Patterns
This Week on Diary of a Sober Girl
I am so grateful to be sober. I’m grateful for my friends, for my family, for our new home and all of the help we received the past few days. I’m grateful for stepping out of my comfort zone, for my sponsor and my sponsees, for a box of 64 kcups from Costco, for our new neighborhood and for rest. I’m grateful for my birthday soon – another year around the sun, for a fresh week and space to sit outside.
Goooodd morning my friends (: As always, I hope everyone had a wonderful weekend and a very happy, safe and sober 4th!
I am pleased to announce that we are officially moved into our new apartment and genuinely I could not be more grateful. This apartment is everything we wanted it to be and then some and we could not have ended up here if we were not sober.
However, because I am an alcoholic this very exciting and happy moment was coupled with me being full of fear. Fear about work, fear about change, mostly fear about work if I’m being honest. I’ve been making a few mistakes lately (let’s not talk about the immense stress moving causes) and I have been convinced that I am going to get fired and then we are going to have to move out of our beautiful new apartment. Â
So naturally, I put on Sex and the City to make myself feel better – and Ms. Bradshaw herself just so happened to be talking about how we are our own worst critics. (For all my SATC lovers out there – it was the episode where Carrie runs into Nina Katz – the face lady – who dated Aiden right after Carrie. Was it a purposeful choice? Possibly...).
I don’t know about you guys, but I’ve heard that very same message from many different angles – Psychology, sobriety, on TV, in music. Is it because we think about ourselves more than anyone else does? Why are we our own worst critics??
I have the tools now to help with that – prayer, meditation, a meeting, service, calling my sponsor, getting out of self, doing self-care, etc., etc., etc. But it’s hard. It’s hard to not pick myself apart, to not wait for the other shoe to drop, to constantly be braced for the next worst case.
It’s exhausting living that way and I almost cannot help myself. Hopefully I’m not going to get fired, I need to have better faith that I’m always taken care of by HP. That feeling of faith ebbs and flows a lot. But something I did do pretty well these past few weeks is put one foot in front of the other (depending on who you ask, definitely DON’T ask Timmy if I did a good job doing that). So maybe that’s what I need to apply everywhere else too – I will recover from my mistakes a work by putting one foot in front of the other. My relationship with faith will start to flow more than it ebbs by putting one foot in front of the other.
One day, probably far down the road my emotions and intense need to control will level out by simply putting one foot in front of the other.
So – that’s my takeaway for the day. If I can do anything, it’s just taking one step at a time ;)
P.S. After writing and going to copy and paste into Substack – I am realizing last week’s post was titled one foot in front of the other. So, if this is redundant, I apologize but CLEARLY there’s a pattern going on here that I need to take note of.
Xx
Jane