Stuck Inside

Hello world!

Unless you've been living under a cactus, you know it's hurricane time.  We're all stocked up on canned food and batteries.  I wiped down all of our porch furniture and brought it inside.  All of our laptops, cell phones, iPods, and tablets are plugged into surge protectors and fully charged.  I've bothered to scour every single concerned e-mail from my desert-dweller mother for survival tips.  My fiancé even bought an 'emergency pumpkin' to carve in case of extreme boredom. 

So far so good, except I hate being stuck inside; I get major cabin fever.

I've been thinking about why I get so antsy when stuck in the house.  Maybe it just reminds me of times when I was so depressed that getting out of bed was a nearly insurmountable task.  Maybe I'm getting used to this no-isolation policy.  Those would be good things.  But I think I get uncomfortable because I allow myself to spend way too much time stuck in my head when I'm alone in the house.

My head is a war zone. 

My sponsor always says she needs her thinking supervised.  I definitely identify; being alone with my thoughts is dangerous.  If one could earn a couple bucks by creating crises, I'd literally be a pro.  When left festering in my mind, an insignificant error makes me a mistake, a tiny disagreement makes me a pathetic failure, and a momentary embarrassment makes my entire existence a shameful skidmark on society's underpants. Sick and suffering indeed!

So I'm doing stuff.  I cooked breakfast, did loads of laundry, cleaned the bathroom a bit, took out the recycling before the rain really started, and even dusted off the ukulele.

After all, there's nothing quite like actually doing stuff to make me not feel useless.

Until next time!

Retreating!

Hello world!

I'm slacking on blogging.  My bad.  I've even been slacking on my sponsor calls; they've dropped from once daily to twice every three days or so.  It's not that I feel the need to call her daily.  It's more like it's a good habit I've developed and I don't want to establish a precedence of calling-only-when-I-feel-like-it.  Because who knows when I won't feel like it--that'll be the time I need to call for sure.  So I call daily, usually with not much to say except, "Hi!  Just calling to check in.  Talk to you soon!".

But you get the point.  If I should be calling daily, then missing a call every few days isn't OK.  Plus I've been slacking on gratitude lists.  And I haven't been making a meeting every day.  It's not like any of these things is a crisis in and of itself.  I'm going to guess that most people with four years sober don't need a meeting every day.  I just wonder what's going on in my head that I'm moving backwards.  They say in sobriety that you're either moving forwards or moving backwards; there's no staying stagnant.  I gotta get back on track!

That said, in a few weeks I'm going to hit a milestone in sobriety: my first retreat!  Wow!  A women's retreat!  Wow!

I realized recently that I went several years without making a women's meeting.  I broke my streak by accident a month or two ago.  I used to attend a women's meeting every week when I first got sober, and found it an annoying complaintfest about spouses and kids.  It's taken me this long to realize that maybe it was me and not them.

Uh...duh.

But anyway.  I'm going on a women's retreat the first weekend of October, and I'm actually really pumped.  I read the itinerary today and I'm assigned to lead a meeting on Step 7: "Humbly asked him to remove our shortcomings".  There's only one paragraph on the subject in the Big Book (pg 76 of 'Into Action') so I started re-reading the chapter in the 12 & 12.  It's all about humility.  

I dug a little deeper and searched 'humility' on my e-AA iPhone app and realized that just about every reference to humility is connected with spirituality.  The gist is that one cannot have a connection with his higher power without humbling himself.  And I'm realizing now I haven't been praying or meditating regularly at all for a while.  

So maybe I should get on that.  And research Step 7 more.  And meditate more.  And say hi to my HP.  Maybe it'll be that simple to get me moving again!

Enjoy the Silence

Hello, world.

I'm having a slow start this Sunday.  I went 'down the shore' (if you're from the state I live in, then you'll understand--if you live here but are from elsewhere, you'll understand why the phrase makes me cringe)... right, so I went 'down the shore' last night with my fiance, his sponsor, and his sponsor's girlfriend.  We had a blast!  I couldn't imagine a night on the boardwalk until I saw it for myself.

But this morning I'm either sleepy or slightly depressed or both.  I'm going to go with sleepy until proven otherwise; somehow, terming myself as depressed sort of becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy when I'm only slightly down.  

Anyway.  I was sitting in bed after making breakfast doing nothing of consequence (writing a grocery list) and catching myself staring off into space.  I noticed a solid collection of pill bottles accumulating on my dresser next to my speakers (playing "Enjoy the Silence" a little too loudly).  Normally, my reaction would have been something like "I need to throw out the empty mood stabilizer bottles", but in that instance, I thought, "I must be over-medicated".  

I am not over-medicated.

I feel a range of human emotions.  A normal range.  I think.  I don't sob uncontrollably when little inconvenient things happen.  I don't spend days manically crazed to conquer the world.  Pretty good, I think, and pretty normal.  And I feel.  I feel sadness, happiness, boredom, interest, embarrassment, pride, ... , you get it.  I think it's just that my racing thoughts kept me awake for a decade and a half, and I'm not used to the silence in my head.

So for today, I'll take a leaf out of Depeche Mode's book.  I'm going to appreciate my day without mania.  I'm going to enjoy that silence!