Ah, sleep. I love sleep. I am now having such negative thoughts about alcohol in regards to sleep. So disruptive.
Wendy commented on my last post about not acting on impulse. It's so true and that is exactly what I did. And I do that with a lot of things in my life, especially foods.
I feel like I am slowly giving up a poison that has been in my life a very long time. I don't begrudge it. It was my go-to coping mechanism and for the most part I handled it behaviorally but gosh knows what damage it has done to my body. Or what other things I could have accomplished if not sitting down drinking for 2 to 3 hours a night. I want to cope in other ways.
I've never really been depressed except for the few occasions I've written about before and I'm not sure if that would even be considered true depression. I've never been without hope. But what I do is obsess. When I'm feeling blue I relive experiences in my past, obsessing over getting the exact timing of it right. When did I do that? How old was I? What happened next?
Obsessing over past time is something I've always done. I remember coming home in the summer after 5th grade after visiting my aunt and uncle. I had so much fun that week! I grew up on the west coast and they live back east. I flew by myself and stayed with them, driving all over New England, going to natural rock water slides, hiking, etc. I came home and was so incredibly bummed to be home. Cried all the time. I loved my home but I had just had soo much fun! I spent the next week with the blues, obsessing over exactly what I had been doing at exactly what time the week before.
I used to do that a lot about vacations. I did that a lot more in my 20s and it calmed down in my 30s. By then, when I went on vacations, even now, I have a great time but when it's time to go home, I'm usually ready. Ready to rejoin the reality of my life.
After going through a divorce, something I never thought would happen to me, of being left by someone I thought was my soulmate, I started obsessing about times past. Even though I moved on with someone else and was happy. The obsessing isn't necessarily about the Ex. More about times we had. I can spend an entire morning, traipsing around the house, cleaning and/or doing laundry, while talking internally myself. I'll rehash some period of time and run through it beginning to end, as much as I can remember. I'll struggle to get all the memories in the right order.
It might be a trip I took or took with the Ex. It might be about a party I went to. It might be a traumatic time like finding about an affair he had and then putting all the circumstances around it in order. Unfortunately with those memories it's like I'm getting a buzz about reliving the trauma of the emotions surrounding those memories. I might obsess over trying to remember what I wore, or what did the hotel room look like, or what book was I reading at the time. I literally can waste hours absorbed not in the present, but in those past experiences.
Once I go through this and put the thoughts in order for whatever experience I am reliving, I tend to feel exhausted but refreshed. I move on. I always wonder if anyone else ever does this. I have friends that can't remember specific details about past events and they focus only on the here and now. Wow, wouldn't that be nice.
I bring this up because I realized yesterday that I was doing this all day again. But I haven't really done that in the past 30 days while not drinking. But, sure enough, I was a little blue yesterday and wasted a lot of time on non-essential past thoughts. I'm turning 50 this fall and I literally spent hours yesterday trying to recreate exactly what I had been doing when I was 39 at this time of year.
Back when I was 39, the ex and I were working on our marriage. We had a lovely summer. A year later he had left, I had met someone new and he was meeting my son for the first time over Memorial Day weekend. I think this would have been a normal passing thought but I even wasted time going through my archived emails, reliving what was going on in my life 9 and 10 years ago. I didn't get my house cleaned, I didn't get the bills paid.
When I do this, I think it's my version of depression. Of handling the blues. It was kind of eye opening to realize I was doing that for so long yesterday after drinking the night before. It was eye opening to realize how exhausting it was. It was eye opening to realize I hadn't done that for awhile and yet it used to be part of my everyday living
When I don't drink and I wake up refreshed, I look forward to moving on with my day. To accomplish things. I don't get stuck in the past. Yesterday I couldn't make myself pay bills. I barely did some laundry and dishes. I knew I wanted to go to Yoga today but thought oh I probably won't go.
But today I am looking forward to that yoga class! I feel good. I'm about to go make breakfast, then pay some bills and then try the yoga. I wrote before about my goals for exercise. That I was going to do a yoga class, a Zumba class, a water or water Zumba class, and a spin class. After today I'll just have that water class left and I'm determined to try and get that in during the month of May!
It feels good to leave the past in the past today. It was just another a-ha moment to realize that a lot of that came from the blues that accompanied the letdown after drinking. During drinking I'm dreamy and think of the future, but the next day I obsess over the past. Interesting. Probably something deeper in all that but, frankly, who gives a shit? Time to go make breakfast!!
HD
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