nin137

The Garage Door

there is no truer testament to just how emotionally unable i am to deal with stress than the incident with the garage door yesterday.

the journey of recovery, at least for me in my first few weeks, has been fraught with stressors. those stressors are what is commonly referred to as life. you know, just the everyday aggravations that we have to deal with? a flat tire, an unmoving cashier line, a traffic jam, or in my case a god forsaken old ass garage door.

so what happened was that, somehow, our garage door has gotten stuck on something. when i tried to open it, the door itself stayed put while the mechanism that actually opens the door proceeded to tear the part that it was attached to the door with OFF of the door. this action caused two very worrisome sounds to emanate from my already old ass garage door:

1) a creaky tear that would put any carpenter's hairs on end as the frame of the door promptly detached itself from the door as the garage door mechanism mercilessly went about its business of pulling a heavy garage door open.

2) the second was a thundering crash as the frame detached itself and the garage door came flying down Indiana Jones style. this caused a loud "ha-wumph!!!" as the garage door finally and irretrievably decided to shut one final time.

and i will be god damned if i can open that thing manually. whatever it did to get stuck, it sure as shit wasn't about to get unstuck for me no matter how much i tried (and i tried, boy did i try).

so there i was at 5:30 pm. my intensive outpatient (IOP) program for my recovery starting in 30 minutes. and i was fucked. and i was pissed. and i just generally did not handle this well at all.

the entire night i stewed that i couldn't make it to IOP. that my fucking schedule was disrupted. and i guess that would be fine if maybe i got angry about it and left it over the span of maybe 20 minutes or half an hour, but no. i couldn't let this grave injustice go! and what was worse, i then got angry at myself for dwelling on it! oh what a downward spiral indeed!

so goes the emotional stability of an addict in recovery. every slight transgression is a huge affront to us. this morning i of course went into self-pity mode as i had to jog three blocks because the bus was late so that i could make it to my doctor's appointment. more whining, more feeling sorry for myself. fucking lame.

ironically i am reading "the spirituality of imperfection". well maybe not ironically. i NEED some spirituality in my life. i know that i am lacking it and have lacked it for a long, long time (assuming that i ever really ever even had it in the first place).

one heartening thought i have gleaned from the book is that the bright side to addiction (or rather recovery) is that it allows for people like me (cynical, analytical, not at all prone to spirituality) to "bring us closer" to spirituality. which SOUNDS good, but as with most of this spiritual stuff i can't tell if it's bullshit or good wisdom.

i guess what it means is that i would never have even TRIED to attain spirituality had i not put myself in my current situation. which i would wholeheartedly agree with.

i just wish i could get that "ah-ha" moment that so many people in AA talk about. i am just far too skeptical to just let things be.

what i am really trying to do is "be present" and "live in the now" I read "The Power of Now" and while i had to filter out about 75% of its material, the remaining 25% was magnificent. i am someone who gets so tightly wound up by the past and the future that i make myself sick (i am prone to anxiety and these thoughts trigger it).

the spirituality i want is the ability to just be happy and at peace in the current moment. that doesn't mean that i have to be blind to the future and never think about my past, but to only do so within reason. to make my primary focus on the present moment and how i feel, what i am grateful for. which is kind of hard to do when the fucking piece of shit garage door is mocking me...but i am trying!