Back in the Saddle

A couple months ago I got an email from WordPress saying that GD&T was overdue for renewal and so the domain was going to expire. I had been meaning to renew it, but felt I didn’t have anything to say so there was no immediate need to do so. It’s been a year since I’ve posted with any regularity. I never meant to take such a long hiatus. I never meant to actively take a hiatus at all. Life just got weird.

What do I mean by that? Well, there’s a whole lot of story that took place over the past year, but primarily I mean this: We alcoholics are an undisciplined lot. We (or maybe I should just say “I” as I don’t purport to speak for all of the alcoholic community) need some sort of regular schedule to keep us (me) doing what we (I) need to do. Since leaving work 15 months ago, my life has been anything but routine or disciplined. I’ve felt very disjointed and sometimes like I was floundering even trying to keep the “Beam” in sight, let alone staying on it.

I didn’t take into account how badly the shifting schedule of a college student was going to fuck with my sanity. Every few months I have to change my entire focus of study as well as my daily schedule. Then midterms and finals come and I have to change things up so I can spend more time studying or putting together big projects. Then I get a month or so with no responsibilities if I don’t want them.

Add to that all the wonderful growth opportunities that came up this year: Twice now, we’ve gone for an extended period of time (2-3 months, each) with absolutely no income and no idea how rent was going to get paid or how we were going to feed the family. (We are currently in the second such stretch now, though this one so far hasn’t been as bad as the first.) One of my classes triggered some serious issues from my childhood that I had to work through, and I began a new journey through the program of Adult Children of Alcoholics which has allowed me to look at some things from a new perspective. Meanwhile, we learned that my baby girl had suffered some physical and emotional abuse from her stepmother. So of course I was a complete and utter crazy person, doing my damnedest not to go and kill the woman (not that I would ever literally hurt her, but I certainly had some anger and resentment I had to work through). And then people started dying. Like, a lot of people. Most of them were older and/or quite ill. Some were closer than others. But we lost 6 people in 6 weeks and that was really rough.

Dude.

So, yeah, God has been working on teaching me to rely on Him more. And I have had wonderful opportunities to learn to discipline myself better and stop procrastinating so much. That is, I have had the opportunities, not necessarily that I have acted on them. Oops. This year has felt a lot more like survival than growth, and unfortunately it’s not quite over yet. There does seem to be a light on the horizon, though.

The nice thing is that I really do trust God here. I have been scared and worried about what’s going to come next, but at the end of the day I know that no matter what happens I’m going to be fine. There are a lot of rough edges I still need to work off in order to help this time go more smoothly, but I have changed a lot this year, too. I am more calm, more quick to admit I may be wrong or to let the little things go. I’ve gained a whole new level of trust that I didn’t even know existed. I’ve been gentler on myself and less proud (do not confuse pride with self-centeredness because I am as egocentric as ever). I’ve been able to take the mothering thing to a whole new level, too. I have a lot more confidence when it comes to my kids than I ever have before. And even though I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up, I know a lot more things I don’t want to do with my life now.

So, yeah, I’m still here. Still sober. Still doing the thing. I don’t have a whole lot of wisdom to impart just yet, but I am crawling out from under my rock to see what the world looks like again. I don’t know exactly what is going to be happening here at GD&T, but there is going to be a new feature coming soon, thanks to one of my classes. More on that later. Right now, I just wanted to take a minute to let you know I’m alive and reasonably well, despite a little extra dirt on the tires.