Remember that pivotal scene in “Bridget Jones’ Diary” when she tells her friends that Mark Darcy has told her he likes her “very much – just as you are“? They react with wide-eyed amazement. “Just as you freakin’ are?,” one of them repeats with disbelief. It’s so simple yet rare to have that kind of love, right?
Imagine enjoying that kind of love for self: developing the ability to look in the mirror each day and say to yourself, “I love you, JUST AS YOU ARE.” This is the best way I can describe my life after 555 days of soul-searching sobriety.
For some unknown reason, my sobriety has yielded the spiritual gift of truly deep and unfailing JOY. Because of joy, I have had the courage to explore many new paths in 555 days – paths I would have had to ignore while drinking, to make time for hangovers!
Here is what 555 days and approximately 2,220 cups of coffee, accompanied by lots of reading, thinking, sharing and exploring has opened up in my life:
- Spirituality Admitting you are powerless over a substance has a way of removing a huge burden from your shoulders and opening your eyes to the Spiritual Journey we are all on. When I meet people now that I am sober, because of the Grace and Humility that sustain me, I am more likely to search for whatever good I can find in that person and connect in any way to the story of their life – not just their outward appearance, or even their words;
- Creativity Before I got sober, I had to think for several months about exactly what it was that I wanted for myself that was more important than numbness. For years, I have had a yearning to write about many things, but of course, the fear of looking stupid is a powerful inhibitor. No, I decided to try it: to give up numbness for the feeling of expressing myself on paper, even if nothing came of it, was a risk I decided to take. I am SO thankful I did!;
- Intuition It is so lovely to open up space in your life for peace and quiet. For a long time, my drinking and subsequent numbness was the crutch I had to use to “get there” – my pseudo- place of satisfaction. Sobriety can deliver enormous intuitive capacity to the person in long-term recovery. Through quiet reflection, which is definitely a necessary daily practice to ensure I am not going to drink during each 24-hour period, a feeling of calm and reassurance that I can rely on my very own skills to deal with whatever life challenges me with that day. I feel 100 percent more competent and trusting in my intuition;
- Financial Sobriety/ Simplicity Early in sobriety, it is common to consider all of the things that are “out of control” in one’s life as a result of the chaos regular numbing creates. Broken relationships, employment and financial disasters are often the “Big 3” demons someone committed to long-term recovery must confront. What I am experiencing personally is such personal fulfillment inside, my spending habits and attitudes toward money are changing. I am starting to actually enjoy making changes to build a nest-egg rather than finding reasons to use money to cover my pain today. Somehow, I have finally internalized the message that I HAVE enough because I AM enough. THIS is a miracle! To read more about this concept, visit Meadow Devor’s blog @ http://www.meadowdevor.com.
In short, learning to love yourself “just as you are” is one way to express growing up. Being a grown up was never very appealing to me, at least not every single dimension of it. The personal responsibility and accountability part of being a grown up have strengthened the most during my 555 journey. I believe myself when I say I will do something, unlike before, when a voice inside of me was constantly bickering in the background and telling me I would somehow mess things up entirely.
