Before

I found the post below sitting quietly in my drafts. I had completely forgotten it. I wrote it before we moved and before I quit drinking. I came across it today and realized that I must have known then. I knew I was going to quit drinking. It was coming. I had no idea, really and I didn't believe that I could. But I knew.

Written on December 20th, 2010 - exactly one month before:

Maybe she's not even a version of me. It's more like there's a piling up of these things that I've practiced being until they've covered up the real me.

I still have a lot of rubble to rifle through, and yet, I'm finally hopeful. Maybe it's the new chapter in our lives opening up, a move to a new place, a fresh start. The things I still struggle with, like we all do, seem smaller. I'm threatening to eradicate those things I'm tired of living.

Anger is there in the pile, this irritable, frustrated and negative absolute boulder of a thing sitting on the real me.

A habit boulder.

A person can think a certain way until that thinking is real and true, even if it didn't start out that way. We can tell ourselves lies until we believe them with nearly our whole hearts. That's what I did, anyway. I thought and thought defeating thoughts until I didn't even know I was thinking them, and then they took root in my head and heart and that's a very dangerous thing to do. A person can waste their entire life trapped like that, thinking they aren't good enough or their marriage isn't good enough or their mothering isn't good enough...and then doing things to stay in the rubble of thoughts.

I can still remember sitting at our first tiny little table years ago, pregnant with Miles and mad at our house for being too small. Mad that we bought it without thinking. Mad that there was dust everywhere, piling up like this other version of me while an addition was added for more space. Disgusted and self-centered and so easily done with it all.

It was then, I think. Then that I actually decided to stop trying to be positive, claiming exhaustion and I just can't handle this. No, I was not suffering, and yet there I sat like a spoiled child, wishing we had done things differently, giving up on who knows what. Somewhere in me, I allowed those defeating and irrational thoughts to trump the positive ones. I had no idea the stress we were about to endure with Asher's colic and hydrocephalus and I set myself up, ruminating around the negative thoughts. I set myself up to cope rather than conquer.

Even if I have been through some awful and ugly things in my life, even those things are not excuses for what I'm doing. Because the truth is that we can even be freed from the most traumatic of things, but only if we seek hope and stop thinking about ourselves all the time.

Now, my boys are here and they pull joy from my rubble and show me how to see life. So I try. I claw and I pray and I reach out when I start to stumble toward a funk. I simply try.

Because of them, that version of me that is covering me, is being shed from my life. They are the catalyst, the reason for me to say, I'm leaving her.

~~~~~~~~~~
It kind of blows my mind that I was writing this and not thinking about drinking but kind of letting myself think about drinking but still not allowing myself to have this thought...

I wasn't just drinking to cope with anger and sadness...
anger and sadness were amplified because I was drinking.

Denial and rationalization are broken power tools.


This post is a part of Flashback Fridays over at Mylestones. Thank you, Jo.