I published a post on Wednesday that touched a lot of people in a lot of ways. It became clear that I am not alone in feeling lonely. It became clear that perhaps I was throwing a little shade. It became clear that I was blaming others for my hurt feelings. It became clear that people have a desire to “fix” me when I am feeling less than joyful. All of these things are fine. I’m down to do the work I need to do around my hurt feelings and shade throwing. We all have a shadow side. It’s not a problem unless we deny it. I know some shit. I show up and write what’s in my heart and on my mind. Not what I think people need to know. I love that people read my words and FEEL. What they do with those feelings is completely out of my control. There is FREEDOM in that. I am not here to hurt feelings. Ever. I am not here to be fixed. This is my space. I appreciate everyone who takes time to read my words. What you do with that is NOT my business. I am thrilled some of you have therapists. I am NOT a therapist. My therapist has reminded me of that a time or two. Or three. 🤣 I wrote my last blog right before a therapy session. The one about loneliness. Something magical happened in that. I named it, claimed it and tamed it. I am sure we talked about those feelings. I don’t even remember now. And life went the fuck on. As it has a tendency to do. My week was uneventful, but here I am sharing my uneventful week anyway. Because it’s Sunday and it seems like the thing to do. I journaled more than a 13 year old girl this week. Most weeks really, if I’m honest. I’ve just switched up my journaling routine from morning to night. Holy Shit! It’s like another world. Night time journaling has opened up some portal into my dream world where a lot of serious action is taking place. This week (in my waking hours) I spent some time trying to decide if AA is still my path. I sit in those meetings some days and laugh at how weird it all is. Not that I am opposed to doing weird shit. I do plenty of it. The topic of quality vs quantity comes up from time to time in meetings. I live in an area where most of the population is retired. In the sober community, that means I am in meetings with people much older than me with a lot more sober time than me. And yet some of them are still so miserable. Miserable could be a stretch, but there are a lot of them who still haven’t figured out how to be happy, joyous and FREE. They have quantity, but are clearly lacking quality. I am not lacking in quality. After 5 years I am still not comfortable sitting in a meeting and sharing openly. It’s something I rarely do. Maybe if I got past that I would feel a shift in my attitude. I don’t know. There are lots of people I love in AA, but the meetings, not so much. And I wonder…….. AA was a great place for me to get sober. The 12 steps were a beautiful launch pad out into a much bigger spiritual world. But does it still belong in my life? My AA friends will say it absolutely does belong in my life, and perhaps I just need to switch my meetings up. This week as I was rolling that around in my head, NOT going to meetings and night time journaling about it my dreams came at me. Alcoholics have “drinking dreams.” I am not sure if people who don’t have a problem with alcohol have those or not, but I am guessing not. I dreamed that I sent my husband to the store to buy me a bottle of bourbon. He asked if a pint would do and of course, it would not. I would need at least a fifth. In real life a half gallon would have been called for, but anything can happen in the dream world. He then asked why I was still going to those meetings if I am still drinking. I wasn’t exactly sure why. I just knew it was what I do. He asked me if I planned to pick up a white chip. A white chip means surrendering and choosing to live a sober life. The start of the journey. Basically, a white chip would mean I had to start over at day one. I don’t do white chips. I was always one to bedazzle mine. Another story for another time. Dream me said a big Fuck NO to him about picking up a white chip because although I was drinking, I wasn’t getting drunk. In my mind, there was no reason to pick up a white chip. I can rationalize anything, Even in my dreams. Drinking dreams suck. I know this one came from all of my recent questioning. These questions aren’t really new to me. I have spent the better part of a year wondering if I I want to continue going to meetings. I don’t have to figure it out today and chances are, I’ll be drinking coffee with old men at least one day this week. Maybe that is the solution. The real movement and processing that’s happened in my dream world this week has been in the form of my little sister. Who doesn’t exist. But she exists in my dreams and I KNOW that she is me. Little me. All thanks to going back and taking another stab at inner child healing. And night time journaling. I tend to go hard at Inner child healing (like I go hard at everything I do) but when I touch on something painful, I stop. After seeing the group that’s working through this process in my studio, I decided to take another crack at it. I love watching the women in the group connect and grow. I can SEE how much this group is helping them heal. I also know that the group in the studio wasn’t the time or place for me. But, I definitely see the value in it and KNOW it’s something I want to keep at. I bought the book they are using and I enlisted a far away friend to work through the book with me. We connect weekly and discuss. I have my therapist to help me process what comes up and she has hers. (Although hers sucks and she needs a new one) I know it’s going to take us a little longer to get through the book, but it seems safe and comfortable to me and my inner child. She needs that. I won’t be blogging about those dreams, but they are powerful. Powerful and private. THAT is what it’s like to pay attention to my inner child. I’m learning to listen to her more and more. When I use that term inner child, I know there are tons of them, pieces of me that I haven’t connected to yet. But I’m getting closer every day. Yesterday I taught my 8 am class how to chant “fuuuuuuck.” It might have been my greatest teaching moment ever. Pretty sure that was my inner 15 year old Rebel girl. I know her well. 😂
Here’s a little secret. My husband doesn’t read my blog. Not regularly anyway. And I don’t offer it up to him for some odd reason. Probably because he’s the one who knows me best and sees me every single day. He doesn’t give a shit about how popular I am on the internet. He sees the real me. Every day. Not just the best photos and the edited words. He gets the unedited version. He’s not on FaceBook and he hates social media. But, he did recently get an instagram account, which I was quick to give him shit about. Because Instagram is social media. Now I feel like I have to censor my Instagram posts a bit. Like he’s there to babysit. Not that that’s necessarily true, but I do get asked who certain followers are. And since it’s social media, I typically have no idea. He assures me his life would be easier if I was ugly. I encouraged him to get the Instagram account because he used to ask me to post pics for him on my page. I like to keep my page looking a “certain way” which doesn’t include pictures of the fish he caught that day. Now he has an Instagram and it’s cute and hilarious that he really doesn’t know how to use it. I post my blog on Instagram and use the standard “New blog post is up, link in bio” caption. He has no idea how to get to my bio or click on the link. I showed him how to do it a couple of weeks ago and he sat next to me and read my blog for what seemed like hours. He went way back…….and I could tell he was upset. I have suggested to my Mom that perhaps reading my blog isn’t the thing she needs to do. I am thinking maybe he shouldn’t have read it either. It hurt him to go back and relive some of it. I know he also felt slighted because he never saw his name in any of my posts. I totally understood that too. I frequently speak about my therapists, past and present. I write about my “tribe of women” who support me. I don’t write about my family. There are a few reasons for this. The first reason is that believe it or not, I do keep parts of my life private. My family is the MOST important thing in my life. I feel like they have their own stories and they aren’t my stories to tell. But here I am. Talking about my family. My husband anyway. The truth is, I hated him for a few years before I got sober. He was the enemy in my mind. He was one of the firsts to point out that I had a problem with alcohol. I could fool a lot of people, but he wasn’t one of them. I hated him for that. He was the person always taking my keys, my wallet and my liquor away. But he wasn’t sober. In fact, we drank a together A LOT. So why was I the one with “the problem?” Maybe because I was the one who blacked out and did stupid things? Here’s the reality. My husband is 15 years older than me. He rescued me when my marriage to my second husband fell apart. I didn’t know how to be alone but I also knew I didn’t need to involve myself in a relationship. I found a man who lived far, far away that would come visit me when I wanted him to but didn’t live close enough to roll up at my house anytime and get too comfortable. Because I DID NOT want to be in a relationship. 6 months later I moved to North Carolina with my two children to be with him. That happened so fast. I had a pretty good handle on my drinking at that time. I was a “functioning alcoholic.” Two years later I got pregnant. I stopped drinking while I was pregnant and nursing (or at least didn’t nurse when I was drinking). When our sweet Jackson turned two, I weened him (yes, I nursed him for two years). It was at this point that my raging alcoholism kicked up several notches. I’m not really sure why. Other than the fact that once I started drinking, I couldn’t stop, which IS the very thing that makes me an alcoholic. I drank every day. At 5:00. Until the day I discovered that I could drink during the day because I was grown. That was a game changer. That’s when the blackouts started coming. The insane behavior and really bad choices started happening more and more frequently. My husband spent a lot of time on the phone with my family and friends “telling on me.” I hated him for it. Today I know he was looking for guidance and support, but that’s not what it felt like at the time. I would have preferred it if he had gone to a support group rather than bring all of our friends and family into our mess, but he’s not that guy and it wasn’t my choice. He spent a lot of time on the phone with my therapist too. She suggested hospitalization for me. I hated her for that. I hated a lot of people for a lot of things. All things that I was responsible for. He took drunk me to an AA meeting once and asked “those people” what he should do. He just wanted someone to fix me. He was watching the woman he loved, the mother of his children, kill herself. My oldest two children lost their biological father to addiction. My husband has raised them since they were tiny and he IS their Dad. I think he hated me as much as I hated him, but he wanted me to live. And eventually so did I. He supported my recovery by giving up alcohol. It wasn’t a struggle for him and if sobriety was going to work for me, he knew he had to make some changes too. I had every intention of getting sober and leaving him because he was a controlling asshole. But then a funny thing happened. Not overnight, because that’s never how things work for me. But, as I began the process of getting sober, along with gaining some emotion regulation skills and a tiny bit of sanity, he began to seem like less of an asshole. Not because he changed, but because I changed. Not gonna lie, all of the changes freaked him out too. I’m not sure either of us knew who sober me would be. All of the new things I was doing seemed weird to him. They were weird to me too, but also things I needed to do. Meditation. Yoga. Meetings. I caused a LOT of damage to our relationship. Damage that isn’t a secret to our friends and family. Things that I had to own and walk through. But, he hung in there and walked through them with me. He hung in there because he knew I was worth it. He saw my worth when I didn’t. And sometimes he’s still an asshole. But he’s my asshole. He’s no longer freaked out by the weird things I do and pretty much expects me to come in the door beaming about the new “weird thing” I am currently in love with. Our relationship isn’t perfect, but whose is? I’m still trying to figure out what we have in common. There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot. But, he makes me laugh and he’s pretty damn cute. So there’s that. He’s a safe place for me. He makes me feel secure. He gives me the space I need to grow. He has his life and I have mine and they are very different. But, we come together every day and share our “seperate lives.” Every now and then we even do things together. Like a real couple. One day, I’ll even go fishing with him. What I am not going to do, is put this blog in his hand. He can find it on the internet like everyone else. Sometimes, I’m an asshole too. 😊
Sober Yogi 