Taking It...

Picking up my computer on the way home tonight, and spending the bulk of my night setting it up again.  I'm so happy I could shit my pants!

The yang to that happy yin seems to be my SMART meeting last night.  Every time I do my "check-in" lately (what they call taking your turn to speak) I just end up feeling embarrassed, and like I made an ass of myself.  And worse, I can't tell if I really did make an ass out of myself, or if I'm just being self-conscious.  Either way, the net result is that I end up feeling like I really don't want to go to these meetings anymore.  But I don't feel like I can stop, either.

I'm really not enjoying the experience; but, then again, is this an experience that you're really supposed to enjoy?  It's about learning and getting healthy, not having fun.  And I'd really like my Tuesday nights back (I could be volunteering at the planetarium if I didn't have to do this instead, which I'd much rather do), but inconvenience hardly seems like a good excuse to stop going.  You know what's really inconvenient?  A drug habit.

And I don't know if these meetings are doing me any good.  And that's the main reason why I still feel like I have to go:  I don't know if these meetings are doing me any good or not.  If I knew for a reasonable certainty that these meetings were not helping me much, then I would feel perfectly fine with deciding to stop going.  But if I stop now, without having answered that question, then I'm just quitting; I'm just giving up.  And as much as I'm not enjoying this, and as much as I don't seem to be getting much out of it beyond embarrassment, I'd be really upset with myself if I just gave up.

I keep coming back to this lesson again and again all over my life.  I think it's one of the big things I'm trying to tackle through this process.  It's not simply about not drinking and not getting high for the next year.  What I'm really trying to do, is learn how to take it.  When my life sucks, and I'm stuck doing things that I don't want to do, and I'm unhappy with the way things are going, and there's nothing I can do to change it, then just shut the fuck up and take it.  You can't be happy all the time.  Sometimes you have to do things that you don't want to do and that make you unhappy.  And when you ease those pains with chemicals, that makes you weak.  And you come to rely on those chemicals, because you're not strong enough to simply put up with those feelings of stress and depression and unhappiness on your own.

So, I'm learning endurance here.  I'm working out my "acceptance muscle," and it's getting stronger.  I'm a lot stronger than I used to be, because I never bothered to work it out at all before.  Whenever I had to use that muscle, and whenever it got sore, I'd soothe it with the painkillers of booze, and pot - and sometimes even actual painkillers.  But now I'm using it, and working it out, and getting stronger, and learning to accept that sometimes I have to just shut the fuck up, and take it, and do what I have to do, instead of what I want to do.

Like going to these stupid fucking meetings.