Past Mistakes:Future Amends

When did I lose my Voice?

Where did I lose my sense of direction and power?

I remember a time when I convinced the CEO of the Company I worked for on a Sunday evening after a three hour conversation to Promote me from a bottom position in the Company to three levels higher then what I was currently at.

Where did that strong woman go?

As I sit here faced with my past work options as possible current future career directions, I am also faced with my mistakes made at each of them.  My self worth has been severely marred.

That Job that I had the overwhelming desire to step out of my bubble of comfort and persuade my Higher up to promote me, ended up in me walking out when the fire got to hot with my head hanging low.   I failed.

Another Job that has resurfaced as an option for a future move is one where my words almost got the boss canned from her position.  Unknown to me at the time of the power I held with the sentences I choose to speak, I had unwittingly just about cost a really great woman her entire career.  All over my loyal defense for my best friend who had been done wrong by this boss lady.  What I didn't understand then is that it was my friends fight not mine and today I am still paying for my out of bounds step.  I failed.

My self worth is as shaky as my current job with my wonderful landscaping company is.  My job isn't shaky because of my lack of good work or dedication, its shaky because its a small business that relies on the weather for its cash flow and the weather has not been conducive for the needed amount of cash flow for the coverage of wages.

So I feel defeated and a bit lost.  I feel all my past failures coming back to taunt me.  I hear that little bitch in my head reminding me how I just about fucked over a past boss.  'You deserve this', I hear her scratch.  She continues on to remind me of how hard that CEO worked to get me into my own center only for me to turn tail and run at the first challenge.  That voice is as convincing as I was in my glory days.

As I read a wonderful book about being Love now by Ram Dass who is quickly becoming a strong voice of reason for me, I am implanted with the idea of Experiences as our teachers.   I am a huge advocate of experiencing life and then sharing those experiences with others.  I take harder paths a lot of the time just for the lesson in the experience.  I love everything this world has too offer.

So what is it I am missing in this situation?

I have two past jobs and one current one in Limbo.

I have put in a resume to the Boss I tried to fuck over.  With previous attempts at amends she has refused.   I pray that maybe this time she will let me come back and make it up to her.

I have the phone number of the CEO of the company I couldn't run away fast enough from.  Apparently there center here in my city is in shambles and they are desperate for someone to come pick up the pieces.  Maybe this is my chance to make it right again.

I also have my current Boss bending over backwards to keep me afloat with hours and job duties until the spring kicks into gear and the hours are in abundance.  He respects me and doesn't want to lose me.

As I write this out I can already see the pattern developing.

I am about to screw over my current boss by turning tail and running back to a position I have already fucked up in order to appease my ego and make things right in the past.

The past is dead.

I am terrible at letting things go.  I hold on to an experience until I suck the ever living life out of it, I chew it up until the taste is totally gone, then I spit it into a plastic container to save for another day.  I pull it out to rechew when I have nothing else to turn my stomach and remind me of how undeserving I am of a new piece of meat.

Sad.

I think instead of running back to these old jobs to make my living amends to myself I need to bring what I learned and gained from those experiences into my current position.   Instead of turning tail and running this time I need to stand up and offer everything I have to my current boss.

I bring a lot of assets to this company.  I am an incredible sales woman, I can sell a freezer to an Eskimo.  I can build my bosses residential and commercial client base.  I was seeing double the amount of clients then some of my coworkers at one of those past jobs. Instead of building that old center back up to its previous glory state I could build my current bosses business up to something spectacular.

I can make my boss money and save him so much stress..... if I just got out of my pity party and started using those experiences to lift me up instead of tear me down.  We don't have any control over the challenges we face but we do have control over how we react.  I am reacting like a child throwing a hissy fit and not wanting to put in the work to get what I want.

I want a voice and I want my power back.  I want to be a strong female who teaches her girls how to be stronger females.  I want to be someone who is not afraid to go after what she wants.  I want to be a woman who lives in love, passion and excitement, not one trapped in fear and pity.

So I called my boss just now.

Told him for the month of January I will make my daily wage with calls to spring clients booking our services early this year.  That means twenty clients need to be booked and paid for before the end of that month.... easy.  I asked for a sit down with him and his new HR manager next week to go over the plan I have developed for the upcoming year.  I sold him on the fact that I can and will, if he should agree, to make him a substantially larger revenue this year and save him much stress.

He happily agree'd to the meeting.

I think I just found my voice.  This Stella is gonna get her groove back!!

Q-TIP: Quit Taking It Personally, Higher Power Help!!

Four of the Twelve Step Program are about Prayer and mediation.

1.  Admit life is unmanageable
2.  Come to believe in a Higher power
3. Begin to build a relationship with said higher power
4.  Take a good hard look at my part in unmanageable life
5. Share dirty secrets with another human being
6. Dig up character defects and assets
7. Work with higher power to manage these defects
8. Admit I have hurt some people
9.  Begin making amends to some of these people
10. Take daily inventory of previous steps
11. deepen connection with higher power
12. Share experience with those that seek it

So how is it that even though I am deep in the program of recovery that I forget to meditate?  That is how i connect with my higher power and for me the only effective way to not only pray but actually receive guidance.  How do I 'forget' to do this?   Actually,  let me get honest... not forget to meditate but go out of my way to avoid it like the plague.

I truly do not understand myself some days.  I come from a back ground of almost 15 years of daily mediation practice, yet when life throws me a curve ball I resort to whining, begging and pleading with a God outside myself.  Why is that?

I have more then enough experience with the tremendous benefits of meditation.  Through meditation, guided, breath work and silencing the mind,  I have not only learned myself better by becoming aware of who I am and what it is I want out of life but I have also been able to attract to me those experiences and situations that I desire with very little effort.

That is until a curve ball hits me, then I throw a fit and shut my higher power out.

I remember writing a list of my dream job.  Oh, this must've been a good ten years ago.  I wrote the list and then began a rigorous mediation routine of yoga breath work for thirty minutes a day. Twenty minutes of visualization of that dream job and guided meditations to clear my bodies energy fields. Within three months I had a job that looked nothing like the job I had visualized.  At first I didn't even recognize it as my dream job until during a visualization meditation one day I realized I was imagining something less then what I had!

This experience has happened too many times to deny the power of meditation in my world.

So why then am I coming off a fucking drug relapse and freaking out about my current job??

Oh ya!  I stopped Yoga breath work.  I stopped visualizing what I want and now I am obsessed with what I don't have.  And I am filling my energy field with toxins!   How do I always land back here??

This is where my addict enters, or my Outer child as is coming up the new Label for that part of me that likes to sabotage.  Inner child's needs don't get met or inner child's feelings get hurt and outer child to the destructive rescue!  So I am reading in my new library find to fix the way my brain works.

I did Yoga breath work today, can you tell?  lol

The benefits of this type of mediation for me are instant.  Already I can see clearly my current job situation as my own inability to let go of slights.  My boss asked me to do something for him.  When I didn't jump up and down with an excited yes, he was annoyed and fired off a slight.  Was it wrong what he did?  For sure it is.  But the reason I love working for him is that he is a recovering addict as well and he has not only understood my emotional outburst and slights he has not at all held them against me.... ever.  So why now am I doing the same too him?

Cause my feelings were hurt and I still have yet to fully understand how to work through that and let go.  I am a hanger onner.  Good or bad if it invokes an emotion I hang on to that, I like to sit in that shit.  I am not so sure that's a good thing.  My mind then begins to play this elaborate drama and before I know it I have quite my job and I am working for half the pay in a situation that is a ridiculous fit for me.  This is how I always operate and why I always end up at square one.

So yesterdays rant about saying No is a good one.  The backlash its had on my mind though is not a good one.  I shared about this situation at my NA meeting last night and walked away still feeling like shit.  I talked to my support group and still got no relief.  I did three out of the four things I am learning to do when something is bothering me.... I just happened to forget the one I probably should go to first.... My higher power.

Building that relationship with my higher power and connecting with my own internal intuitive system is really the foundation of the steps.  As I stated in the beginning of this post, four of the twelve steps are directly about our higher powers.  The other eight steps are the steps that clear away the shit so that you can love yourself the way your higher power does....

I am glad I found my yoga breath this morning and I look forward to speaking to my boss early next week.  I am grateful to have this writing avenue for my thoughts to play in.  I am beyond words for the expression of love I have for my friends and I am looking forward to a meeting this weekend to share my new discovery of my crazy thought patterns.

Life is back to good..... For today.  Let me remember to connect again tomorrow.  Oh, Goddess, please!!

A Big Fat NO!!

The art of saying NO.  The grace of accepting NO.

Oh man.   What a loaded word that No is.  I remember when my first born was a toddler and she said her first No to me.  That big fat, forceful, stomp her foot, clench her little fists and firmly stated...NO! I laughed.  It was beyond adorable.  Then I made her do the task anyways.

What a terrible young mom I was then, I didn't even share a shred of respect for her No.

Today I am feeling the weight of that word.  No.

I had to say it to my boss yesterday when he called to see if I could handle 15 driveways.  (I am a landscaper, that means shovel to pavement in our northern little city... in other words, a shit tonne of snow.)    He responded with a mild threat.  Apparently ignoring me like I did my toddler is not effective in the adult world.

Let me give you some background.....   I have been off work since September and I am due back end of December.  I am bored and do want to go back to work.  But.

I am on the mend from a major workaholic burn out.   I have never been able to say no to my boss.  I not only Love working for his company but I adore his philosophies of life and all that he has taught and gifted me in the years I have worked for him.

So to say No now was very hard for me and for him to retaliate even tougher.

I need to learn to take care of myself.  Self care has been a huge lesson for me these past few years of recovery.  Being my own hero, my own Princess in shining armor to rescue me.  Standing up for my needs and even pushing for them to be met has been an extreme challenge for me.

I cant say No.

I never realized in the past that I was one of 'those' women that couldn't say no when asked to do something for others.  I never had a problem with telling my girlfriends No when they wanted me to pitch in for a party or function thing, if it is something I couldn't or didn't even want to do.  That was never an issue for me.

That was always the example I heard given when someone explained a people pleaser or the woman who can never say No.  The woman that was always stretched so thin because she couldn't say no to social engagements.  So I never identified with lacking that ability.

I definitely lack the ability to say No. I have now learned.

The first time I had to say 'it' was last winter.  A dear friend was in need and I was deathly ill with bronchitis.  I was so sick that when she called to ask her favor I just blurted the word No and didn't even share with her how sick I was.  She was mad and we didn't speak for a long time and truly our friendship is still strained today.

I was not graceful in my delivery of my first No.

Over the course of the Summer I just kept getting more tired and more burnt out.  I did approach my boss a couple times but there was nothing to be done, I was the only one that could do the job he had me doing.  So I just kept plugging along.  With no time off, no holidays in over a year and an average of twelve hour days almost six days a week.  We were always short staffed.  There was always something.

.......Eventually I broke.  Hooked back on drugs and sitting paranoid in my work truck unable to carry out the duties he was paying me for.

Thats when I went to him and told him with huge tears and a shaky voice that I needed to check into detox.  Having struggled with drug addiction himself in the past he could relate and the leave granted without issue.  While in detox I begged God to work out some more time off for me because I knew five days was not going to be enough time for me to get clean and unburnt out.

Thats where I sit today, just coming back into my power after it being entirely drained early last winter.  From not being able to say No.

So when my boss called yesterday to ask if I could take on this huge contract which is actually larger then the one that burnt me out last winter I had to question him..... get this, I didn't even say No... couldn't still,  .... after all this crash I still struggle with saying No to my boss.

You have to understand I am a single mother, single after seventeen years of having a man to fall back onto if a job of mine fell through. I also live in a city that is male oriented and rents are ridiculously high.  I need to make good money just to live.   My boss holds tremendous power over my livelihood.

I just questioned how doing these driveways would affect my sick leave benefits.  We both knew that I couldn't legally do the work for him and still be off recovering.  He then fired a nasty statement of maybe not having any work for me in January when I come back.  I know he was just frustrated but still its shit like that, that make it hard for one to say no to people.  My dear friend did the same dripping with a venomous voice when I said no to her as well.

It is very hard to take care of one self and say No when we need to.  I have bent over backward for my Boss and truly enjoy working hard for him and making him money.  So when I know that my refusal is actually costing him money it is doubly difficult.  But I have to remind myself of this past summer and all the money and reputation damage I was costing him by going to work exhausted.

The old school theory of taking care of others before yourself is quickly flying out the window for me.  What was once thought of as selfish to put ones needs above another is quickly becoming a ridiculous concept.  I was more destructive not only to my job, my boss and my kids but also myself when I was putting my jobs needs above my own.

I am amazed at how much I love making my girls lunches for school and work.  I have time and energy for that while being off taking care of myself.  I love baking muffins.  I even made cheesecake the other day that was so good I almost had tears in my eyes from my own self pride.  Self pride that was once a dirty thought.  I cook meals for my family and feel so damn good about caring for my girls.  I can only care for them in this way because I am taking care of myself.

When my boss poked in frustration.  I freaked out.  I have printed off a bunch of resumes and was about to send out the Calvary to dispense of them.  My reactions still apparently need work.

 Last night my youngest daughter wanted money for a gift exchange at her school next week and I had to say No for the second time yesterday.  She was angry.  I had to explain that with me being off work Christmas was gonna be homemade this year.  I felt twinges of anxiety at not being able to provide and thought of retracting my early Bosses No.  But I held to my No in both cases and my daughter came out of her room a few minutes later with a brilliant gift idea that cost us nothing.  I was proud of her.  I was proud of me.

An hour after that my mother called with a question and before I even let her ask it.   I jokingly said a big fat No.  She launched into it had nothing to do with moving her, which we just did that past weekend, which I must say I thoroughly enjoyed the experience to exercise my body.  I laughed and said I was just practicing my No.  Offended she retorted ... Not with me you don't.  I laughed inwardly at her defensiveness.

People equally hate being told No as much as they hate saying it.  Maybe we all struggle with the giving and receiving of the dreaded NO word.

Well that at least makes me feel a bit better.  I love coming to realize I am just like everyone else or others can relate to me.  This world is such a huge scary place that even if one person can connect to what I am going through then it brightens up my world!!  So here is too all the women that struggle with saying No.... take care of yourself above all others.  And for those of us that struggle with receiving the No.... Compassion and Self Acceptance.

Repeating Emotional Patterns

Being present in my feelings.
Acknowledging them and giving them proper expression.
Just being aware of them in the first place.

These are hard new applications I am learning.  I signed a book out from our public library recently about emotional intelligence.  A fascinating read for someone who is just learning to understand feelings and how they effect actions.  Turns out I am more emotionally intelligent then I have given myself credit for.  I am also coming to realize that my recent blog posts about never having been aware of my feelings before now, is inaccurate.

I have gotten really really good at suppressing and manipulating my feelings.  Turns out after some study that as a society we all have been taught to shut down overwhelming or unwanted feelings.  Even the new age books that teach of all things love and positive have just taken a new spin on the same control tactics.

Ram Das has been a huge influence these past few weeks for me on the development of my emotional intelligence.  Of course along with my amazing therapist who can help me personally clear out my mental distortion around all things feeling and perceptive.

Being present with my emotions is what I want to focus on here.  After a lifetime of mastering getting out of my feelings I now want to spend as much time on actually being present with my emotions in the hopes that I will eventually move into recognizing a feeling when it first emerges and dissipating it through my own management of relaxation and meditative responses as opposed to drugging them out.

I am using the words feeling and emotions interchangeably only to learn the proper uses of them.

From my research and budding understandings a feeling is the immediate gut reaction in the body. An emotion is a more blanket term and can last a long time and can be hidden and hard to define... like revenge.

A mood is something again all together different... we wake up sometimes on the wrong side of the bed for no apparent reason, thats a mood.  I think moods are appropriate to get out of as they seem to really serve no purpose, just like random negative thoughts.  Moods are where we can practice exercise and meditative tricks to get out of.

A feeling is a warning to me.  I am very focused on not shutting out my feelings anymore.  So for today its the feeling I am trying to stay present with because its the feeling to me that turns into an emotion that is the true cause of some damage in my life.

I remember when my ex husband took me out of my self secure life to a life of full dependence upon him.  Within four months of that life with him he decided he wanted a divorce.  I went into a rage.  Like broke every glass thing in my house kinda rage.  After much begging and pleading on my part he allowed me to stay with him.  Seven years later I took him out of his nice self secure life and moved him to a new city and within a month, proceeded to walk out on him.

That was revenge.

I had no idea how damaged I was because I did not honor my feelings at the time.  I hid how I truly felt, which was hurt and instead begged for him to relearn to love me.  I should have left then but instead I convinced myself I needed him and seven years later when I was self supporting again I inflicted that pent up hurt on him.

I had no idea until recently, five years after the fact, this is what I had done.  My poor children were damaged in the crossfire of my unresolved pain.

This is why today I feel the tremendous need to sit in my feelings and allow them to speak to me and not be too busy trying to ignore them or quiet them.  I need to hear what they are saying because I am tired of acting in ways that even I don't understand because an emotion has been lying dormant for years and pops out at the most inopportune time hurting the people I least want hurt.

I am in the process of letting another guy go from my obsessive mind clutch.  I have over analyzed this cycle in my past five years.  Why I get hooked up with the unavailable guy and then wonder why I am so devastated when he doesn't want me and why I hold on so tight.

This again goes back to an emotion I refuse to acknowledge.

Abandonment.

I have always felt abandoned.  I refuse to admit my childhood has effected me.  Hell, until recently I didn't even know just how far I have ran away from all things to do with my life pre adulthood.  I have always had the mindset of survivor and refuse to be a victim and another broken woman statistic.

Learning now how deep emotions run and how long they will stay trapped in our cells, has forced me to begin to deal with some of these recurring patterns in my life.

I am no fool, I knew my dad left when I was eight.  I have watched friends experience the same fates and create the same patterns of attaching to broken guy syndrome in their lives.  I knew that's what I was doing.  The difference for me was that I thought awareness was enough.

Self acceptance has been my lesson as of late.  Coming to accept that whether or not I like it, I am a broken female.  Abandonment is but one emotion that is wreaking havoc in my life.  But it is the one I am starting with because I am sick and tired of creating this same repulsive pattern with guys.  I have used sex and love addiction as my means of getting out of the real issue here.

I am struggling with abandonment.

My dad said a super heart wrenching sorry to me a couple years ago.  It has taken me this long to come to accept his apology.  To finally let go of my hurt and anger at being left with an emotionally unavailable mother and a family pedophile as her closest friend.  I blamed my father for not protecting me and today I am still seeking out the afflicted man to save me.

These I knew as truths I just didn't know how to get out of them.  I was always lead to forgiveness but know one showed me how to go in a touch the pain first.  To go in and accept it as my truth.  Being aware is not enough.  Learning to accept that I am seriously damaged brings about a whole shit tonne of feelings.  Feelings that until today I could get out of masterfully.  I never allowed myself to touch the core of my pain.

Today I am working overtime on being present with the pain of abandonment.  I started with the current manifestation of it.  A womanizer I got caught up with over the winter who seemed to find a way into my heart and left a home made pipe bomb behind.  Dealing with the immediate hurt, has triggered the hurt over what my ex husband did all those years ago.  Which was the first warning that abandonment was a smoldering emotion under the surface of my 250lb food suppression.

Now I am slowly moving back into the little eight year old girl that watched her daddy walk down the street on his birthday into one of her best friends houses where he proceeded to make a new family, Leaving her to pick up her mom and raise her brother all the while dealing with weekly sexual assault.  I say her because I still need to dissociate in order to even say it.  I am still not yet in full acceptance of that as my truth.

Its rough for me to even write that.  Acceptance is tough business.  I have learned my whole life to keep my secrets tucked away safely, its way better for everyone involved.

 Is it though?

I walked out on my own children to get revenge on my father.  How is that right?  I am done repeating the mistakes of my parents.  I have never talked about my pain before, maybe this is the path to finally heal it?  I dunno,  but I cant keep holding the emotion in any more.

Sharing our stories is what the anonymous program has taught me.  Writing has always been my way to express and heal.  I have just never been to the center of my pain before.... it seems harder to share this.  Who would want this?

I have no idea how to even end this post.  Not a pretty writing, not a positive one.  Messy process this self acceptance and business of feelings.   No wonder why I have gotten so good at suppressing them.
 Maybe its time I take up smoking again.......

Self Acceptance

Self acceptance.  ugh.  I had no idea the concept was gonna be this hard to digest.

This is where I am at in my recovery today, self acceptance.  What am I recovering?  My second sponsor would always ask me that question when I would use the term recovery.  It seems fitting today to remind myself of what I am recovering to be able to accept my full self.

I have peeled a new layer of my onion and what I used to be recovering is not so anymore.  Before I was recovering a drug free me.  I was reaching into the depth of my psyche to recover the whole of me that didn't use dope.  I did succeed on that venture.

.... For about 18 months then I got loaded again.  As I look deeper and ask myself again what is it I am recovering I come up with a different answer.

I am recovering my feelings.

I shut my feelings off a very long time ago.  I used many forms to suppress and manipulate how I felt. In my adult years I mastered and manufactured my feelings to fit my desires and the situations at hand.  I got so good at it that I completely and fully dissociated from all my feelings.

After a year of being clean it was getting harder to keep that disconnection from my feelings without

the use of drugs.  So here I am back in early drug recovery and getting more honest with my onion layers.  I am recovery the full use and natural expression of my feelings.

And it sux.

 So how does self acceptance fit into this?  I actually have no idea yet.  I didn't intend to include the what am I recovering part.  So I guess we are gonna find out together.

I am struggling hard with self acceptance.  I realized recently that I didn't fully accept I was an addict in the past four years of frequenting the meetings of narcotic anonymous.  I am from the mind set of what we label ourselves we become.  I also believe our speech affirms our labels and to say daily in public that 'I am an addict' actually perpetuated the problem for me.

Those beliefs keep landing me in drug relapse.

Its not that I have to gt rid of the beliefs entirely but what I do need to understand now is that before I can paint a new reality for myself I need to work through the challenge, the lesson first.  I am always quick to jump to the end of the road with out having walked the path.  I am the hare in the tortoise story, always rushing to be the first one across the finish line having learned nothing along the way.

To move away from my existence as an addict I first have to get real about the fact that I am an addict in the first place.  I cannot put drugs into my system without it ending very badly for myself and my life.  I have had three major relapses since coming into the N.A. fellowship, I think it is safe to say that I have done enough research to safely say I cannot use dope in any form and stop at just one.

I am officially accepting I am a drug addict.

And my heart is crushed.

To admit to myself that I have a serious personality defect like this or a disease cursing through my spirit, or the mind corrupted by addiction,  is to admit I am damaged.  I am broken.  My sadness these past few days has been all inclusive.  Tears flow constantly.

I am accepting I am an addict.  I am addicted to anything that will kill my feelings or manipulate them in a way that best suits me.  I am addicted to numbing out my spirit and comfortable living in a shell of a body.  For the past thirty years I have grown fond of a slow self induced death.  I am addicted to all things that will slowly suck the life force out of me.

There is an energy within me that wants me dead.  And this is why I am so sad today.  To accept that I am an addict is to accept that I have taken part in the slow killing of my own body.  I have a part in raping my soul.  I have a part in torturing my intuition, beating up my inner goddess.   To accept is to take responsibility for my part in my destructive behaviors inflicted on my own self.

Self acceptance is rough personal business.

Awareness is key.  I always tell myself this.  Following behind awareness is acceptance.  I see now that is the truly hardest step to take.  Becoming aware is sickening and sometimes to hard to chew and this is where I have chosen denial in the past.  But today I am working through the awareness into acceptance.

I have to now move into action.  I have not over eaten all week.  I have worked so fucking hard on my obsessive thoughts around sex and all thing romantically involved and the person I am obsessed with.  I have not used any drugs.  This has been my action.  This is the work that is solidifying the acceptance.  This is my way of showing myself that I am truly beginning to accept I am an addict and there by actually proving that I am not wrong in this awareness..... because its brutal fucking hard to change the way you have thought and behaved for thirty fucking years!!

But the rewards are instant.

The result of Awareness, acceptance and action.....OMG.  Feelings!!  And lots of the little buggers.  They are popping up everywhere.  Tears.  Giggles. Happy. Sad,  Angry.  Frustrated. Burning desire. Excitement. Disgust.  Guilt. Shame. Defeat.  Hope. Joy. Peace.  Serenity.   Man the list is endless.  And I cycle through them as quickly as I can write them.  To someone who has felt them their whole lives I wonder if I look a bit nuts right now, but to me who has never allowed them to flow... its kinda amazing and exciting, albeit scary and hard as fuck to just sit with them.  But I cannot even begin to describe the relief..... like finally getting to pee after holding your bladder until almost explosion.

So self acceptance i can now see is the first step in moving away from labeling myself an addict.  Because it is only through shedding light on the shadow can we then remove it entirely.  I am now a recovering addict.

I want to say that's the end of my self acceptance but its not.  Now I have to face one very strong lady Vixen who has put a block on all things Love and one really pissed off inner child.  One affliction at a time though.  I am gonna take the addict acceptance to my heart first and begin to move into a life where I don't feel the need to control my every waking emotion.

 Baby steps.... says the tortuous.

Emotions: Energy in Motion

Wow.  I have been in an incredible place of processing and learning these past few days.

But first I have to say... staying home from work the past six weeks has not only afforded me a very quickly expanding waist line but my nails are seriously long and I can barely type anymore.   I just hate when i actually have to cut my finger nails.  I was a terrible nail biter my whole life until about eight years ago and now I grow these fabulous nails.  They are a sense of pride for me to cut them is like gouging out a piece of my Ego.

Just saying.

Moving on.

........So I am really starting to feel the opening of my heart.  I am really starting to feel the expansiveness of my soul that was trapped behind my twenty foot walls.  I am seeing the effects in my life from having had the courage to keep the walls down after the explosion of July '014.   And the rewards have been out of my scope of reality amazing.

I think the largest realization for me is the ways in which I keep everyone locked out of my life including my own feelings.  I need to focus mostly on my feelings here because it has been through them that I have invited people in to my life again.  How hard I worked at keeping myself closed off and shut down, not even getting close to venturing out to let people in.  I was so blind to it that I didn't even know I wasn't letting people in.

Thats the definition of denial.... Don't Even kNOw I Am Lying.    (To myself)

I had no idea I even had walls up let alone how I kept those walls securely in place.  I think until you are cracked wide open, you cannot even know there is another way.  This is why I am an advocate of taking risk's and experiencing things.  Books and study cannot provide a cracking seed experience. Books and study only provide comfort to get through the opening experience.  I was tackling it all wrong before.

Giving forgiveness before I even touched the pain, did not work.

So what were the walls made of,   you so eagerly want to know??

Drugs.  Over eating.  Sexing.  Over working.  Staying ridiculously busy.  Getting absorbed in TV shows.  Pretty much anything that takes me out of my feelings and helps me to manipulate them is what I used to keep my walls up with.

I see how drugs were the most direct and effective way to not only kill my feelings but kill myself in the process.  I am discovering a whole new layer to the walls coming down.  And thats the way I would keep myself in pain.  I am learning that no matter what, pain will be expressed if it is there within you.  It is far to powerful of an emotion to just stay as a seed behind your walls.  So drugs killed my body physically and mentally retarded me.

Over eating puts me in immediate physical pain as well as provides a fat buffer between me and the world, thus creating physical walls.  Plus eating gets me out of overwhelming feelings in the moment.  And its so socially acceptable to plow through a huge piece of cake when we are emotional women.

Over working keeps me too busy to deal with anything.  My full attention is on creating something for someone else so I don't need to look at myself.  I push my body and mind to hard, creating stress which harms my nervous system causing colds and flu's, illness and cancer.  Again our society is very okay with getting a cold.  sympathy is eaten up and accepted easily when we have proven just how hard we work by taking ill.... oh poor woman look how hard she works and now she is sick.

Smoking used to be a way I smoke screened people out and effectively implemented a slow seeping death as rat poisons entered in through my lungs and were moved into my tissues and muscles rendering me tired and shortness of breath.  Again all these things i did not learn until I gave up these ways of hiding.

Sexing by far was the worst way for me to act out on my feelings.  I think I either suppressed my feelings or found a way to act out.  So eating and smoking suppressed.  Over working, being to busy and sexing were the way I acted out the pain.  Sexing put me in harms way of sexually transmitted disease and seriously hurt my soul and auric energy.  Letting people into your intimate space like that suggests a serious lack of boundaries.  I didn't care who came in because I was in pain and needed to express that.  The rougher the sex the better.  The dirtier the sex the better.  The more rules I broke with the sex the grander the hurt in the end would be.  And a world of hurt is what I was seeking.  Its what I deserved.

I was in pain and needed to express that.  Emotion is energy in motion.  Its gonna find a way to release itself even if you refuse to acknowledge it.

I only know this because I have been cracked wide open lately.  I don't want to be in pain anymore.  I don't want to hurt others around me anymore because of my toxic seeping of pain all over the place.  Second hand smoke, poor romantic partners that actually tried to love me, sorry boss for losing you contracts..... the list goes on and deep in the ways I have hurt people.  But more important the list is heavy with the way I self torture.

I am tired of hurting myself.  I have had enough hurt inflicted outside myself to be treating myself even worse then my abusers did.  Yo stop hurting myself I have had to work so fucking hard this last couple months to not build up the walls that crumbled in the explosion.  I still struggle hard with over eating, but I am working diligently on removing each brick I replace with this self harming tactic.

I set out to seek Love.  Stopping the torture is apparently the first step.  Who knew??

The Messy Business of Feelings: From Drug Suppression to River flow

Sometimes I wonder who I should be marketing these writings too.  I go with drug addicts because its my main affliction.  But is it really?  The more I look back at my writings the more I see a trend of a woman dealing with feelings and how to express those feelings in a healthy way.  Drugs where the way I suppressed them.

Having gone to a kick ass counselling appointment yesterday and a great two hour chat with a friend and then another two hour womens healing circle,  I am broken wide open once again.

Having understandings about my life and why I do the things I do has not only shocked me but has also helped me to know how to move forward and make different choices in my future.   Being entirely open with where I am at in the moment and sharing that openly with people is the largest lesson I am learning today.

I am always learning something more about self honesty.

I am always learning something more about my feelings and how they are playing out in my reality.

 In the summer I experienced extreme overwhelm with my job.  I knew I was tired.  I knew I was pushing myself really hard.  But I had no idea how to slow down and set boundaries for my own safety.

I ended up in a detox center and now with three months off work.

Through all the counselling yesterday I see now that I was not being honest with myself.  I was way over tired and I had no idea how to ask my boss for help.  I did speak to him on numerous occasions but was never clear on what it was that I was seeking.  I just knew that things weren't right with me.  I had no idea at that time I was heading for a serious drug relapse because my feelings were lacking a healthy outlet.

I have a feeling problem.

I don't know what feeling is cursing through my veins most days.  Learning the hard way has always been the way for me.  I am seeing a therapist for dissociate identity disorder.  I have this disorder because I shut my feelings off a very very long time ago.  I lived under manufactured feelings most of my life and when a real one snuck through my thick crust I reacted with a temper tantrum.

This is  new layer of self honesty for me.

To realize my whole life has been lived from an emotional place of monkey see monkey do is kinda stomach turning.  My one goal after leaving my ex husband was to find Love.  Real Love.  I knew what him and I had wasn't real.  I had no understanding that the journey I was about to embark on was going to show me that I had not felt ANY real feelings for  a very very long time.

How is that even possible?

Feelings are such a huge part of our bodies make up and defense system.  How is it that I was able to function and get along relatively normal in my world without tapping into my feelings for protection or creation?  Have I truly never had any feelings?  What about when my kids were born?  Did I not feel anything when I walked down the isle at my wedding?

Learning what is a true me feeling and what is a manufactured feeling because that is what I am suppose to feel is the dawning realizations that are knocking me out into left field.  Seeing where real feelings have been so quiet and subdued and usually effectively taken care of by another aspect of me is very scary.

Learning not only how I have suppressed the feelings has been quiet a process but now learning how to express the feelings and setting boundaries around them is a whole new path I am taking.

I have felt very open and raw in my heart lately.  Like my entire core and feeling center has been busted wide open.  All my walls have been broken down and I feel very raw and exposed.  My feelings are oozing out into my reality and as good as it feels its kinda messy as well.  Well messy for someone who has manufactured and controlled them her whole life...  messy meaning that I don't have control over them.

Although I am not having temper tantrums now that I am allowing them their time in the spotlight.  They are not having to erupt and cause chaos for me now that I am slowly letting the air out of my huge  balloon of raw life long unexpressed emotions.

My therapy appointment was riddled with talk over an emotion that took over the session and was scary as hell for me, can you tell??

I find it fascinating and equally exciting that I am learning this whole new aspect of myself.  Yet at the same time I am fully understanding of that fear of moving forward.  I have embarked on a lot of journeys in my days.  many new programs, career choices and talents developed but nothing even comes close to this inner journey of change that is causing these huge ripples in my rushing river and is changing the course of where I am going at such a rapid pace its damn near impossible not to feel fear.

To end my day last night I got to watch a video I was in for promotional purposes for my hypnotherapy teacher.  As I watched myself speak animatedly about his course my self critical nature turned from picking myself apart to a growing self love for where I am at today and who I am becoming.   So the fear is very present but the rewards are equally as great.  I am finding that Love I set out five years ago to find.

I guess to answer my original concern this blog I guess is just a place for me to express my emotions and thoughts about those emotions.  Everything I do lately has started out one way with an intention set by my mind but then has taken a different current somewhere along the way of my emotions.

 I think this is what they call letting go and letting your higher power direct the way.  I take the first step and then I let the control go.  So weird. So Uncomfortable.

Freedom to Choose Misery

Self care is paramount to recovery of any sort.  Self care is a number one priority in a healthy persons life.  Self care is something I focused on a lot in this blog over the year I was maintaining my sobriety.

Whats the flip side of self care?

I am not in self care yet.   I am still pulling out of my relapse of self harm.  Coming to understand that relapse is just that.... a trip back into self harm.

Self harm for me might not be the same for others.  Self harm starts simple in my relapse pattern.  It starts with a single thought.  A thought that I need something outside myself to 'complete' me.  I have had enough relapses now to be able to trace each one of them back to a sense of incompleteness or lack of self worth.

Self care gives me a sense of wholeness.  I feel love for myself when I am taking care of all my needs for myself.  Paying my bills with money I have earned.  Cleaning my body with products I have made from organic items.  Feeding my body with healthy foods and exercising in a way that nurtures me.  Building supportive relationships in my life and connecting regularly to my higher power.

Those are the things that start to slip when I begin to seek outside myself for that Love.

I seem to always get it in my head that an easier path for me is to find a man that will take care of those needs for me.  A man to pay my bills.   A man to take me out to eat because cooking is a terribly redundant task, This one and only guy will be all I need for supportive relationships... it will be him and I against the world and he will be my god!

Yup that is always the single thought..... hhahaha yup I will repeat 'single' thought that leads me away from my self care program and back into the realm of self harm and the 'I give up, this shit is too hard!'

It is after that thought that I actually stop going to the gym because I am bored with it.  I stop all the self care practices one by one for different reasons and soon find myself away from my once profound happiness and back in the blackness of misery. Sitting in the misery with no guy and shocked at how I got back to this place of 'yuck'.

Why do we actively choose misery over happiness?

I make the choices in my life systematically that take me back to misery every single time I reach happiness.  Why is that?  What does misery still hold for me that makes me give up my happiness?  What is the magical allure misery entices me with to give up all I have worked for and trade it for where I have come from?

I ask this most humbly as I claw my way back out of the whole that is so well known to me, back up to the mountain of happiness I have built for myself.

I do know as I work my way through the landslide I am taking new awareness's with me this time.  I do understand on a much deeper level the why's of my life and the hows as well.  For this I am entirely grateful for my recent back slide.  Seeing my life as a spiral that is constantly moving forward has helped me accept the dips back into the hole which is wonderful, yet at the same time terribly frustrating.

Coming out if this dip I am faced with my impending self care and the grip I have on my self harm.

I 'know' from previous personal experience what to do to feel better.  I know all the steps and actions to take to get my body back in good health and my mind too.  I am working on a new area, the emotional body and that's exciting, but the rest is known deeply enough to be second nature.... yet I resist.

Why is that?

Why after all this time and all this experience am I still holding on to some misery.

 I blog it here to figure it out.  My therapist asked me last week what it is I am still getting out of my obsessions.  Because I am getting something from them if I prefer to live in them, then in my happiness that is so easily obtained.

Why do I resist the treadmill when I know my body will ache less and I will feel tremendously better after I run for a bit?  Why do I choose the cold pizza over the apple, knowing I hate the way the grease of the cold pizza is gonna taste on my tongue?  Why do I choose to lay on the couch watching movies instead of calling one of my amazing supports and gaining valuable insight into my life?

Is ignorance bliss?

I started a course a few months back.  A course that took that little seed sitting in the pit of my stomach and fed it  a growth hormone.  That seed now has busted through its shell and is making its way up my esophagus.

It's so easy to follow the sheep.  Its so easy to do what everyone else is doing.  Be it the lazy self harm way or even the get fit cause that's what we are all doing way.  Following blindly what others do is how this course started out.  It was a course on societal trance.  The proverbial sheep.

Todays Just for Today reading was about making choices that are good for us and owning those choices.  When I came into narcotics anonymous I did the suggestions cause I was told to and when they didn't work for me I left the program thinking everyone in the program was an asshole.

Suggestions are just that..... suggestions.  Some work and some don't.  Being told what to do was the way I lived my life and the rebellious nature in me was to do the opposite but only because I was following what I was being told.  Contradiction, I understand.

Self care I am starting to see is way way more then just eating right and paying my bills on time.  Even more then being connected to my higher power.  Self care is about knowing what I need in that moment and not feeling like I am suppose to being doing something because it made you feel good in the past.

It's really about feeling good, isnt it?

I have always sought to feel better.  I am constantly chasing the feel good dragon.  When I am not copping out with dope I am busting my ass at the gym to feel better.  Always with the positive and running fearfully from the negative.  What is so wrong with the negative?

I get that to a person that is always in the negative then yes lets teach that person the flip side and the light.  For me personally I have always been in the light.... superficial light albeit but light none the less.  For me to accept the negative is absurd.  For me to embrace my shadow is not okay.  For me to have a negative feeling when I know a million and one ways to get out of it seems ridiculous to stay in it.

That is the societal conditioning that I learned about so many months ago.  Take Care of yourself.... go to the gym.  Take care of yourself.... pay your bills.  Take care of yourself.... raise your kids well.

Whats if taking care of myself right now was just sleeping and eating the cold pizza.  Whats if taking care of myself was fantasizing about my knight in shining armor coming to rescue me from my miseries.  Whats if taking care of myself was letting my girls pamper and care for me just for today.

I think I am learning that listening to my body and my inner knowings is what self care really is about.  I know that going to the gym will give me energy, but I am also learning that a great deep breathing yoga meditation does the same thing and is much easier for me right now.  I am learning that getting out of my feelings has always been my way and sitting in them is actually pretty cool too.

I am seeing that when I go into relapse there is almost always a reason for me to dip back down into the pit of healing.   I knew what I was doing when I picked up that first drug.  I knew what kind of world of hurt I was in for when I brought that first drug into my lungs.  Yet I still did it anyways.

As much as I have beaten myself up for the why's and hows I have not given myself enough credit for having the courage to move in that direction in the first place.  I am not condoning conscious relapse for anyone, but for me it was the necessary path for me to finally get what I wasn't getting any other way.

Relapse brought me to a personal crisis that needed to be broken wide open in order for me to finally move forward and away from the constant need to have a man take care of me.  I am sure I could have taken a softer easier route to come to that lesson.  And many of my friends have been preaching that lesson to me along the way, but I am one that has always needed to learn through my own experience.

What my friends could not teach me was the opening of my heart.  Through this current manifestation of addiction in my life my heart has been cracked open.  My emotions are finally flooding my reality.  The dissociation I had with my feelings for my entire life has been lifted and for the first time in my adult years I am feeling again.... truly feeling.  not superficial feelings, not mimicked feelings but real emotional outbursts of feelings.

This is the self care I was missing in my recovery before.  This is why I was always seeking the guy to fix me..... because I knew somewhere deep within me that only a guy could awaken me to my feelings.  Had I continues to listened to my friends, I would not have awoken my feelings.  I now can finally move on from having the need for a guy to take Care of me because I was only leaning on societal hypnosis as my avenue to get what I really needed.

I guess through this entire post I have finally come to understand what my choice to be in misery is really giving me..... balance.  To really feel the full range of my feelings.  I choose to be in misery today because I have never given myself the choice to sit here before. I am always trying to feel better...more more more better.  I have never allowed myself the luxury to actually consciously choose a negative emotion knowing that I can easily get out of it if I wanted to, but I choose to sit in it instead.  Misery is giving me something today....  a choice.

And I am learning......  Misery is not the bad guy.  It is just part of all that is.  It is not 'sad' to be in the negative... it is balance to my abundant light.

When Obsession Chooses You

I choose recovery.

So whats my next step??  I think this is the part of my addiction recovery journey that I tend to lose track of where I am going and why I am going there.   After having a few days clean and by few I do mean just over thirty days. Which is just a very few in the scope of forever, yet to the addicted mind it feels like forever already.

 That forever seems to be very cunning at teasing me into believing that I am ready to jump back into life with both feet.

I feel almost desperate to get back to work.

My energy returning and my mind starting to need more then a just for today thought.  I can feel my addict starting to tell me that if I don't get back to work soon I am gonna gain all my weight back. Several years ago the scale used to read 250lbs.  I am a landscaper today partly to keep in shape... that shape is quickly rounding again.

I want to go back to work.

My addict also tells me that my boss wont hold my job with his sights removed from me. My oldest daughter works as his receptionist.  He hasn't forgotten me.  My addict then shows me my very meager bank account and tells me I will never make it through the next couple months on those pennies.

You see I just transfer my addictions.  I have always lived from a place of obsession.  Workaholic.  Overeater. Sex and Love obsession is the worst and the one you see most of in this blog. These obsessions always lead back to drug addiction.

Can I live in some form of obsession and survive?

 I used to spend hours and I mean like two to five hours a day at the gym when I was losing my eighty pounds.  I would rather be at the gym then home making supper for my three young children and husband.  I would rather work out then hang out with my friends and family.  I was so into my body that even when my husband wanted to touch it, I was annoyed.  He was overweight.

People tell me to get into a healthy obsession.  I don't think that works for me.  Obsession for me makes my life unmanageable.  No matter how I slice it when my mind is obsessed with something it exhausts every resource available to me until I am sitting in a detox center hanging on by a thread.

I cannot afford to be obsessed.

How the fuck do I live then??

I look back to my early formative years and all I see is obsession.  I see nothing but one obsession after another.  My mind was molded at a very young age to be obsessive.  I have, through years of counselling. traced my obsessions back to younger then six years old.  Too young to be even able to comprehend obsession as a mind that young is nothing more then a perceiver.  Yet all the perceptions I got were from the people I loved and every one of them was deep in their own obsessions. Unavailable to me.

I struggle very hard to be in my life and present with my own children.  I learned that obsession was the only way to function my mind.  Trauma's supported that lesson and turned it into a belief.  The rest of my life I continued to play out the belief.  

I am always trying to get out of my life and my feelings as I have watched my own parents do my whole life.  Except now I am too old to blindly follow my parents examples.  Wish I woulda figured this out in my early twenties.... damn ridiculous slow learner that I am!!  And people say I am smart... ahahahaha.  Not!!

So let me move back to the original statement at the beginning of this post before I digress... where do I go from here??

I have until the end of December before I must go back to work.  Going to a drug rehabilitation treatment center has not panned out.  I  have an amazing therapist that is moving me swiftly through some pretty major stuff.  So I am not worried about a treatment center, what I need to work through here is time management and self discipline.  I have been to treatment before.  Its eight hours a day of intensive counselling and work book stuff on trauma's.  I have that kinda time and I have tonnes of resources and even the old work book from the center I attended the last time I landed here.

I finally feel ready and up to the task of ripping the obsession band aid off and get down to the dirties in my life.

 The rose colored glasses have already come off and pretty much every moment of my day is spent feeling gross, uncomfortable and wanting to crawl out of my own skin.  Every time I open my mouth to speak its almost like I regret it, I say shit that's not congruent to me anymore,  I don't know who I am, I feel like I have all these caged personalities fighting for my attention within me and the anxiety is almost overwhelming.

I stress again I have an amazing therapist walking me though as well as a psychiatrist on stand by in case I feel the need to self medicate with some blow, he promises me he has better shit in a prescription bottle... shit that wont kill me if I get a bad batch.

 And I have my family in Narcotics anonymous that wont let me go even half a day without word from me.  Man I love my sisters in recovery... its the only thing besides my girls that makes my heart glow even in the middle of a tar slimed, skin crawling dawning realization about myself or my life.

I have everything I need to move forward and get on with my recovery.  To really actually overcome my obsessive mind and change the way I think and act.  I have been doing a fair amount of study on the mind and it is a muscle that can completely and I mean completely regenerate itself.  I need to put in the work but I am slowly beginning to believe I can fully change the way my brain fires up.

So time for me to move the focus away from everyone else and the obsessions still playing out in my life.  I say that with some sadness.  I still really do enjoy my love obsessions... the fantasies it creates for me are way more enjoyable then the current reality I am manifested in,  But alas I know my life is unmanageable because of the thoughts so I must let go of them..... but its still sad for me.

Eight hours a day of step work, therapy, homework and self care.  Fuck I thought I was a mess before.... look out my friends Its about to get really real for me.  Dorthy is coming home and taking off the red shoes.

30 Days Clean!!

I got up at a meeting last night when the member handing out key tags for clean time called for anyone taking thirty days clean.  As everyone cheered, I finally relaxed and allowed myself to feel excitement over my achievement.

I was just told, to be gentle on myself, thirty days clean is a big deal.  I find I am needing to be given permission to feel these days.  This is not my first kick at the can, not my first ride at the rodeo.  I have taken thirty days clean before.... several times.

 Last night started out as a reminder of all my previous failed attempts.  Story of my life.  I finish nothing I start.  However as the meeting progressed I began to start to turn my mind around at how I looked at my thirty days of sobriety.

My glass can be half full or half empty.

I keep seeing meme's(?)  those pictures with sayings on Facebook, I don't know what they are called, but whatever... I keep seeing motivational quotes about the difference between a master and a beginner is that the master has more failed attempts then the beginner has ever tried.  ....Thats me.

Queen of failed attempts.

Yet when I look at it from the angle of all the experience I have now at understanding deeply my patterns.  I understand without a shadow of a doubt how the relapse pattern gets started and how it plays out.  I know myself pretty well now from one too many bad decisions.

And to be honest I now can see the similarities between me and the junkie on the street eating out of a dumpster.  I don't have to force myself there anymore to prove I deserve a seat in a Narcotics anonymous meeting.  I am a drug addict in recovery,  a drug addict,  I indeed am.

Why?

 Because I simply refuse to feel my feelings and deal with life on life's terms.

I would rather check out of life and live on the streets some days then have to put in another minute playing nice with a corrupt society of manipulative people willing to stomp on you to make another buck.   I would rather eat out of a dumpster some days then to have to face my abusive past and finally walk through those feelings of pain before I can get better and move on.  I would rather be high and live in my fantasy world then work on building my dreams in a reality that sometimes takes way to much work.

Now saying that, I must admit, at thirty days clean is a bit of a contradiction to the way my mind normally works.    I do check out of life when I don't get my way.  I am a bit of a spoiled rotten brat who hasn't grown up yet.  But I have also created an amazing life for myself that I truly love.  I don't see the world as that harsh on a good day, I love life and the way it works, corruption and all.  I have a tremendously exciting higher power that makes life a huge game of fun for me.

Just today however with the understanding that I can never again throw a drug related temper tantrum and check out of reality is making it hard for me to see the beauty in life at this moment.  For the first time in my years on this earth I am removing the rose colored glasses and seeing life for what it really is, shadows and all.  I am feeling all my feelings, not just the fluffy light ones.  And I am accepting my past for the truth of what it was and the players involved for the truth of their parts in it.

.... And it sux.  Life is not all roses and butterflies.

This is a harsh new understanding for me.  It's not that I didn't know there were injustices in the world.  Just that when an injustice happened to me, I was so, so, so good at keeping the mask of pleasantness plastered to my face that the feelings and actions involved with the injustice were swiftly brushed under the carpet of my heart and on with my life I moved.

Well I have this amazingly wonderful psychologist whom I see on a weekly basis, who has effectively ripped up my fucking carpet when I momentarily left the room and now all the bugs that have been feeding off my festering pile of shit under the rug are pouring out into the room of my heart and I am a bloody mess trying to clean everything up.

My best friend has said it for years and years upon years.... deal with your shit.  And for years and years and years upon years, I ignored her.

So at thirty days clean I am learning a new way of dealing with my feelings and life's situations.  At a time in my life where I am being faced with all and I mean every single one of my past trauma's, I cannot get loaded.

I cant have a 'drink' to take the edge off the hard truth I just learned about someone I love.  I cannot smoke a joint to ease the pain of having to call my boss to find out if I still have a job.  I cannot go hit up a club to dance off the fear of getting to old to make the changes I need to make in order to become the person I wanted to be when I made my lifes wish list at 16.

Hahaha... reading that above paragraph to proof it, makes me realize how ridiculous it sounds to even cope with life that way in the first place.  But its the truth of how I dealt with shit and well my life apparently reflects that today.

Learning a new way to live isn't the hard part.  Its facing the shit, that's the hard part.  Its standing in the room of my heart, looking at the mess I have allowed it to become and knowing I am responsible for it all, that's the hardest part.

So thirty days clean for me today is a big fucking deal.

One foot in front of the other, right?  and focused on ... JUST FOR TODAY!!

I am Powerless over my Obsession.

Step One:  We admitted we were powerless over our addiction that our lives had become unmanageable.

At every meeting I hear this read.  In every Recovery book.......Narcotics, Alcoholics, Co-dependency or Over Eaters anonymous this is on every first page.  Every time I come back into recovery after a relapse this is the first step I must take.

Yet it is still the step that trips me up before I ever get started.

I find I am working very hard today at not rushing back into my life, like a bull staring down a red flag.  Angry that I have had, yet another, set back. More determined then ever to get it right this time and FAST.   This is why I fall time and time again.  I build shoddy foundations.  Always focused on the stars and never on the branch right in front of my feet about to trip me up.

I started Step four recently after having ripped through steps 1-3 while still in detox.

.......Ya that isn't working out so well for me.

Let me give you a quick run down of the steps for those of you unfamiliar with them.  Personally I believe these steps can be applied into anyone's lives regardless if addiction rains supreme or not.

First step is to admit your life has become unmanageable due to your powerlessness over your addiction.  The second step is then about coming to believe that a power greater then yourself can restore you to sanity.  The third step is then making a decision to turn you will over to the care of this higher power as you understand them to be.

Those first three steps for me are the ones I rush through because I know from personal experience when I am controlling my life without the support of my guides(higher power), I make terrible decisions based on my Ego or addict and well .....then I land back in drug lala land,

I am learning that I need to slow this down however and really work these first three steps which I will share about in a moment..... Let me not digress.

Step four: Made a searching a fearless moral inventory of ourselves.  This is the step that peels back the layers of who you were in order to emerge who you are becoming.  I have to stop here because I do not have a solid enough foundation to face more demons in my closet, nor do I have the confidence of divine guidance that I will become something pleasant at this point.  Hence why this post and the return to step one.

Step five we admitted to God, ourselves and another human being the exact nature of our wrongs. Step Six, we were entirely ready for God to remove these defects of character, step seven we humbly asked her to remove these shortcomings.  Step eight we make a list of all the people we have harmed and step nine we begin making amends where we can.  These are the action steps that we work in order to peel back the negative energy that holds us back from entirely stepping into our personal lights, our personal powers.

Steps 10-12 are a repeat of one through three but now you are ready to actually starting walking in your higher power and giving back to the world what you have gained.  This is the glory that I am rushing to achieve.  Yet I keep tripping up on the first step.

I refuse to admit my life is unmanageable.  I refuse to see how powerless I am over certain things in my life.  I sit with the step twelve understanding of remembering what it feels like to be in my full power but refuse to admit I have lost that power.  It may be only temporarily and I do fully understand I am never disconnected from it entirely, but I have clouded the truth of who I am.

Admitting I am powerless is such a nasty thing for me.  Nasty in the sense that its hard to do, but when I do the freedom I achieve is out of this world.  It makes no sense to me and therefor my Virgo analytical mind cannot wrap around it and thus my constant trip ups.

 How can I be powerless and yet strive to step into my full power?  Why am I being asked to admit I have no power when the entire set of steps are teaching me how to take back my full power?

I have been blessed and equally cursed with having devoted friends of the twelve steps who have made this program their lives.  These friends eat, sleep, breath the program and have spent many years in deep study of these steps.  They tell me its not about ever having any power but turning all power over to God.

Then I have beautiful, spiritually mastered friends who speak very wisely and who have the lives I wish to achieve one day, teach me that God is within us and the power we seek is already in our souls and all we need to do is to step into it.

Equally blessed and cursed.  The twelve steps teach me how to peel back all my own limitations of stepping into that power, but I am being bombarded with the teaching that God is still outside of myself.  Hence the constant focus on the stars and the logs in front of my feet tripping me up.

But this is not where I wished this post to go......

Moving back to step one.  I am reminded of how powerless I am over the temptation and desire that my obsessive thinking leads me too.  I am an addict.  I have an addictive personality.  I am working the steps to let go of these limitations, but I must first admit that I indeed have them right now.

I cant stop obsessing in this now.  I go back and forth between wanting to get high, to over eating to thinking non stop about a guy.  My over thinking leads me to sit on my couch or lay in bed doing nothing so that my mind has full freedom to play in the obsession.  The torment it brings causes me to hide under the covers begging it to stop.  Begging for sleep so my mind gets peace.  And on very bad days... wishing to die so the torment will stop forever.

I know full well that if I get up and do some house cleaning or call someone, the thoughts will cease.
Yet I am paralyzed by my own mind.

This is powerless.

This is causing my life to be unmanageable.  When I am home all day because I have taken a leave of absence from work to get my shit together and I am spending it in obsession instead of cooking dinner for the three other people in my home that are spending their days working and in school..... my life is unmanageable.

I am learning to recognize when my thoughts are moving into obsession.  I have a sponsor who gives my wise counsel on steps to take to stop the obsessive thoughts from starting in the fist place and I am reminded yet again to work a more thorough first step.

I must admit at this point of my life I am powerless over my addiction.

I must take very small steps and look down at my feet lest I trip and land with my face in the mud again.  I need to focus on the little things to make my life manageable again.  Like getting groceries to make a healthy dinner for my family.  Like paying my bills and cleaning my house.  Like practicing a ten minute yoga routine every day and keep working at my treatment.

You see I may not have had a major surgery that you can physically see my illness, but a major illness I do indeed have.  The mind is a deep sess pool, full of things many of our doctors and scientist still have yet to understand.

Why some days I cannot function because my brain has decided to malfunction is beyond many understandings... sometimes I wish it was my right leg that was the problem, then at least I would understand myself better.

I didn't ask for this malfunction of Spirit, of a plaguing mind or a traumatic life.  But I got them none the less.  Sitting and whining about it as I have done for way to long now is tripping me up,  Its time to admit I am powerless over my lot in life and work at gaining the power back to better that lot for my future.

So I guess just for today I will move back into step one and focus on not tripping on that branch and leave the next step for tomorrow.