Deep in the soul

Have you ever just felt a deep pain or sadness in your soul? Today was an especially difficult day for me. Many things going wrong and most due to the changes and challenges caused by the pandemic. I was able to sort most of it out but I realized that I just felt pained, deep within. I don’t like that feeling as it brings about fear. Fear that the feeling is all to familiar and does that mean I am falling back to the old me, to the darkness? I’m sure that is not the case but it certainly is unsettling. I guess I am really struggling with how life is right now during this pandemic and I am unsure how to navigate through this. Since my job has me home; albeit paid, I have found that I feel as if I have no purpose and that brings about many of the darker feelings that were once all too familiar. Before my sobriety, the only purpose I had was to get drunk or high. I didn’t know or believe that I was capable of anything. I wasn’t raised in an atmosphere where education or goals were encouraged or where fostering confidence was present. Once I made the decision to change my life, one of the first things I did was get a job and for four years now I have had purpose and that does my mental health well.

I feel lost in my day to day right now. The first two weeks home I accomplished many projects that I had wanted to do and cleaned my house top to bottom. Now I find myself with a lot of idle time and I am unsure how to utilize it. I’ve never been good with a lot of quiet time to myself. It allows my mind to drift back to the memories that were once the catalysts for my drinking and drugging. My mind goes to all the “what if’s” and “should haves.” I sit and wonder what my life would have been like had it not been filled with all the trauma and abuse. I get stuck in the thoughts and feelings about what an absent mother I was to my children, especially the older four. I was always physically present with them but I was never really present. My pain was more important than them and then my drinking and drug use was more important. I always loved them with my whole heart, I just wasn’t capable of taking proper care of them. I always thought I was a great mother of course. It wasn’t until I got sober that I realized how much I hurt them and traumatized them. Thinking back to earlier in my marriage, I remember one time when my oldest was a preteen and only my second and third child were born, I had decided that I no longer wanted to live in the misery anymore. I attempted suicide with a serious drug overdose. It was my oldest child who found me and called 911. I ended up in the ICU for a while but obviously survived the attempt. Looking back now, it absolutely hurts my heart to think what that must have done to her. How could I have been so selfish? I Can only hope that one day she will be able to forgive me.

Unfortunately that was just one of the times I hurt my children. I think the worst thing I did regarding them was to stay in a horrible marriage because I believed that I had to. Part of me believed I had to keep my family together, part of me never believed that I could make it on my own and the rest of me was completely manipulated by my ex husband into believing that I had no choice. He was extremely talented in taking my childhood traumas and insecurities and using them to make me believe I was nothing without him and that I was so damaged I would lose my children. When I made the decision to change my life and to LIVE, sobriety wasn’t the first thing to happen. Throwing him out was the first thing! I had no job and no clue what I was going to do but I knew that until I was free from him, nothing else was possible. I had a lot of help coming to that realization from one hell of an amazing therapist! I don’t think I could have done it without her support, that’s for sure. Staying with him was the equivalent of staying locked in my traumatic childhood. As long as I stayed, there was no hope for recovery. Once he was gone, the weight that was lifted allowed me to go from a completely dysfunctional addict to a quite functional addict. So clearly he was 50% of the problem.

It was almost a year and a half until I took the next step and again with the help of my amazing therapist, walked into my first AA meeting. I have to giggle when I think of that time! You see, I had kind of decided that I just couldn’t live the way I was anymore because I was now drinking from the time I woke up until the time I went to bed, or passed out as it were. I went in to see her and said I wanted to stop and needed help. She proceeds to tell me that she is going to be gone for a week or something back to Denmark where she is from. She tells me that I can absolutely do this while she’s gone but of course I don’t see it that way. I tell her that I plan to drink until she returns…….AND I DID! When she comes back she agrees to see me just about every day for a week, which by the way is unbelievable! Who does that? This amazing woman did. And so it was…. I went to my first meeting but unfortunately I still drank during that first week but officially became sober on July 1 2017. I was terrified by the way. I still can’t believe I walked in to that first meeting all alone, and stayed! I met some really kind women that night as it was a women’s only meeting I attended. One of them became my sponsor whom I adore. She took me through the 12 steps and has been an amazing support. I can’t believe that in less than three months I will have three years of continuous sobriety!! Wow! I should probably have a little more faith in myself. Faith that I can get through this difficult time. I most certainly did not overcome a traumatic past to let this time of uncertainty and isolation take me back. Now I need to trust that I can do it, I will be okay, I will not go back into the darkness and that this; like everything else, is temporary.