I"m making progress. Thank you Jennifer Hudson. I'm feeling free TOO. lol

death

I know I sort of see things differently. Especially things about death and dying. I had to talk with a friend , a young friend and compassionately remind him that we were all born with an expiration date. Death catches so many people off guard, and I mean yes it's shocking sometime , the circumstances of deaths but it appears like they thought they would be with the dead ones forever.  We all die and it's the best reason to "BE" with the people that matter while they are here. Keep in mind our boarding passes can be sent out at any time. I know the players in my life wont be there always. It's human hubris to think death will never touch their circle of family and friends. Count of your loved ones and make your loved ones count.

Stand up and speak.

I find myself in all new territory. I am had 44 years of swallowing my opinion and withholding everything I desperately wanted to say. Up until sometime this last year I had a steady reoccuring dream where I would need badly to say something, to warn someone or just to scream for help. I woke up so frustrated every time and there was nothing I could do about the dream. I hoped that therapy/counseling would help but it didn't. Some where in year two of my recovery, I started vocalizing whatever it was I needed to say. My friend was having a horrible breakup and my fear from what i was seeing was , if he didn't snap out of the "Embracing" his deepest pain and begin to let some go. I didn't want to to my friend because I thought maybe I didn't know him well enough or maybe I sounded stupid but I told him my grave concerns and it helped us to be much closer, much much closer.

I don't like to stand up for myself, or others, speaking my mind in any fashion. I was born to absorb all of it and let it out only when I got fucked up.  I've spoke up and been counted many many times in the last few months and it doesn't get any less uncomfortable, but in my head I think if I speak out , i withhold less negativity and that in the end will let me be a happy peaceful Clinton. I also think it causes illness.

I don't want to be a dick head, but if standing up for myself , my friends or telling the ugly truth, , then I would love to be called an opinionated dick head. When I was young and in high school, when I got furious I couldn't speak because it would make me cry and you know when you are crying you can vocalize words. It was a 1-2 punch for me because I didn't like to get angry because then you could see you have broken me and I was afraid to speak because it felt like I would break down and sob. WEAKNESS exposed.

I didn't know it was a thing I could learn to do. I thought you were either a pushover  or a dick head if you did or didn't speak up.

If you don't speak up for yourself and feel like to have a ligature around you throat you much speak of something of great importance to you.l

It is ok if you speak your mind or your heart. You don't have to be a doormat. Freeedom of Speech can be learned if you don't have it.

There is a way out.

I had to tell my friend this morning when he was freaking out at what lay in store for his freedom and I felt I needed to tell him that HE had made those choices that takes away his freedom. It wasn't the mean old police and it wasn't The Devil. It was you thinking you could use drugs, while on probation and it wasn't going to blow up in your face. I said it with love and great compassion but I felt he really needed to be reminded that he alone had set this course in action.

Just a little collect of light heartedness

Faux-Feelment

Just woke up thinking about how as humans we have a deep deep calling and desire to feel fulfilled. Whether it's our relationship with family or our relationship with the world. We crave to be full "feeled". The short cut of getting the most human of needs met causes us to reach for things that we think will fill us. Haircuts and colors, cars , clubs, sex or bigger TV's, are all exampled of us reaching outward for a lack of feeling full inward.  Food was the first thing I reached out for and it actually did fill me up or (feel me up).  The time I spend biting and chewing and swallowing was time when the world ceased to exist or stopped hurting. Eventually it  went to sex and then to alcohol, sleep and pills.

All the stuff I I tried to plug in to make me feel like a whole person , or an actualized spirit in the form of a human, failed me. Some took longer to fail than others. I live in a world where a rhinestone is just as good as a diamond to me but I know now that nothing, nothing is going to actualize and fulfill my spirit except for spirit. Faux-fillment will always fail in the end " Faux-feelment" will forever be a pail substitute for being filled from the inside out.  Fulfillment versus faux-Feelment.

These are photos scarier than an horror movie. Buildings that fall into disrepair scare the shit out of me

My heart was pounded just looking through these photos. The one with the fancy theatre gone to shit is going to give me nightmares. What has been seen, cannot be unseen.

http://izismile.com/2012/09/22/abandoned_landmarks_of_detroit_35_pics.html

blah

One friends in a hell of a mess and I don't want to got to meetings because of the nut job I think is actually dangerous. I slept all night last night, back to bed at 7am , slept til noon, got up and went back to bed at 1pm slept til3.  I felt like I had been drugged for surgery. I don't think it is depression but there are several different kinds of depression and this may be one I have never experienced before. I hope i don't get shot or stabbed before this shit is over with the crazy member M.B.

Kimberly -thanks for sharing your experiences and thanks for the tips on how to allow the program to work for me. I will try a new approach.

I felt like an idiot after I posted because  frankly, it seemed to make me sound like an idiot. Just getting honest with you all helps some of the chatter die down, especially the leader with the megaphone. lol I don't think I quite hit my point total but I did take in plenty of protein so my points were good points and no stupid ones. I actually was in a twist about having added to many raisins to my special one cup , bowl earlier today. Really, 12 raisins would shoot me out of the point water for the day? lol   If you all don't mind I may try it again when my thoughts are screwed, it did help me today getting the crazy out and sharing it.  

One thing I know for sure and that I don't have to waste time and energy wondering about, that is SUGAR may just as well be crack cocaine. One bite of sugar turns loose this monster from the pit of my core than is coming out for more sugar. A spoon of ice cream and licking the bottom of the carton. Those 9.00 specialty coffees,,,,,,,,,I need to bring 30 bucks with me because I'm not stopping til the monster says I can. Part of being a drug addict is there is a driving force in me whether it be booze or pills that frightens me to start knowing there is a strong possibility I will have stop, just one shy of having enough.  One cookie, one candy, one frozen coffee. I want to know that once I start I WILL be satisfied. Then after the monster has had it's way and left me crumbled in bed, the self loathing comes relentlessly.  The obsession followed by compulsion is the actual equation in Narcotics Anonymous when discussing what is addiction. I recover from benzodiazepines one day at a time, only with food, I have to learn how to appropriately nourish my body with out eating to death.  The drugs are easier because I just don't put one in my mouth.

Set him Free

For 20 years I arrogantly believed that I knew when I turned inward and quit letting my feeling escape. I thought I new when I went into the whole. It seemed at 12 when the house went nuts when my sisters drug abuse which dovetailed into menopause for my mother. When I say shit was crazy it was crazy, some stuff I wouldn't even would to speak into the air.

Through therapy and my intense inquisitiveness I have been spelunking into the dark caves of my experience and my emotions.

I have figured out that by 5 years old, I already was trying not to let on that I was frightened or angry. My mom took me into a little 5 and Dime in a town near ours. I was looking at a toy display and I looked up and my mother was gone. I hurried down the aisle and did not find her. At this time my chest had cut my ability to breath off. Pounding in my ears . I was trying to figure out how she could forget I was with her and leave. As I was in full little boy panic attack mode, I tried to walk slow and make it look like I was completely fine. I was melting down and I couldn't cry out and say help. She appeared as quickly as she disappeared and I tried to look like nothing had been wrong.

I had already bought into "my feelings are bad and must not be shared".  It made me feel week if I let you know I was melting down. It didn't have much to do with actual embarrassment. It had to do with me censoring my feelings and it proved to be a near deadly decision on my part to not share fear, or pain or joy for that matter. Everything had to remain dark. Mushrooms and fear/terror are the things that grow best in the dark. 40 years later, it's hard for me to open up and share what goes on when my mouth closes and i am left with only the bad messages I was injected with as a baby.

I'm trying to live differently. I am trying not to sensor myself to the point I say nothing of relevance. If I couldn't display the emotions of a child, what makes me think I can must up grown man feelings to set free to the world. Hope. Hope and the hard earned knowledge that to deny my feelings is to welcome the death of my soul.

But for the life of me I can't imagine existing through childhood any other way. The wolves would have finished me off for breakfast. Most of the defect of my character at one time helped save or preserve my life. I reached the tipping point with them and now they only serve to me me sicker and more hurtful.

If I had the chance to be a boy, this boy for an hour, I would like to set him free.