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meliapsviesta · 29 days ago

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It’s Christmas, and I’m not crying, but who’s to say that won’t change?

I just saw a post about life lessons learned this year, and I’m honestly not sure how much I’ve learned… but I do think that I have noticed how much I have changed?

Honestly, I tend to feel like the same person I was even just a year and a half ago, but I am far from it. It’s weird. And I also feel like I have just been coasting for the past x amount of months/years or whatever, I can’t really figure that out.

However, I can say this:

I am not one to notice how I change, it just… happens. I feel like a lot of people don’t realize they’ve changed, or not changed. I really don’t think your average person truly knows who they are relative to how other people see them, even if a third party were to tell them. It’s not like I’ve come to some bizarre realization that everything is well and good, or that I’ve suddenly been overcome with absolute gratitude, whimsy, and joy. No. Not at all.

What I have realized, though, is that I don’t go out of my way to make myself miserable. And look, I spent many years doing that in a very obvious way that I hated myself for, but I thought I stopped doing that long before I actually did. Instead, it just evolved.

It went from, say, deep depression and despair as a teenager which resulted in pushing away everyone from me and rendering myself friendless by the time I graduated high school. (This also reminds me of something I was thinking a lot about recently. Something about how I wonder if I was just an evil teenager turned young adult who knew better, or if I truly was completely unaware and yet caused so much harm and turmoil. And I wondered if somehow both were true, because I think there came a point I had realized I was causing harm in the moment and couldn’t stop myself as it was happening because I felt completely out of control of my own body, thoughts, and actions. Maybe it’s not so black and white as I think it is, though.)

Anyways, this self-loathing I had further snowballed into addiction and isolation. Then I got sober. But to clarify, nothing really happened overnight.

People describe early sobriety as a pink cloud. I don’t think I got that. It felt like a black cloud that loomed over me. I knew it was the right choice, though. I didn’t choose what color cloud was there, I just mean choosing sobriety was the right choice.

And the longer I’m sober, the more I realize that.

I’m going through the reading for the twelfth step with my sponsor, and I asked her, what DOES a spiritual awakening look like? Because I knew it wasn’t typically some white-light-fall-to-your-knees moment. I don’t think it usually is for a lot of people. It certainly wasn’t for me.

And she asked me, how do you respond to life now?

There’s your answer!

I certainly had a very emergent-feeling freak out the other day regarding my dad but I didn’t text him like all of my instincts told me to. Instead, I called my sponsor and she talked some sense into me.

And then it hit me. I may not think I pause nearly as much as I’d like to, but what kind of bullshit standard am I holding myself to? What matters is that I, even though I didn’t consciously think it, told myself, “no, you need to intervene with yourself right now and call someone you trust to talk about it.” And so I did. I knew talking to friends would be helpful, but I needed something more specific. To talk to someone who is a fellow alcoholic who knows me. Because I really think that sometimes only other alcoholics understand what’s going on in my head. My friends can rationalize with me, yes, but they have not experienced what it is like to be an alcoholic. They tend to see me as level-headed and that I make rational decisions even when I show that I am upset.

But the truth is, I don’t. I can’t trust what’s in my head. Especially when I am worked up about something.

Point being, I paused the other day. And I have started to realize that this is completely against every instinct I have ever known. I don’t tend to dwell on mistakes or regrets in the way I used to. I still make mistakes and apologize for them but they… kind of just don’t matter as much as they used to. Not that I don’t care, that’s not the case at all. What I mean is that despite all of my rage towards myself and regret that I have harbored, it does not bother me nearly as much as it used to.

I never needed to be a prisoner in my own body, therefore I never needed to beat myself up senselessly when I was already down. I also did not actually change my behavior despite all of the times I would promise I would do so. I genuinely did convince myself that if I just felt guilty enough, that meant I’d do better. Nope. Not at all.

I feel that guilting myself further did nothing but solidify what I was already doing, in some strange contradictory way. Of course I didn’t mean it that way, I just thought that, well… if I feel worse about this than you do, then I have done my job in disciplining myself into correcting my behavior. But where was the correction? All I did was reprimand myself without *really* taking any ownership and accountability. I really, truly, thought I was taking ownership by beating myself into a pulp. But that’s not true at all.

You do not beat sense into yourself, or anyone else for that matter, literally or metaphorically. That does not teach you or them a lesson. That only teaches you or them fear. To be afraid. And to be afraid is to, in my experience, be frozen into a certain state that remains unchanged until it is met with something entirely different. It can border on insanity, even. To repeat the same thing x amount of times to the nth degree until the cycle is broken. The behavior will only repeat but wear a different disguise each time you offend. But the pattern is all the same to me.

I cannot force myself into submission, and that’s not always people pleasing, either. That’s just self humiliation that sometimes has an audience with more than just me in it.

Now, I don’t know the logistics of “why,” but I really don’t think “why” really fucking matters at this point. For YEARS I have always been focused on the root cause, as if I could go back and do anything about it. I can’t. I can’t just go back in time and make myself be loved and brought up like a normal happy kid. But I can love myself now anyways. And I do not live out of spite anymore. I used to, which did benefit me at the time and for a long time at that, but I am not spiteful anymore.

I am a human, and I am flawed. I have caused harm and will continue to. But the degree of harm that I cause is not nearly as much as it used to be. Most offenses I am responsible for are accidental nowadays. And when I have been told or come to acknowledge on my own that what I said or did is wrong, I apologize and I correct the behavior without guilting myself up a storm over it. I have always been analytic and strategic about how I handled responsibility, but now I don’t do all those completely hindering, yet arbitrary and unnecessary, crimes to my psyche in the process. Because as I said earlier, guilt does not fix anything, it just breaks it more. And I tied my identity to being “broken” for a VERY long time.

I guess all this to say I do often remind myself that healing is far from linear, and yet with every setback I feel that I have been forcefully ejected and land back at square one. But that’s not true. I would say it’s more like I’ve tripped here and there in the pursuit of being HEAL*ED*, but I have now realized—it is just the act of RECOVERY and HEAL*ING*. I will never be this idealized past self that I have created. Besides, why would I want to be this version of myself I don’t think was ever going to be real to begin with, when I can just be who I am in the present moment? Life really is a choose-your-own-destiny thing (if you ignore all the socioeconomics and whatnot that go into it, anyways). Plus, you can’t take back the past, no matter how awful you feel about it. And trust me, I’ve tried. It does not work. It only drives you insane.

But look, I think I’ve started to understand why it’s not worth being so angry at myself as a teenager. Ever since I started going to therapy *for real* almost two years ago, I always thought about how angry I was as a teenager, and how justified my anger was. Therefore, I was allowed to be angry at my justified anger. Because, you guessed it, I found a way to justify that, too. Again with the guilting myself into submission thing.

I think it’s okay to be angry with your past decisions, but you can’t change them no matter how much you wish you could will that. That’d be far too paradoxical. This is long as fuck but ever so necessary for me to word vomit out. Because I am a recovering and healing person. I am letting go of justified anger it seems. It’s not like I’m suddenly full of forgiveness or anything, but I understand more now about why justified anger is so dangerous and yet unproductive. Counterproductive even.

I do not suddenly love myself as a teenager now because I don’t think that can happen overnight for me, although I am starting to let go of the anger that I have against that version of myself. However, I have been indulging in things lately that I felt kept me sane as a teenager, and I still love these things in just the same way and yet a different way than how I did seven or so years ago.

I’m happy that I’m growing up, and that I’ve realized that this person I had zero hope for in the recent but distant past has changed, too. I am evolving and growing and oh how beautiful it is to still be here and realize that.

And I think the craziest part is just how SUBTLE this has been for me. I have noticed virtually nothing as it has happened. But my God, it has happened and it almost feels like it just suddenly happened overnight and I’m just now feeling the effects. The truth is, though, I have been changing rapidly and quietly, under my own nose, reaping the benefits for months now, and I am just now becoming aware of it. Holy fucking shit. Holy SHIT. I genuinely cannot express the importance of writing this out and having it set in that I am fucking sober and I am fucking GRATEFUL that I am.

I promise you, happiness is not the goal—gratitude is. Gratitude and contentment are the ultimate goals that I want to achieve on a daily basis in my life. I chased happiness for far too long and ended up burning everything around me in pursuit of it. But holy goddamn shit, I don’t need to be happy all the time, I’d be scared if I was. I just want to be comfortable in my skin and feel like I have a purpose in life. Not just relative to others, but to ME. That much I’m still figuring out but I can say this much:

Helping others without sacrificing myself to do so is truly the best gift I could ever ask for. I cannot express how grateful I am when I can help someone out without it being of consequence to me. A majority of the time there is absolutely zero consequence, just mutual benefit. For example, I just had a scary situation happen recently with a family member and all I’ve been doing since is just seeing how I can help out. And when I’ve been taken up on that, I feel so goddamn GOOD. It feels like I get why people sometimes say they’re high on life when I have those moments.

Anyways, wow, I can’t imagine the length of this but I’m glad I wrote this out. Feels like a damn Christmas miracle of some kind I started writing this like 45 minutes ago and just fucking kept going at it like the lunatic I am. But I’m happy I’m a damn lunatic because I am a lunatic who is loved, loving, and is love itself. I really, truly hope that I will always choose love. I’m done throwing pity parties at this point.

I’m sober and I’m ALIVE. I shouldn’t still be here if I kept going the way I was going to go if I were in control of everything. But. Thank. Fucking. GOD. I am NOT in control of JACK SHIT. Not in the grand scheme of things, anyways. I can control my outside reactions at least, but that’s really about it.

Anyways… I don’t really know what else I can say now that I think if any devs see this post they may consider instating a word limit on these damn posts, but shit. To hell with it. I’m living on borrowed time and my fucking God I am going to make the most of it because I am alive, as I am, right now, right in this moment, and I should probably get some goddamn shuteye so I can be at least halfway conscious to celebrate with my grandparents in the morning. Merry Christmas to those who celebrate and happy holidays to everyone else who celebrate any other holiday. Otherwise, have a wonderful day/night or whatever. :)

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