kept thinking about something I heard there that really resonated with me. I watched a recording of Brene Brown who said, “One day you will tell your story of how you overcame what you went through, and it will be someone else’s survival guide.” I don’t know if this blog will become someone else’s survival guide or just my journal to reflect back on later, I will be stronger for it either way.
May you be sober and happy always! Ci
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My Heart Is Full of Gratitude and Grief
06.10.26 Today when I turned on my computer, the screen greeted me with, “Hi Ciana, how are you today?” My first thought was that if it really wanted to fucking know, I was prepared to unload on it. Instead, I took it as a sign that it was probably time to sit down and write.
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Checking Myself
06.02.26 Last night, something a friend said in the meeting hit me hard, maybe a little too hard, but in the way that kind of stuff usually does when it’s something I needed to hear. It shook something loose in me. It made me realize I’ve gotten out of the habit of having those real,
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Moving With Life
05.17.26 The seasons changing used to terrify me more than I ever admitted. Something as simple as the days getting longer, work picking up, having more responsibilities would immediately make me feel like I was drowning before anything even happened. My brain would start racing, trying to calculate how I was going to keep up
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Juniper Jo
05.03.26 I woke up yesterday and my kitten was cuddled up next to me dead. There’s no softer way to say that. It was immediate and wrong and nothing about it made sense. My sweet Juniper Jo, six months old, warm, always curled up right against me, was just…gone. Yesterday felt like a raging storm.