Pursuit of Happiness

I feel like I'm always in pursuit of the next best thing. I'm never satisfied. I can't sit in a situation and just accept it for what it is, enjoy the moment as it presents itself. There's always something unsettling or that should be different about my current circumstances.

I check my phone, I chew gum, I eat something, I start planning what I'm having for dinner. I drink. I smoke...

"I'm restless. Things are calling me away. My hair is being pulled by the stars again."

Anais Nin

I don't know what is wrong with me, why I can't sit still and take a moment for what it is. Apparently I'm not the only one who feels this way. Maybe I'm too ambitious? Maybe I'm too restless, wild, careless, impulsive. There's a lot of things I've contemplated being too much of.

What never occurred to me, was that maybe I'm not too much of anything. Maybe I can just sit in the middle of the boat like I'm supposed to. Maybe I don't need to be better than, or worse than. Maybe I can just be. A foreign concept for this alcoholic to just accept things as they are, myself included. I read something that resonated with me yesterday in the 12 Steps and 12 Traditions. Sometthing along the lines that there are two types of alcoholics, those who think they're better than and those who think they are worse than. And then there's alcoholics like me who believe both. I fall into this category. I am SO insecure and have so little self-esteem that I must see the problems in everyone else to feel like I can even make it through day to day. I have to be more than or less than. I'm better than you because I never used IV drugs, but I actually have the worst life ever because all these bad things happen "to me."

This thinking though is what gets me loaded, and keeps me miserable. As is said often, the opposite of addiction is connection (or something like that). When I make myself less than or more than, I isolate myself. I make myself different, feeding my alcoholism and diminishing my opportunities to make connection.

I truly still have a hard time not seeing this problem as something wrong with me. It's hard to recognize that it's an attribute of my alcoholism and that it does not make me unique, or more than, or less than. My ability to not accept things for what they are, is the very root of my spiritual sickness. What makes the world around me so intolerable that I pour poison into my body.

Sure, the problem lies in me but not in the way I thought it did. Not in a way that makes me unique. This is a hard pill to swallow as a narcissist. I forget that this isn't my world, this isn't the Clara show, I'm not the actor, director and the ballerina. I'm a measly little human is just doing my best without having the divine omniscient knowledge of the universe. And that's okay. I need to be humbled, to sit in the middle of the boat, to be OKAY with just being average.