It’s me again, Margaret

I saw my therapist this morning. She sure wants me to go to meetings. She doesn’t get off it, she keeps circling back to it. There’s been periods that I didn’t trust her about telling me what to do with addiction because it came out that she drank. Apparently, she is a “Normie” though and she has worked through other recovery related issues. I’m sorry but codependency isn’t a chemical addiction. Not the same thing. But, that is what turns me into an asshole about defending the alcohol and why I drank. I get where she thinks that I need community. I stopped arguing with her about it. OK. She might be right. I am quite the loner. I am fine to hang out with myself for days on end. When I have depression it is definitely a lonely experience. I am currently not depressed and I can entertain myself and not feel the sadness of being alone. It’s solitude, not isolation right now. And I do have people. I guess she just wants me to have sober people in person. I have a horrible resistance to AA. It’s from my childhood. It’s from watching my dad still be an asshole. And when I hear people who sound like him in meetings, I get really turned off and want to drink. So, we discussed the trauma from my childhood again and it really was similar to religious abuse. I know, I know. Anyway, it’s not what I got on here to talk about…

Continuous sobriety, I don’t have it. I can string together thirty days, two weeks, three weeks, I even had six months once the first time I really tried. There is something though that comes up for me and I don’t know how to get around it, through it, over it, whatever.  It’s like everything that I work towards, changing my mindset, spending hours listening to podcasts and reading about recovery and putting things into practice like yoga and meditation or walking my dog or meal planning and I start to feel really good,  I then say, “oh just fuck it all” and I drink. Why? I know why. I have an addiction to the sauce. I’m missing something very fundamental to keep it going. To keep my sober car on the road. Poor Belle, she’s reset me so many times.

The eating disorder plays a huge roll. The last few years of being in recovery from anorexia has been a total mind bend. Right now, I’m pretty thin and my hunger cues suck ass. I wish we could just get our nutrition from gummy bears and be done with it. Food is stupid. The fact that I even got a diagnosis of anorexia nervosa was very liberating. Finally, people believed me, not necessarily my friends or family but people who worked in the field that could help me see it for what it is, validating that it is painful to be this thin just as it is painful to be fat, tons of emotional stuff going on here for all of us and we take it out on food. Damn our diet obsessed culture and the misinformation out there about what we should look like and what is the ideal body weight. It’s like drinking culture and diet culture are the “alternative facts” to what makes a happy life most people buy into it and hard to see the shit from the shinola.

Hang with me for a bit longer. There’s a saying in recovery from eating disorders along the lines of “you have to get the tiger out of the cage and walk him three different times around the block a day”  And let’s say that recovery from addiction is locking up the tiger and not letting him out of the cage no matter how sweet he talks to you. I have two tigers here. In two separate cages. One I have to walk around the block and he’s an old crotchety mean guy, I can’t say I enjoy his company that often and one that is totally cute and sweet and loves his walks…. oh the dilemma.  I guess, I should look at it that if I can get these two beasts under control eventually I can send them off to the animal sanctuary and I will be free. In the meantime, it’s my job right now to train them.