Making Room for the Good Stuff

When you let go of the story you tell, a lot of times it creates
a whole world of expansion for other things to come in.
~Sheryl Crow~

I want what I want, when I want it - oh yeah, and have I mentioned that I am somewhat of a control freak?

"Surrender" is a difficult word for me on my very best days. To surrender, in most contexts, means to lose...to give up...to stop fighting...to let it go. I am not one to feel all that comfortable with any of those things, and that can be both good and bad.

Over the past year, I have had the opportunity to travel more than usual, flying here and there to visit family and friends. Ever the meticulous planner, anytime I have a trip, I spend hours checking out the various options on Expedia and Orbitz and all of those other services that promise to make things quick, easy, and painless. I pick my flights, check the times, make certain that I have plenty of time from one flight to the next on layovers...I ALWAYS plan out what seems to me to be an easy, no hassle, stress free trip. I arrive at the airport with plenty of time to go through security, get something to eat, and chill out with a book for a while before boarding the plane. I am in my happy place because I am in control :)

Then it starts to rain...in Pheonix, where my plane is coming from to pick me up on the way to Atlanta...where I have planned for an hour and a half between flights. So, cool. I planned for this. It's all good. Twenty minutes late, no problem. Boarding the plane, finding my seat, realizing that there will be a 2 year old behind me for the next 2 and a half hours. Ugh, no planning for that...but it's ok. Headphones rule. Thirty five minutes later, we are still on the ground. The wind is blowing weird so the pilot has decided that we need more gas. I reassure myself that gassing up is a good thing, I am blessed to be on a flight with a pilot who is as careful of a planner as me and wants to make sure all of the bases are covered. All gassed up, approved for departure....only 6 planes ahead of us on the runway. Touching down in Atlanta, I have a meager 30 minutes to make my connection...tight, but it will be ok. There is another plane at the gate - we must wait for it to move. 20 minutes later, in Terminal B, I ask the desk attendant what gate my new plane is departing from. Terminal T - have you ever seen the Atlanta airport???

My zen has completely disappeared, and I want to scream, fight, and blame every airline employee in Phoenix, Dallas, and Atlanta for the fact that I am not where I need to be...but, since I have no desire to be on the wrong end of airport security or give the airline any reason whatsoever to make my day even more difficult, I suck it up and graciously say thank you when I am informed that I will be able to be on the very next flight in 2 hours. Defeated, I sulk over to the food court to find something with lots of endorphin releasing fat and sugar (translation: a triple shot Espresso Truffle from Starbucks) to ease my wait and bring me back to center...

While drinking my coffee (ok, it is a triple caffeinated hot milkshake...just to be clear) in the crowded terminal, an elderly woman approaches me and asks if the seat next to me is taken. I am a little annoyed, as I am trying to pout by myself, but the annoyance disappears as she talks to me. She is 86 years old and on her way to see, for the first time, her great great grandchild. She is traveling by herself and has experienced many of the same kinds of obstacles and delays in her day as I have. She has photos, and stories, and a MUCH better attitude than me. By the time I reach the plane for the last leg of my trip, my heart is lighter, my zen has returned, and I am actually grateful for this delay.

Sometimes, giving up on something is the only way find the place where your energy is really meant to be. Typically, fighting only serves to make everyone involved just a little more miserable. And letting go of _________ (the blank is totally yours to fill in) is the surest way to free our arms to reach out and embrace the blessings that the universe has for us today.

For control freaks like me, that means planning for the story to change...

No Time Like the Present

Having spent the better part of my life trying either to relive the past or experience the future before it arrives, I have come to believe that in between these two extremes is peace. ~Author Unknown

Nothing is worth more than this day. ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

I have a ton of regrets. When I get still, and think about the various ways in which my addiction has affected me and the people that were around me when I was using, I fear the grief will just swallow me up. The understanding that my behavior caused other people great pain in their lives...so much so that it became unforgivable...is, perhaps, the most excruciating thing in my own. There is nothing in my past that I wish to relive, but there are plenty of things that I wish I could do over, do differently, do better.

To avoid the pain that past regrets bring forth, I spend a great deal of time trying to occupy my thoughts with other things. For the past couple of years, I have been trying to make plans for a different future. I have dreamed of drastic changes, far away places, and a life far removed from reminders of such painful times. My plans are beginning to fall into place, and it is both exciting and scary at the same time. My emotions range from being barely able to stand the waiting and being paralyzed by the terror of failing...and failing alone. The former creates a deep seated discontent in my soul, and the latter...well, I have been talking myself out of a lot of panic attacks lately.

The problem with placing myself too far, or too often, into the past or the future is that it causes me to lose sight of today and miss out on the joys of the present. Even on bad days, there are priceless moments that make me smile, make me think, and allow me to fully immerse myself in the gratitude I feel just for waking up on the top side of the dirt on that day. I can't change anything that has happened in the past, and the future is uncertain for everyone - no one absolutely knows that tomorrow will actually happen. But in this day, and this moment...one day, hour, moment, second at a time...I can make a right choice, and then another - with the understanding that if I put enough of those together, the future can't help but work out...and just maybe, eventually, the right choices I make right now will become greater than the wrong choices I made when I was using...and that will somehow make its way to the people that I need too see it. Stranger things have happened...

There really is no time like the present...

Just a Tiny Speck...

“True humility is intelligent self respect which keeps us from thinking too highly or too meanly of ourselves.
It makes us modest by reminding us how far we have come short of what we can be.”
~Ralph W. Sockman~

Humility and Gratitude comprise the foundation on which my recovery stands. While they are separate concepts, you really can't have one without the other if you truly understand the meaning of each.

It took some time for me to fully grasp the concept of humility and to be able to apply that to my own life. I have always struggled with low self esteem and a negative self image. When I first started out in recovery, I often mistook those attitudes for humility, thinking that the less I thought of myself, the more I was humbling myself. Consequently, I ended up beating up on myself and harshly judging myself for every mistake that I made and every flaw that I perceived in myself. As a result, I often found myself swallowed up in feelings of regret, guilt, and depression. These feelings would often render me completely hopeless - and send me back to the desire to escape from my own "badness" - a desire that was one of the driving forces of my addiction to begin with.

Humility is NOT the same as self degradation. It is not about feeling like we are not as good as other people, but about realizing that we are not profoundly different from them either. On our best days, we are still flawed, and on our worst days we are not nearly as bad as we often believe. Humility is about finding the place where we can acknowledge our genuine selves with all of our scars, bruises, and other imperfections and also find an understanding of the roles we play each one of them. It is about truly "getting" that the profound list of blessings in our lives are truly the manifestation of a higher power at work and cannot be accounted for by anything that we have done or not done on our own. I can still remember the exact moment in which I TRULY felt a sense of humility in my recovery. I was at a meeting when I really understood for the first time that the ONLY difference between me, as I walked to the front of the room to receive my 3 year chip, and the newcomer walking to the front of the room to receive his desire chip was that I had simply been doing it longer. To this day, while I am proud of the years of sobriety that I have achieved, I never allow myself to get too far from that understanding.

Today I find that the more I understand that I do not have all of the answers, the easier it becomes to find them. When I acknowledge that I did not get to where I am by myself, I become more compassionate with myself and with other people that I encounter. The more I reach out from a heart that is open to feedback, the more I find myself surrounded by people that help me to move to the next level, and the next, and the next. The more I subscribe to the idea that I am just a tiny speck in a vast and infinite world, the more meaningful I feel within my own little part of it.

The more I humble myself, the deeper my gratitude becomes.

And that is my strength...

Feeling It

"What's baffling when you are on the ground makes sense when you can begin to rise above it."
-Wally Lamb

I used to refer to hydrocodone as "the love of my life" because it was the only thing I felt like I could count on to get me through the night...and the day...and everything in between. I didn't realize the abuses that I was suffering at the hands of this lover until it was almost too late. When I was in treatment and the fog started to lift, all emotion seemed very sensitive and painful - much like when the blood starts flowing again through a limb that has fallen asleep and the sensation is almost unbearable for a brief time. I had to learn to breath through it, cry through it, write through it, talk through it - whatever was necessary to move me through it without taking a pill. It is always temporary, and there is peace on the other side of it. I have also learned, over time, that the way I talk to myself is key. "I can't take this" has turned into "this is going to be ok, I just have to wait it out." "I can't do this" has turned into "This is nothing, I have done WAY harder than this."

I have been clean now for 6 years - I have bad days...but they are the exception rather than the rule. Once, I believed that "feeling good" meant feeling nothing. Today I know a very different kind of feeling good. You may not feel pain when you are numb - but by definition, you will not feel joy either. Frankly, I would rather have both than neither.