30 Day Recovery Challenge

[The Albatross]

Day 21 - What was your ‘rock bottom’? How did you overcome it? I have had some "rock bottoms" of various sorts but because of the reaction to the letter to my father and my time in recovery I will think this over. I may elect to write about it privately if I do it at all. I have been in recovery for 13 years total for various things including therapy and counseling.

How I am overcoming it is accepting the reality that I needed help from other people, that I could benefit from mentor-ships and that I could learn what I needed to turn my life around with dogged persistent use of the power of choice. I will think about this today and maybe come back and write more here or on my diary

 

[Bree]

Day 13 - Have your struggles changed you? For better or worse? Why?

Oh my god why yes they have changed me.

Naturally anxiety and PTSD have had negative affects on me. That goes without saying. They are diseases, and when you break down the word disease, you get 'dis-ease'.


To stick to the positive side, I'm going to talk about the one good thing that has came from my illnesses.

Which is that I'm no longer able to pass judgement on anyone. Yes, some people frustrate me. Yes, some people annoy me. That's part of life. But I don't hold /anyone's/ actions against them.

My mental illnesses have taught me that people's personalities and behaviors are shaped by their genetics and the environment they were subjected to while young. Therefore, most people didn't have direct control over the person they are today. Everyone's actions have underlying, and often unknown reasons behind them, which go unaccounted for. So people need to stop being so quick to judge.

For example, there was a girl at my high school who had a bad reputation for being a slut. Everyone knew she was a cheater who loved to sleep around. Due to this, my classmates constantly bullied her. But I didn't because I knew about her home life and her past. This girl was severely verbally abused by her mother on a daily basis, and she was raped on her fifteenth birthday, during her first ever date. Due to these two combined traumas the girl absolutely despised herself as a person. She blamed herself for her mother's ongoing insults, and she blamed herself for getting raped.

She began seeking out multiple romantic and sexual partners in order to get the affection and attention she constantly needed in order to not feel shitty about herself. She wasn't engaging in these destructive behaviors because she was a bad person who liked breaking hearts. She was engaging in them because she was hurt, really badly.

I can think of tons of other real-life examples, but you get the point. I'm not condoning everyone's bad behaviors. I'm just saying a lot of shit goes into why we, as humans, act the way we act. And if I had never gotten PTSD or anxiety, then I would've never been forced to examine how /my own/ reckless, harmful behaviors stem from some really sad, heart-wrenching issues.

See, they don't teach you this stuff in school. They don't teach you how to accept others and not to place blame and not be hateful, which you should do, because no one knows what someone else is really going through. Sure they say these things in school and everywhere else using cliches, but they don't bother to explain the cliches in depth.

However, because of my mental illnesses, I know that there's a bigger picture behind everyone. I Really get that. Everyone deserves a little empathy. I have so, so much more compassion for each person alive, now that I have anxiety and PTSD.

 

[The Albatross]

Day 22 - Favorite quote(s) to live by?

I love quotes and have many... but Richard Bach books were my favorites. So here are a few:

"Here is the test to find whether your mission on Earth is finished: if you're alive, it isn't." ~ Richard Bach

"Your conscience is the measure of the honesty of your selfishness. Listen to it carefully." ~ Richard Bach

"Don't believe what your eyes are telling you. All they show is limitation. Look with your understanding, find out what you already know, and you'll see the way to fly." ~ Richard Bach

"Every problem has a gift for you in its hands. You seek problems because you need their gifts." ~ Richard Bach

"We are each given a block of marble when we begin a lifetime, and the tools to shape it into sculpture... We can drag it behind us untouched, we can pound it into gravel, we can shape it into glory." ~ Richard Bach

"An easy life doesn't teach us anything. In the end it's the learning that matters: what we've learned and how we've grown." ~ Richard Bach

"Any powerful idea is absolutely fascinating and absolutely useless until we choose to use it." ~ Richard Bach

"The opposite of loneliness, it's not togetherness. It is intimacy." ~ Richard Bach

“That's what learning is, after all; not whether we lose the game, but how we lose and how we've changed because of it and what we take away from it that we never had before, to apply to other games. Losing, in a curious way, is winning.” ~ Richard Bach

“Life does not require us to be consistent, cruel, patient, helpful, angry, rational, thoughtless, loving, rash, open-minded, neurotic, careful, rigid, tolerant, wasteful, rich, downtrodden, gentle, sick, considerate, funny, stupid, healthy, greedy, beautiful, lazy, responsive, foolish, sharing, pressured, intimate, hedonistic, industrious, manipulative, insightful, capricious, wise, selfish, kind or sacrificed. Life does, however, require us to live with the consequences of our choices.” ~ Richard Bach

"Happiness is the reward we get for living to the highest right we know." ~ Richard Bach

 

[The Albatross]

Day 23 - How would you deal if your (future?) child had your addiction/disorder? What would you say to them?

I am not in any frame of mind to answer this question even though I know what it is necessary for. The fact is, I don't have a child, will never have a child, and I am not up to writing a bunch of puffed up stuff about how supportive I'd be. More than likely I'd have my foibles and be as much (but hopefully less) than a mixed bag as my parents. I would like to think I could tell a child that I loved them before my father told me. But really the damage was already done way before I left for boot camp.

The best I can muster, is what my shrink said to me, "It is not the world's job to adapt and change to suit you. It is your job to find a way to adapt and cope and change to live in it." "Self pity will kill you just as much as drugs or booze. Get off your ass and get help, it is too big to do by yourself. You need assistance, like I did."

 

[The Albatross]

I am increasingly finding this exercise to be difficult. But I am determined to press on even if my responses are not fleshed out in the way that they sort of need to be. 7 days left, and I can't wait to put this behind me.

Some of the questions, though well intended (and my rational mind can see that) are making me feel very sad and depressed.

 

[Bree]

Day 14 - Think about yourself one year ago, how have you changed?

It is good that I am specifically answering this question today, because this day is a one year milestone for me.

This time last year, I had finished my very last day of high school.

I walked out of school for the last time with one of my best friends. It should be noted that I was in love with him, and had been so for two years prior.

While by his side I felt unstoppable. When we stepped out for the last time, I was feeling a mixture of slight nostalgia and extreme elation. I sprinted to the top of the student parking lot and then stared, in shock, back down at my high school. I screamed as loudly as I possibly could, to let out all my emotions. I spun around in circles until I was so dizzy I fell down. Then I started to scream again. My friend just laughed at my ridiculousness. He got me into his car and we drove to his house, where we watched movies and cuddled and played video games.

Everything felt so final and so full of new starts and hope and perfection that day.

You see, at the time, I had JUST ran away from my mom, and I was on top of the world. The PTSD from how horrible and abnormal my childhood had been hadn't set in yet. Actually, the very fact that my childhood /had/ been abnormal and horrible had not set in yet. Though I had left my mother, at the time I still had her on a pedestal. I still thought she had put the stars in the sky. Back then, I still believed a lot of sad, untrue things. Like I believed it was typical for parents to use cocaine in front of their kids. I believed it was okay to pawn your kids things for drug money, to go without heat, and electricity. Though I lived around abusive, manipulative people, I didn't believe that anyone would ever try to hurt anyone else on purpose. I also thought that you can become successful in any career you want, so I was going to run off and go to college and study art and become a famous writer and actor and everything was going to be sunshine and rainbows and miracles, and no one was ever going to abuse me again and I was never going to be sad again. Actually, at the time I didn't know I even had been abused. I was naive. I was hopeful. I thought I knew everything about the world, and that life was soon going to be everything I had ever dreamed of, now that I had graduated high school.

Then, slowly and harshly, reality set in. I began realizing my total perception was sick and f*cked up. I learned that there are mean people, that there are people who will inflict pain on you, just because they like to. I learned that my mom was one of those people and that I had been subjected to a lifetime of abuse. I learned that the idea of me running off and going to some top-notch university to study, and then becoming instantly successful in an arts oriented career was some complete bullshit fantasy invented by my childish perception on everything. I lost all hope in everything and I got really confused. I didn't know what was a normal way of life and what wasn't, I didn't know how to accomplish my dreams, I started doubting everything I was living for. Then, I lost all hope, meaning, and self-identity.

And that's where I am now. So as a person I'm a lot more depressed and shit. But I'm also no longer entertaining this childish sunshine and rainbows fantasy. I'm slowly looking at how f*cked up life can be a little more everyday. At this point, everything seems like total bullshit.

That being said, I'm still in love with the boy mentioned above, we're still best friends, and though we've never dated, I still got to call him up a couple days ago and tell him that I'm madly in love with him, and I got to thank him for being one of the only people who has stood by me anxiety and PTSD and all, who has sat with me for hours while I've cried on his bedroom floor about everything from loosing my faith in God to having shitty breakups to loosing my mom to drugs. He's been there, through it all, which just might be restoring my faith in life a little. Like maybe life isn't as bad as it seems and maybe there are good people out there or some shit like that. I don't know, just maybe.

 

[Bree]

Day 15 - When you are triggered, what do you tell yourself to calm down?

Ha, that's funny. It doesn't even matter, because I don't believe any of the bullshit positive things I say to myself when I'm triggered. My therapist says positive affirmations will only work if I believe them. Now, the hard part right now is trying to believe something positive.

 

[The Albatross]

Day 24 - Has having the internet helped or hurt your recovery? Why?

It has helped. It has given me access to resources not available in my town. It has connected me with people who have had similar struggles. It has helped me to be accountable, I use it as a daily "check in".

 

[The Albatross]

Day 25 - What/who in your life makes you smile ear to ear? Why?

Hmmm. I don't know that anyone consistently makes me smile ear to ear. The closest thing I think is infants and toddlers. At the clinic yesterday was a beautiful two year old named Elijah. Watching this beautiful mocha boy with hazel eyes and ringlet curls as he went about the room greeting all the animals in the clinic so gently for a child his age... made smile.

Listening to stories of the elders I visit, of when they were children and their antics and mischief... watching them retell their stories with a glint in their eye like a rekindled ember in a campfire. That makes me smile.

The ear to ear kind of smiling is elusive for me but there have been a few times. A rescue burro named Peso who would recognize the sound of my car when I'd pull up and he would bray until I would come to the back fence to say hello and give him a scratch and a small treat. Or the time we were caught in a thunderstorm on Coldwater River in inner tubes and I continued to drift down the river blowing bubbles and singing "Rain Drops Keep Falling On My Head" loudly and sometimes purposely off key.

Why? Well, I guess in order of the 4 examples it would be: the beauty, vitality, and spontaneity of youth, the transformation that happens by storytelling when elders speak of their childhoods, the near comical insistence to be greeted by an animal that thought I was the best thing apparently since sliced bread, and the odd moment of reckless silliness when I think things are really very funny.

 

[Bree]

Day 16 - List 5 things you are grateful for.

At this very moment I feel grateful for

1) Avatar, The Last Airbender. Watching this silly kid's cartoon is majorly helping with my recovery.

2) The ability to imagine an amazing, successful future in which I call my own shots, and live freely.

3) Being reunited with my Dad, and meeting my Stepmom. Though it was eighteen years too late, I'm finally able to see and be apart of a real, functional family. They all drive me up the wall sometimes. And yes, I'm counting the days til I can get away and move out. But I have never known a stronger, greater sense of love to exist between a group of people. I have never been part of a family that sticks with each other, through thick and thin. This is a wonderful experience. I'm so lucky for all the love in my life.

4) Having a consistent place to live with electricity, heat, and food. God, please don't let me ever forget how difficult it is to live without those necessities. I want the pain from my poverty-stricken past burned in my memory, so that I may never take for granted a single meal.

5) Those rare moments of pure spiritual happiness and clarity. I spend so much time depressed now and preoccupied with suicide ideation, that I revel in every laugh and smile. Moments of happiness are so sacred, because I know at in second I could sink back into the dark void.

 

[Bree]

Day 17 - What in your life has improved since you entered recovery?

That's a hard question, because I honestly am at my rock bottom right now. Everything sucks, but I guess it's kind of like that saying- "If it hurts, that means it's working". Right now, I am being forced to peel back everything and face head on all those icky traits that make me despise myself to my core. And I am being forced to correct them. This is no easy task. But I feel myself getting a little stronger because of it everyday.

 

[The Albatross]

Day 26 - What would you say to someone if they told you ‘I give up on my recovery. It’s too hard.’?

The reality is that, ultimately, it is far better to be in recovery than to give up and stay in the behavior. The reality is that change will occur and that the choice to give up and not recover will put you on a slow slide of diminishing returns. My brain would like to me and tell me that it is safer, better, easier to live an isolated life... but it was a lie. It became problematic and affected my familial relationships, my marital relationship, my ability to earn a wage, and contributed to my physical illness and increased my habitual use of alcohol to the point almost the point of no return.

Far better then to use mutual aid, therapy, and to learn management techniques and endeavor to use them than to die or to become destitute and alone unable to fend for myself. In the end, it has been easier to recover... though stressful, than it has to continue to exist in a life untreated. Someone said, something like, "Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing." I have found that recovering is that, "work worth doing". Far better to be in and around recovery, than to slowly lose for the remaining of my days and have to make harder and harder choices, living in my head with the monsters screaming at me. Fear based thinking is a killer.

I can't know what the next 20 years will have for me, but I know that I have more choices at my disposal now to help me stop the slide and even reverse some things and improve the quality of my days. Take charge of your life, take charge of your mind, get assistance, and get into recovery. Those who sit at it's table are survivors and there is much to learn from them. Benefit from the experiences of others, and you never have to go through anything alone.