A Re-introduction of Sorts...

Hello.  My name is Jessica.  I have been writing this blog for quite some time, but with this revamp I thought I would take a moment to share a little bit about the who, what, when, where and why… a short qualification if you will.
 
I got sober on August 26th of 2012 in Los Angeles, California after having a couple of spiritual experiences.  At the time I was drinking a bottle of vodka a day and popping migraine pills.  I didn’t know it at the time, but I was in a very dangerous situation.  I had heart palpitations non-stop and my muscles were so weak that walking the few feet to the mailbox entailed plopping down on the sidewalk to rest before returning to the house.  I was also facing the problem of alcohol not working for me for the first time in my life.  From age nine to age thirty-two, alcohol had been my answer to everything…my fear, my social anxiety and my unrelenting panic attacks.  I suddenly stopped reaching that glorious state of oblivion and began thinking about switching to hard drugs.  Those drugs had always been around me, but I never wanted them because I had all I needed in my bottle of booze.  The tables were turning and I was at a very dangerous cross roads when a spiritual intervention occurred in my life.  I was worried about finances and was seeking spiritual help through meditation, fasting and prayer.  The only subject that kept coming up for me was sobriety.  I did not understand why God could not understand that what I needed was a breakthrough on the job front.  The following week, I took a soul’s goals class and was guided through a mediation that focused on the one thing each of us needs to get rid of to live our best lives and realize our dreams.  The guided meditation took us through life with that thing in our lives and without that thing in our lives.  My mediation was quite startling as all I saw was my grave beginning with the year I was in if I didn’t relinquish my alcohol.  After doing the meditation I just sat there dumbstruck.  I told God that alcohol was the one thing I could count on, the one thing that always made everything better, the one thing that allowed me to function as a normal person since my social anxiety and panic attacks were life altering and debilitating.  I reminded God of that one time I tried an anti-anxiety medication I ended up in the psychiatric ward.  Alcohol was my everything and I would slowly learn over the next few years that therein lies the problem.  Alcohol was in God’s place in my life and He had to perform an alcoholectomy- the recovery time was unheard of, but 100% worth it.
 
As I sit here typing this, I am coming up on six years of sobriety.  I still can’t fathom that it has been six years.  The first three years I was so upside down and crazy, which might explain why it doesn’t feel that long.  I literally went from drinking morning, noon and night to being stone cold sober.  It was weird to say the least.  I had to re-learn how to do everything because my anxiety and panic attacks came back in full force.  I can say that I don’t typically suffer from debilitating anxiety and panic attacks anymore…. I was able to learn to navigate life without alcohol and quickly learned that what I thought was helping me was actually fueling the anxiety and attacks.  On the other hand, I do not have one of those great stories where I got sober, got married, had kids, landed my dream job and lived happily ever after...yet anyways.  I have quite the opposite story to date.  I continue to struggle greatly financially, I haven’t dated in years and I am currently living at home in the town I swore I’d never return to.  I have fought depression and suicidal thoughts greatly over the past year and am very worried for my ability to take care of myself in the future.  The one thing I have been able to do is stay sober. Another plus is that I have maintained a continual growth on the spiritual side of life.  In fact, I have to imagine that the physical side of life will follow suit at some point so long as I continue down my new path in life.  Currently, I am dealing with a lot of loneliness.  I have friends scattered around the country, just not so much in my current city of residence.  I am also 38 and that in itself is sometimes enough to make me crawl under a rock.  My thirties have been swallowed up in my getting and staying sober – I guess you could say I was derailed to say the least.  But regardless of how much fear I have about my future, I also have a lot of hope.  I am not where I want to be right now, but I am working hard to put myself in a better situation that will allow me to realize some of my dreams.  And as for those promises… they are true.  They may not come as quickly as some of us would like, but they do come to those who make the choice to live out the twelve steps and the program of alcoholics anonymous.  My lesson for 2018 as far as I can tell is to learn to accept good into my life, to accept that it can happen for me too, that I do deserve it and to accept and love myself as I am today and where I am today.
 
New content coming soon… I hope you’ll stick around to read, share your thoughts and hopefully get some inspiration and empowerment for your own journey in 12-step living.

The secret of change is to focus all of your energy , not on fighting the old, but on building the new. - Socrates