Sometimes I wish I could give people a chance to live a day in my head, just so they might understand what I struggle with everyday. I can’t so I thought I’d write out a few different scenarios and show how ACA thinking affects everyday life moments.
You’re out with friends. Hanging, actually enjoying yourself, but then someone makes a joke, one single stupid joke about the joys of booze, and then all that fun you’ve been having? It’s done. You try hard to have a good time, but you just got reminded of all the fun with booze you had growing up. The yelling, the anger, the fear. In a single instant you just got consumed. You can’t wait to leave, because you want to run to your bed, fall asleep in the hopes it resets your mood. But these are your friends. To run away now would raise questions. So you sit and stay and pretend to be having a good time, and wonder how screwed up a person has to be to hate hanging out with their friends like this.
You’ve made the decision to go to this group meeting. You’re eager and excited about going, because you like the people in the group. Everything is going well, until you hear someone else share something personal in their lives. You want to share as well. But what do you say? You’re struggling and hurting and close to tears, but you can’t figure out what to say about it. So you stay silent. Doesn’t matter anyway. Even if you did figure out what to say, you can’t. Despite your best efforts the words stay stuck in you. You get so frustrated, because you know that if only you could ask for help, it would be given to you. You know this, and still can’t force the words out. So you become angry at yourself, and upset, and when you are alone you feel the tears well up. You wonder whether or not you should go to that group meeting anymore.
Things aren’t exactly going super in your life right now. You accept this, because you know that your life is destined to suck. When things go wrong sometimes you don’t even know if you’re allowed to be upset about it. You look to others to gauge how you’re supposed to feel. And because things go wrong, you blame yourself. Even if you did your best, it doesn’t matter, because you failed. And because you failed you get angry at yourself. You start listening to that voice in your head that says you’re worthless, that you don’t matter. You get struck by depression and then find yourself doing nothing for days on end, because you don’t think you can stand one more failure. And you just know if you try and go after what you want you’ll fail. Because that’s how your twisted mind works.
And God. You struggle with God a lot. For a while it was okay. You accepted what happened to you as a kid because it made you stronger. But then you realize just how weak you actually are, and that you are forced to recover in Al-anon/ACA due to what happened. So now you struggle to find another reason why God let that happen to you. And you wonder if God’s plan is for you to be broken. You end up concluding that you can’t understand things right now, but surely in time it will all be clear. You hang on to this hope desperately, because Al-Anon and ACA are spiritual programs. And you need a relationship with a Higher Power to recover, so you feel trapped by your inability to let God in.
Truly the mind of an ACoA can be a troubling place. I battle self-hatred every day. Some days I come out ahead, and others I go to sleep hoping my life will reset itself in the morning.
Last night Heather and I went to the International Women's Day event at U of L. One of the performances they did was a piece about Pandora's Box where they told the story and then, in response to the admonishment not to ever open Pandora's Box (they used a jar) they destroyed the jar and at the end they passed the broken pieces around for us to take and asked us in the audience to respond and think about our responses to the statement, "What will you do when they tell you, and they will tell you, never to open Pandora's Box." My first instinct was to flippant, make some joke about "boxes" and laugh. It's how I deal with things and the metaphor of all of the scary and evil things in the world being unleashed upon me was just a little too real in that moment. Admitting that the piece moved me was frightening, vulnerability was not what I signed up for when I went out last night. But...
ReplyDeleteThere also was hope in the box. More than that, we are not alone, as Pandora was in the legend. You speak of difficulty letting God in, and certainly I am not the first you should ever come to in regards to God. The idea of God was always too intangible, too distant, too...something. Love has always been easier to conceptualize for me, much easier to find. If you need me, for anything: a shoulder, a distraction, a soothing cup of tea, I am here. My love is most likely not what God is for you, but in the moments when God is too... unfathomable, or whatever, I will do what I can. You are not alone, and there is still hope in the box.