Tag Archives: Valentine’s Day

Love yourself

14 Feb

12:25 pm

You are not sick.
You are not crazy.
You are not “overthinking” it.
You are not obsessive.
You are not mean, or manipulative, or a bitch.
You are not diseased, or disordered.
You are not lazy, or inept, or incapable.

And, most definitely, you are not the label you call yourself.

You are a person, with a miraculous tenacity to fight the urge to drink, or use–which drinking or using is the opposite of loving yourself. One day, you will come to realize that there is this big ocean of calm called self-love, that can combat all the negativity, self-doubt, and external “un-love” factors that present themselves on a daily basis. To those attempting to mess with that ocean? Go ahead and try; it ain’t gonna work on me this time. THAT is self-love (and a little bit of self-righteousness, but hey, we need that now and then).

Love yourself, and everything else will follow. Love yourself with treats, and flowers, and solitude. Why? Because you can. Because you want to–above all the self-sabotaging, you see that you really want to help yourself by loving yourself. Because that is the “natural order” of things. Look around–do you see birds and plants not loving themselves, not putting their needs first, trying to break themselves down?

You are seeing through the ways in which you didn’t love yourself before–most of them you learned, or they became habit. You never stopped to say, I deserve to be loved. It’s OK, we all do it. We’re human. We have this brain, and it is a complicated little mess of electricity. Beyond this brain, however, is a bigger body–the holy ground. This Body with a capital “b” is the holy ground. This Body is our connection to self, to relationships, to “god,” as it were. And this Body needs care, and calm. This Body doesn’t need to be beaten down, or examined, or “dealt with.” This Body just needs love.

You can be proud of yourself no matter what you “did” or “didn’t do” while drinking or using. You really can. You can be proud of yourself today, for not drinking, or for starting over, or for reaching your 100 days, 300 days, 3,000 years of sobriety. And, if no one else loves you today, love yourself. At the end of the day, that is the ONLY thing that matters. Everything else will follow.

18 weeks and 4 months should NOT be equal, right?

15 Feb

3:37 pm

It’s been a while since I’ve posted, but with draft posts titled “Feeling like crap,” “Pangs heard around the world,” and “Where am I?,” I figured I would let whatever this is pass, continue to solider on, and spare you my annoying diatribe(s).

I’m still sober, going on a day after 18 weeks today. But, the other day when I looked at the calendar and it read February 12th, I thought, Wait, I’m ONLY at 4 months? So, how can I also be at 18 weeks, which would be 4 months…PLUS 2 weeks. Um, hello? That PLUS 2 weeks is kind of huge. Le sigh.

I’ve really wanted to drink the past several weeks, but I haven’t. I feel quite practiced at saying no through most of my pangs, cravings, and “thought ditches”…until PMS rears its ugly head. The past week has been bad–sometimes I wonder if it isn’t something in my new environment that is messing up my hormones. I literally felt hung over the other morning, as if I was coming down WAY TOO FAST off a “good” drug–crashing. However, it wasn’t a drug, it was my own internal chemical fluctuations which were off schedule and which, instead of letting me down easy, came to a screeching halt a week early. Hmm. I know it sounds a bit melodramatic, but when I was drinking, I really hit the wine hard when I was PMSing; and, I know it’s difficult to believe, more often than not I never connected the two until after the fact. Duh. Every month it became, Oh, shit, no WONDER I felt so horrible, drank so much, and could SO not even deal with the booze (I always blacked out hard when I was PMSing). Now, I’m hyper-aware of the fluctuations because I can feel every single one of them.

It’s not that life has been bad, at all; I’m grateful that work and dinners and walks, days and nights and everything, well, has been passing smoothly. Sure, there are moments (nightly, lately) when I find myself saying to myself, Do I really need to stay sober, like Sober Sober, anymore? Aren’t I healed? Hasn’t this 24-7 sobriety shit gone on long enough?! I need a BREAK! Just one glass…

I had major pangs last night, which sort of took me off guard. I felt a little bit like crying inside when I looked at the menu and realized that once again–even at a nice restaurant on a nice Valentine’s Day date with my nice manz–I can’t have wine. Not even one glass. And to make it worse? I end up ordering yet another Diet Coke, which I have to say, did not go so well with the pasta. The good news is that I did muster the sense to realize that I wouldn’t really enjoy the wine because I’d be thinking of the next glass, and the next, and the next. It’d be more of an annoyance than…whatever I’m imagining it’s going to be.

What’s the point? The point is, I’ve learned that even IF I want to drink, NO GOOD CAN COME if I do it when I really want to. Because, when I really want to is always when I’m feeling really bad. My strategy is to wait: until tomorrow, until the next project, until the race, until this or that or the other. And, if I wait–even a night–most likely I’m going to feel both happier and less desperate the next day, at which point, even if I drank it’d much likely be a better outcome than if I drank when I was in that desperate state of mind.

Anyway, it’s Friday! And I haven’t even started my work. Wah wah. Catch y’all later!

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