Where the road leads next

Not wanting my week to start, I am going to blog a little this afternoon. It seems a good diversion, one I won't regret later, (hopefully) one that won't get me into trouble, (much) and looks good if the boss should walk in. Not that I actually have to look busy. In fact, I could just as easily be doing this from home.

Speaking of home, I had a fantastic lunch this afternoon of lasagna and pumpkin pie. Lasagna is so over the top for lunch, but to chase it down with pie! All I can say is "wow".

I can't say wow about the work portion of my day however. It hasn't even been a bad day, I just don't feel like doing anything today. I am sure part of the problem is I have had 2 restless nights sleep. A tired Davie is a not so upbeat Davie. A tired Davie tends to look at things with a little too much introspection and start thinking in absolutes like "always" and "never". With that in mind, I am just going to give myself a break today and chalk it up as one of those days.

One of the lessons of Al-anon is to take it easy on yourself. I am notoriously so self critical I leave little room for people that hate me to do worse. I guess that is a defense mechanism or something; hit me with your best shot, mine was already harder.

Over my year of recovery I have learned to stop the internal banter of self destruction. At first it was like losing a friend and very difficult to let faults just hang out there for other people to pick up on. A funny thing started to happen however, as I allowed people in my life to care about me, those faults became areas I could work on with them.

Being vulnerable allows us to grow. Having it all "figured out" ahead of time left me unapproachable and haughty. The end result was I never actually had to change anything. As long as I could mask the need to change with the aggressive attitude of already knowing I had to, I could agree with the fault, but never agree on the solution.

The last thing most children of alcoholics want to do is agree with the fault and agree with the solution and for good reason. For some of us, we knew the fault was not us and the solution was for the alcoholic to stop drinking. All too often we became the fault and the solution in the alcoholic home, so the only way to survive the schism of changing the core of who we were as a person, was to self loathe. That way the pain and confusion of a home life in crisis could be focused internally without destroying what was left of a shattered soul.

Unlearning that behavior takes grace and takes time. It takes grace to know that not everything rises to the level of crisis and it takes time to learn how to trust criticism that does not destroy.

It is a painfully slow process to learn that some days are just "those days" and not connected to anything more.

Time to get some work done - wasting time at work is a fault.