Epiphany! (Now what?)
Posted: January 26th, 2014, 8:20 am
I'm just gonna cut and paste this from an email I wrote my OA sponsor a couple hours ago. Got tired of waiting for her to respond with her take (ADD FTW), so I'm sharing it here. I feel like I've cracked a code, which is super exciting, but I am not exactly sure where to go next with this newfound insight.
(Paragraphs 1 & 2 of the following written on Friday; 3-5 just now in a sleepy haze; nothing at all yesterday; yay procrastination.)
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I am naturally impulsive. At a young age, this got me in trouble, both with authority figures and with my peers. I'm also naturally sensitive. My response to getting frequently burned without warning was to suppress any and all impulses. To shut down. I built a jail in my mind, where I was both prisoner and warden.
This is the model that my life has taken: a permanently deadlocked struggle between opponents who are evenly matched by definition, because they are both me. And yet, as epic as this struggle may seem, as genuinely bruising and exhausting as it feels, I have always had the option to end it, by choosing a victor. It is all, in the end, make believe. Prisoner Me and Warden Me are constructs: in reality there is only one me, trying to direct the whole show and play all the roles.
But if I have always had the ability to call off this ridiculous farce, why haven't I? The biggest and most obvious reason is that change is scary, especially when it's not just any change, but the introduction of change itself. If I was afraid to make mistakes at 5, I'm literally petrified after 2 1/2 decades of slow burn failure.
Meanwhile, the prisoner inside me has grown defiant. Prohibited from pursuing a truly fulfilling life, he resorts to acting out, surfing the web when he should be working, being chronically late to work, sneaking in a few extra nibbles of dinner.
There's so much more I can write, and should, and will. So many orphaned pieces of the puzzle of my behavior, suddenly seem to fit. I know I can't think my way out of a thinking problem. But I do think that this advancement in my self understanding will be hugely helpful in guiding my actions as I take the next 8 steps.