Leap Day is a long time coming

Happy Leap Day! This day doesn’t even exist, and on this day, I am happy and proud to celebrate and honor myself. This day spends four years building itself up so that it may exist for 24 hours. Oh how I can relate.

Good morning, god. Good morning, world. Good morning, friends. I celebrate myself today. All of me. I am proud of another 30 consecutive days of sobriety. I celebrate 30 days without thought of self harm. I celebrate 30 days on new medication. I am proud to be the heroine in my own phoenix story. I am proud of my home. Proud to belong to myself. I am proud of my job. I am proud of my relationship with my love. I am proud of my effort. I choose life today. 

I am proud to be doing what I need to do for myself despite some pretty horrific circumstances. I am proud to rise above and continue to thrive. I am very happy the gremlins of negativity, that seek to destroy me from the inside out, have started to quiet down. This is because of the self love and hard work that I practice on a daily, hourly basis. This is because I have access to all the love in the universe. I continue to practice humility and embrace ALL of me. For that, I am grateful. I honor myself daily by continuing to practice. The work is mine and mine alone. 

Threatening external forces only play a part in the daily internal upheaval. I rebuke external negativity, untreated illness, power, and control. I seek to please no one but the power of good. At great self sacrifice I hold at bay those that use mental illness to their advantage. I say that because I want to write. I want to use my voice. Sharing this brings fear to my soul because there are those that will use it against me in the most intimate way. I will not hide. I will not be silent, I do not fear my voice. I am lovable and I am loved.

Letting My Most Beloved Care For Me

I have been keeping in very close contact lately with the ones who know me best. And I am grateful. Repeatedly, those that I have let in as much as I can, have helped guide and direct me when I don’t even know the direction myself. They have cared for me and cautioned me when I didn’t know I was in danger.

I was speaking with one of my spiritual advisors on the phone while walking to the bank the other day. I got to the corner that was supposed to house the bank I was directed to, and it wasn’t there. It was cold and I was on foot. I expressed my frustration verbally, finished the phone call, and plugged on finding another place with an ATM.

The next morning when I spoke to that same spiritual advisor, as I do every morning, she said, “Oh thank god, I am so glad to hear your voice!” I asked, why so relieved and eager? She stated that she felt that not finding that bank on that corner could have been cause to take a drink. That’s how fragile she perceived me.

Me, on my own, I do not realize how fragile I am. I am strong! I am capable, dammit! I have come this far. I am unsinkable after all. But what has been happening a lot lately is that I do not know how fragile I am. My senses have been on overload. My triggers have been rampant. My tolerance is low. I am existing at such a low threshold for life. It’s incredibly dangerous. Writing this makes me anxious.

But that’s why I have been keeping those close to me very very close. They know me better than I know me at this juncture in my life. I didn’t realize that I might be in danger of drinking with a small disappointment or anger inducing incident like not finding a bank where I was told it would be. And it didn’t occur to me to check the google. My brain just hasn’t been working. I have just been missing a lot lately.

I haven’t been myself for quite a while. I am taking action and I continue trying, but at this very moment, I have put my life in the capable hands of a new recovery home, and my most beloved. Thank you all. I am so grateful for you. Love, Holly

Screw the Alcoholic: Get Help for Yourself!

If you are in any kind of a relationship with an alcoholic, a wife, husband, sister, brother, uncle, cousin, friend, neighbor, anything, I beg of you to seek guidance and help outside of your normal channels. Al-Anon Family Groups are still widely unknown, even in alcoholic circles. Al-Anon is a different look at the family disease of alcoholism. Al-Anon is a place to go and seek help and guidance for yourself and is rarely about the alcoholic.

I have recently experienced yet another pummeling of emotional abuse from one I used to love dearly. There are others in my life that have taken hard and bitter roads due to their response to the disease of alcoholism. There is help for you as well. You do not have to go this alone. Al-Anon provides a unique perspective, like I said, outside of your usual support systems. The disease of alcoholism is so fierce, it will affect you without your consent. Please seek some assistance for yourself before alcoholism bitters you, and changes who you once were.

Thanks for reading.

Al-Anon on the web: https://al-anon.org

It’s Okay to not be Okay

I wanted to share a few things: there is a good chance this will not make sense but I get to share what I want on my page. I refuse to let fear guide my words. First things first, I am okay. Well, as the title suggests, I am not okay, and that’s okay, but for those of you with concerns about my wellbeing, I am at a moment of reembrace. I took myself out of the world in many ways last month. There were thoughts to do it permanently. I just kind of hobbled along, putting that off in order to get to this place. It’s a new place driven by fear and high emotion. Driven by a new friend called Generalized Anxiety Disorder. I have been friends with Substance Use Disorder and Major Depressive Disorder for a long time respectively. Anxiety was not to be left out and recently made itself known. As I said, this is a newer friend and when it came about, my world crashed. I reached for the unhealthiest coping mechanism that I could muster, and burrowed down. Mental health is such a fragile thing for me personally. Even at my best there are things that I must do every single day just to be okay… and that’s okay. This was new and on a much higher and stronger level than I have ever experienced.

Reasons: I have been away from home for a year now in a street fight to save my own life. Even during successful days/weeks/months, it’s very hard. I miss Lawrence. I miss my darling, Angela. I am potentially on the cusp of being able to speak with my beloved Moon again after more than a year and my fear is that this will still not happen. My progress here in Wichita has been slow and steady which is hard for this alcoholic. Slow steady progress is still progress and that is still hard for me to deal with… and that’s okay. Finally, after years and years of trying to find a place to fit into humanity from a religious perspective, the homos were condemned yet again from the human pulpit of the church I went to. I was already so low and close to broken that this tossed me into the street like Edward Norton and Brad Pitt in Fight Club. I let humanity get to me. I let humanity get between me and my god. Oops. My heart was already breaking on so many levels; I just could not handle it. And that’s okay.

I sought help. And that’s okay. I sought help no matter the cost, no matter the consequence. Spoiler alert: also okay. At this moment, which took a week of hospitalization to get to, I refuse to tell myself that it was too late or that I could have done anything different. I did and am doing the best I can… and that’s okay. Anyways, I just wanted to let y’all know that I’m okay. I needed a bit more than a FB post to do so. Thanks for reading. Be well.

Self-vulnerability

This writing is in response to The Language of Letting Go by Melody Beattie, January 8th, 2020. https://www.hazeldenbettyford.org/thought-for-the-day/the-language-of-letting-go

So often in the past, feelings have taken me to the bottle. Today I get to take responsibility for my feelings. Hurt feelings are a part of life. Loneliness is a part of life. Not getting what I want or losing what I have had; these things are a part of life. And I’m not really a big fan of responsibility quite yet. It’s a concept that I play around with. When I do something that SHOULD be done versus what I want to do, I dip my toe into responsibility. I still want it to always FEEEEEEL nice. This is not so. Hurt feelings are a part of life, relationships, and recovery. I am recovered. So in order to take responsibility for my recovery and subsequently my feelings, what the hell do I do? I embrace self-vulnerability. I feel them. I surrender to them. I honor them, and then I move on. Nothing, absolutely nothing lasts forever. I pay attention to the pain; I honor the pain. I learn from what my feelings are teaching me. It’s okay to hurt. It’s okay to cry. And it’s okay to move on to the next feeling when it is time. It’s okay to learn from hurt feelings and change my behavior accordingly. As always, I cannot control anything other than myself, so I move forward without expectation. I check my motives for manipulation and controlled outcomes. Recovery is not immunity from pain; it is self care in the midst of pain. I take responsibility for my emotions. (Slight shudder 😉