I don’t know what to write about, but I feel l like I should post. I went to a meeting tonight, my favorite meeting that I have found in Chicago. A relief from the hours I have been working. All I could think about was how alone I felt in a room of thirty people. How much I don’t feel a part of the program here. How little I want to try to integrate myself. How much I feel like no one here would want to be friends with me anyway – if they actually knew me. This is something that most people in the program feel. So afraid of what other people think of them. I’m holding so much in because I am too afraid to talk to these people about it. It is eating me alive. The anger has become more than I can deal with. It’s anger, it’s pain – it’s all fear. Everything is fear. The fear of not getting what I want or losing what I have. Mostly, it is the fear of not getting what I want. The key to my happiness – that ever changing and always elusive thing that drives me and disappoints me again and again. The truth is, I have most things I want – or most things I have thought I have wanted. They just don’t make me happy and I only want them until I actually have them, then I just want something else.
I know that happiness is not a destination and I know better than to look outside of myself for it – I know better than to move in an effort to escape whatever is preventing it. Funny that everywhere I run to, I keep showing up - as a friend likes to remind me. I am the problem. I remember the moment that I actually got that – that alcohol is only a symptom, the problem is me. I have all these AA sayings running through my head. Feelings are not facts. You have to change your behavior and your thinking will follow.
I try all these things and nothing seems to help. I try the things that people suggest, but I sit on my bathroom floor crying every day anyway. All I do is try. I try and I try and I am running out of effort. I have never been able to figure out what giving up looks like. Giving it up - turning it over, letting it go - although I can imagine what it must feel like to feel the freedom that one feels when that kind of surrender is possible. I can imagine it, but I don't know whether I've ever felt it. I must have felt it at least once - when I decided not to drink and take a few suggestions from people in AA. There is a kind of willingness that goes along with that, a kind of giving up where you say, okay, maybe I'll just try to do it your way.
I say that I give up all the time, that I literally do not have the effort to keep going. Nearly every day I think I tell at least one person that I give up. I say that I'm done and then every day I get up and keep going. But the inability to continue is not the same kind of giving up I am talking about. Every day someone tells me that my strength amazes them and that my resilience is incredible. I just shrug my shoulders because I don’t know how to do it any other way. I want to give up, I need to give up, but I can’t figure out how to.
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