These past few weeks have been a time of forced withdrawal after a longer period of intense activity that was both self-imposed and accidental. I look back at my posts from the last year and see the ebbs and flows of my journey, a clear coming to terms with the need to balance action and rest. I have always thought of myself as an overachiever, in pretty much everything I do. A striver for perfection. Sometimes I’m not even sure what I’m perfecting, I’ve just convinced myself that I need to relentlessly keep at it. My brain is wily in this respect. Its reasoning powers are seductive, and I can be easily conned to do its bidding.
Even though I’ve gotten better at observing my inner mechanisms, I am finding that my mind can be very slippery in the way that it works. Either I find new excuses for what I want to do, or I willfully ignore or fall asleep to the reality of what I’m doing. What I had been doing for some months was pushing myself in extreme ways. This developed in several different areas of my life over a series of months and it created a perfect storm.
It started with my client workload increasing, which I had identified pretty early on and was purposefully winding down. But while I was winding down my hours, some other client changes made me realize the instability of my situation. Since I had also been exploring changes in my marriage and my own independence, this instability started to produce some anxiety about how I would support myself. At the same time, I had immersed myself in a few online classes that I was sure would lead me to my new career path, but the details were still a little vague. I suddenly felt a sense of urgency to learn all that I could as fast as I could.
In the meantime, groups that I had initially felt supported by were evolving in ways that felt unstable. My relationships with members of these groups were changing, and I was finding it hard to find connection with anyone. I struggled showing up to meetings as myself. I didn’t feel accepted. I started to feel a deep sense of longing and my anxiety worsened. This in turn made me want to work harder, to dig deeper. To find a way out of this mess, I turned to old habits of listening to my inner slave driver who kept urging me to keep going. My intuition was trying to communicate with me… why else would a book about idleness come under my nose right at that time?
It still did not dawn on me that what I really needed was a break — until a friend pointed it out to me during a practice focusing session that I had booked with her. I’m not sure what made me perk up and listen to her advice, but I did immediately. This frenetic overdoing is a pattern in my life and although I keep thinking that I’ve mastered it, I clearly don’t always recognize when it is happening. I dreamt about alcohol that very night which alarmed me. I had been pretty confident that it would be a cold day in hell before I’d go back to drinking — an attitude that I guess makes alcoholics worry about me. Even though I hate the idea of having a target perpetually on my back, I’m humble enough to understand that I don’t have complete control over my life. Will I ever? I don’t know. I guess that’s why the surrender is important.
I personally enjoy the surrender. It’s my favorite part of recovery. Trying to control everything in my life has never been enjoyable to me and that’s a huge reason why I drank in the first place. I found some sense of surrender in alcohol. The art of the surrendering without needing alcohol is a new concept to me, but I love it. So, as soon as I realized what was happening with my inner slave driver, I surrendered. I detached myself from all the noise, disengaged from social media, stopped striving, and took myself away for a private retreat to re-find my center.
Now that I’ve found my center, I’ve been a little wary of opening myself up to the noise again. I have been watching my mind try to convince me of all the reasons I don’t need to be part of certain relationships or groups. It’s very interesting to observe these thoughts. As when they tried to lure me to work harder and overachieve, I know that now, too, they are simply trying to protect me, but it’s still not exactly what I want for my life. In fact, I have been actively working on my relationships with people and groups. I don’t want to run away or cut myself off like I’ve been doing my entire life. But all of this takes work and I must give myself time to flower.
I can’t keep thinking I can master everything quicker if I strive hard enough. Maybe the path forward will be a step here and there between the surrendering. I’ve got all the time in the world. This is my life journey after all. Step by step.
