In case you need a reminder today: It’s going to be okay. You are not a failure.
Lapse, relapse, messed up, slipped up, fucked up, wrong choice?
It doesn’t mean that you don’t deserve sobriety.
It doesn’t mean that you will always just mess up.
It also doesn’t mean that you have failed and you should shelve the idea of attempting a new lifestyle.
I won’t bore you with the specifics in relation to all of the times that I lied to myself and cheated my sobriety and fucked up early on in my recovery.
Or how many times I sat surrounded by that cozy familiar feeling of numb, staring blankly into space as I listened to people who were telling me that I was loved and that they could see me, as I secretly pondered how much I didn’t deserve to be there hearing those things.
Since I sincerely don’t love giving direct advice, here is some that I would have whispered into my own ear:
You are changing your entire life. Calm down and slow down a little bit.
Listen. This is all new. You changed jobs, friends, locations, and your life is no longer recognizable. Your new normal will feel weird for a while and you will probably be uncomfortable and scared.
Maybe you aren’t sure that you will ever get used to it all, but you will. It might take a long time to warm up to all of the new things, and for those new things to become your normal things, but they will. It takes time. Also, when you are in the midst of all of the changes you probably won’t be able to see how your small changes are important and it will be frustrating. You will have no idea how significant or incredible the small victories actually are, or how huge their role is to the process. Try to calm down and let the things play out, because I can assure you, they all matter.
Handle yourself with more care and stop with the picking.
Just stop. You are over-analytical and critical are there are not strong enough words to describe how harshly you handle yourself. It is okay that you are not meeting your own unrealistic expectations and unattainable goals. You are shedding skin that you have lived in for over twenty-years. This process is painful. You expected sobriety to be the answer, and while it is the first step toward peace and freedom, it is only the first step in the right direction. Keep pushing through. Keep rewriting and overshadowing your old beliefs about yourself and about what you thought your experiences and choices meant. You get to choose what happens next.
Recovery changes and it isn’t as black and white as people think.
There’s grey. The grey is where the magic happens. It’s where the lessons and learning and navigation take place. When you make a mistake or forgot to journal, or if you miss a meeting, or lose your temper, or slip up, or feel your old ways of thinking or coping creeping back to the forefront of your mind, that doesn’t mean that you throw everything else out the window.
Your progress still matters. Don’t discount all of the days and weeks that you walked through the doors of the church sober with your homework done. Don’t overlook all of the times you came straight home from work or that one time that you turned your car around and decided to come back home instead of going where you weren’t supposed to go. Don’t believe that since you slipped up that you should completely derail. You haven’t failed, you messed up. And that’s it.
Now you stand up and you own it, and admit it and you keep moving forward.