I'm sitting at my car dealership as I'm writing this. I was on my way to work the other day I decided to take a back road instead of the fast-paced freeway. This road brings you past miles and miles of apple orchards, you can view rolling hills stretched far off into the distance as you crest many hilltops then dip down into sprawling orchards. I'm a huge sucker for scenic routes. During the fall it's full of picturesque views, but really any time of year is beautiful. As I was zipping up and down the rolling countryside hills, I nearly missed two red squirrels who were jumping around in the road. Not two seconds later I hit a poor little gray squirrel. I didn't have time to slow down, it was what it was. I always have a pang of anxiety after hitting anything, I always feel horrible. I tend to think of it as a bad omen, what am I doing wrong, maybe this is a sign. I'm a believer in signs but I don't bet my whole life on them. Later in the day, I pressed my vehicle's automatic start because, well, it's cold and this wonderful and totally necessary invention warms my seats up for when I get in my car. It's one of the small comforts I've really come to love. As I pressed it, to my surprise, it wouldn't start. I kept hitting the button and nothing. I was dealing with some frustrating circumstances at work and then this. My whole day was going like this, I realized the day before was also full of minor inconveniences. Why is it that things all happen at once? I know at this point I'm frustrated so I try to evaluate the situation before I unravel. Counting my blessings helps me defuse the bomb about to go off in my head. Gratitude can go a long way in situations like these. In all reality these problems are trivial. I get into my car and notice my check engine light is on, I decided to spend my lunch hour at the dealer getting my car looked at. After a few moments the mechanic comes back, "Looks like your grill is messed up and you knocked out a sensor, it'll be $170 for the repair but I can't do it today you'll have to come back". He then asks if I hit a deer. I look at him puzzled and say "No one hit a deer, I haven't hit anything." My eyes widen as I realize the damn squirrel I hit was the culprit. "I hit a squirrel". I can't even be mad.
The biggest challenge I've faced in sobriety is acceptance. The squirrel story is a cute (kinda morbid) story but it's minor compared to the level of acceptance we have to work through in our sobriety. No, the hardest thing in my life to accept isn't the fact that I ran over an innocent creature and had to shell out some dough to cover the damage. In the past, I would have headed for a drink over it. I might've blown up on the mechanic, ruining his day. Called my husband to try and manipulate the situation to make it somehow his fault. Skip out on the last part of my workday because I just couldn't "deal". Then maybe do some retail therapy at Target to drown my sorrows, but not before grabbing a box of wine on my way out to... drown my sorrows even more!
These little inconveniences would turn into wildfires of out-of-control behavior on my part during my drinking days. Why is life SO hard, why me, why today? How can I use this situation to do what I really want? Drink. Shop. Repeat.
Acceptance of minor inconveniences as we get sober gets easier. At first, I felt like a toddler having a temper tantrum at a grocery store when my mom refused to buy me a chocolate bar. The outburst of emotions dwindle the further we get away from alcohol. This has a lot to do with something called PAWS (click to learn more, I typed "lick" to learn more on accident, please don't lick this blog, or do, whatever). It also has to do with how we've learned to cope over time, sometimes we just need to unlearn certain ways of doing things... Ehem, blaming others, using incidences as an excuse for poor choices. You get my point.
It wasn't the minor inconveniences that really had me stuck. Those soon turned into learning opportunities, small challenges that when you overcome them, make you feel accomplished.
The acceptance I want to talk about is the earth-shaking, underlying, slithering through the dark, downright scary truths about yourself. We all have them. You would not be drinking yourself to death if you didn't. (That line is more for me, I was trying to drink myself to death, maybe your experience is different or maybe it's not that different.)
I was trying to drink myself to death because I was scared to death of the truth about myself.
That is one slice of what made up my addiction, among other things, but that's not what I'm here to talk about.
While I won't sit here and dish out all my dirty little (and big) scandals (I've learned that when I divulge too much information, it's a form of abandoning myself, I refuse to do that for the sake of popularity online) I will sit and tell you it's possible to accept the past, to live with it, and to grow from it.
Before you say "Jen, you don't even know the depth of my pain, how can you say I will be okay and be able to accept my past?!" Please know I understand that I will never fully grasp everyone's experience, that my own experience is far better than some, that it is also far worse than others, but I cannot shame (or gaslight) someone's experience. We cannot live each other's experiences, we can never fully understand someone's pain, but we should not make them feel any less worthy of recovery from their own past. We all have the right to recover, we all deserve to be here.
Some areas of my past are so painful, I haven't worked through them yet. They just sit there, acknowledged, but waiting to come bubbling up to the surface and I will be forced to deal with them. I've been proactively trying to work through a lot of my guilt and shame. This includes working with a therapist and remaining sober. Staying sober allows new perspectives and insight to enter my life. Before I felt like I was on a hamster wheel with my thinking. It's so refreshing when we gain a new perspective. When new insight or perspective enters my mind, I feel like I have to snatch it and study it. It's fleeting like if I don't pay attention, it will be gone. I wonder how many times this happened before when I was too worried about my next fix to notice.
*I imagine the sound of the AOL Instant Messenger Chat door opening and then closing almost immediately*
***NÄ“W pErSpEcTiVÄ“ has entered the chat***
***NÄ“W pErSpEcTiVÄ“ has entered the chat***
(if you don't understand this, I apologize, you had to be a teen in the early 2000s living in the US I suppose, I don't even know if it was AOL? Is that the same as AIM? It's been too long.) My heart would stop when my crush would come on, then drop when they left immediately. So much cringe.
What does acceptance mean to me? It means not crying over the past, wishing things would be different in my life, but grieving properly over my past and working through my emotions so I can move on. It means building a life for my future with the materials I have at hand, not wishing I had better materials to work with.
Acceptance for me is understanding I cannot go back and fix everything that I did wrong, that I can live with that, and build a life worth living going forward.
It also means that if I decide to take the scenic route, hit a squirrel, and it costs me $170, that I can accept that too.
Best, Jen