What’s in the Gray

I am so grateful to be sober today. I am grateful for a weekend filled with lots of reading. I’m grateful for having seen my friends yesterday, for the little island where I work in our apartment, for feeling a little more confident walking the dog again, for fresh flowers and for coffee. I’m grateful that the weather is warming up and that I finally finished the needle point that took me OVER a year. I’m grateful for AA, for this big life and for having a place where I can speak my mind freely.

Morning my friends (: Hope everyone had a lovely weekend!! 

I have something on my mind but I’m not sure what. Something is bothering me and again, I’m not exactly sure what that something is. As I was thinking about what to write between yesterday and today I have come up with a few ideas but I’m not exactly sure these are it either. #1 I suddenly don’t feel super grounded? Could be of my own making? For example I wanted to write last night so I was ready for the morning but I was tired and went to bed instead. As I suspected, I am now a little scatter brained because I need to write but I also need to do this and I also need to do that and how can I do all of it as quickly as possible. Answer: I can’t and I need to remember that my time is actually respected these days so as long as I’m actually doing this and that, as long as I get it all done eventually, no one is going to come for me. 

#2 I suddenly care A LOT about what other people think about me again. That had gone away for a while when things were bad and no one expected me to be anything other than a mess trying to keep it together. But I guess now that things are better I have slipped back into wanting to meet what I THINK other people’s expectations are of me, but how can I do that when I am not a mind reader and no one has told me exactly what their expectations are.

And #3 and perhaps the most important here, I think I have slipped back into judging myself way too harshly. Judging myself about what I THINK other people think about me. The assumptions I THINK other people have made about me. So I go down a rabbit hole based off of things I think I know when I really don’t. And I am so fortunate because the people closest to my tell me frequently that I am doing just fine. But I can’t help but find myself in this cycle of worry about what other people think. 

So my friends, all of this leads me to my favorite topic that I have written about time and time again – duplicity. I think in AA it is easy for people to think things have to be just one way. In regards to the program and ourselves. Faith and fear cannot coexist, someone I know says. But I disagree as many of you know, I believe faith and fear are always coexisting, you can be both fearful and faithful and perhaps that fear is HP’s way of reminding you/us/me ‘hey I’m here when you need me’. 

I am judging myself, I am a little concerned about what other people think, maybe I’m a little ungrounded but I can be and feel all of those things and still have confidence in myself in other ways. I can be confident that I will get over this little judgement spell. I can be confident that my concerns will go away. Not everything is black and white and there is a LOT of gray and that gray to me is the duplicity. And that is so incredibly normal. I am constantly reminding myself that things are not always just one way. 

So finally, I was thinking about two of my favorite people last night, how their friendship is so important to me and one of them just so happened to call me in the middle of my thoughts. No coincidence’s (; But that’s exactly my point. In the middle of feeling so uncertain about so many other areas of my life, I can feel so strongly and confident about others. 

Perhaps I’ll come up with another 400 things that could be bothering me or perhaps it’s really all super simple (I am an alcoholic who feels comfortable in chaos and when there is no chaos I create it in my brain) but either way it will all be fine and either way the message of duplicity still rings the loudest to me. 

So for anyone who needs it, it’s all good to feel two things (or more!) at once. There’s nothing wrong with it, WE ALL FEEL that way sometimes and don’t let anyone make you believe differently because simply, it would just be inhuman to not have a mix of emotions sometimes. 

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xx  

Jane