I’ve surrendered yet again. I can’t do this alone. My mind is at breaking point and my heart needs rest. I wake worried, I go to sleep worried and my dreams are also worrisome. Anxiety has taken me over and the desire to drown in a sea of alcohol is beginning to sound like a good idea. My issues with alcohol ceased being a problem a long time ago, yet my reserves are so low that numbing sounds delicious. How did I get here again?
Life seems to have a habit of hitting me with stuff all at the same time. It’s never one thing at a time, but always a sequence of major events within a month. I’ve never quite figured out why that is though. I’ve sat with my therapist and asked her why. She maintains that we can be predisposed to catastrophe depending on our birth and family situations and that things spiral out of control seemingly without cause. But there is always a cause. Being in survival mode all of your life means that other things get neglected and missed. Hence the snowballing of emotional and physical dis-ease. If keeping a roof over your head and food on the table is a constant uphill battle, then there is little time to look at ourselves internally.
Healing is eternal
I get that, but why now, when I’ve been looking internally for so many years? Because there is always something else to look at. In some crevice or other, buried deep inside, there are dusty, neglected parts of ourselves that need healing and sit there waiting their turn. Humans cannot cope with the devastating things that can happen to some of us and doing the healing all at once can literally kill us. So we begin our journey slowly, lifting each event out of ourselves for examination. Just when we think we have completed all the clearing and dusting, we find one more item that needs attention.
It takes a lifetime to become emotionally sick and so it takes another lifetime to heal. Some of us never get to heal at all and some of us need to come back to earth several times to learn and heal from one lifetime of being alive. So the Buddhists say. For now, I live one moment at a time, putting one foot in front of the other. I’ve had to as for lots of help from those who love me and from professionals. I have surrendered but will never give up.
Things are a little different this time though. Because of making good decisions along my healing path I now have good people around me. I can trust my decisions to do the right thing and I trust myself. On each step of our journey, we pick up new coping skills that help us with the next part of our healing process. Each lesson, no matter how insignificant it may seem, becomes monumentally important in a different situation. Gather all of those lessons. You will need every single one at some point. I’ve needed everyone, and I can’t do this alone.
