Overthinking, Overreacting, Overindulging
One humbling and empowering thing that I’ve found to be at the core of my sobriety has been the idea that I myself am responsible for a large portion of my misery. Not in the sense that there’s something fundamentally wrong with me, that I’m a weak sinner in need of surrendering to the superior force of grace; I mean that in the sense that my drinking wasn’t immediately provoked by my circumstances but by me riling myself up with a particular story about my circumstances and by a particular story about myself. Rather than just focus on what’s going on right in front of me I would freak out relentlessly about things that might maybe happen someday or about things that had happened long long ago. I would make “being in my head” extremely agitating and extremely compelling, then I drink to get away from all the thoughts and all the feelings about thoughts that I had cooked up for myself.
It wasn’t that I was weak; it was that I was stuck in a pattern of thinking and acting that had a lot of cost for me but also a lot of payoff.
It was humbling to see that; humbling to see that I was not in fact a pure and righteous victim of myself and my life. Once I got past that feeling I found it to be empowering too, empowering in the sense that I could stop being reactive and start telling a different story, and that I have the power to do so at any time no matter what I’m dealing with in my life.