What the actual fuck?
REALLY?
Sadly, no.
It was my modus operandi for well over a decade. When I took that drink at 12, I fucking needed it for about 8 years. So when I found it, life changed for me. And it saved me. I know for an absolute fact that if I had not found alcohol when I did, I would not have made it through adolescence. So I am eternally grateful for the ability to numb my emotions until I matured enough to be able to survive them. At 55 now, with 29 years of sobriety, I know plenty of people who are my age or older that still can’t do that. So the fact I was able to begin this particular lesson at 25 is nothing short of miraculous. And Divinely inspired because I can tell you that five minutes before I got sober, I was not planning on doing that. The fact that I am still here all these decades later, is evidence of God 100% being present, felt and active in my life.
So I guess I have to disagree with the statement a little bit today. Numbing your emotions is coping. It isn’t particularly effective and highly likely to cause all kinds of shitstorms in your life, but it is a way to cope. And if it is all you’ve got, well then that is all you’ve got.
But at some point in time, drinking yourself into a stupor and calling the suicide hotline every night becomes just another level of dysfunction in your life and you see that until and unless you address your numbing out and killing off all hard emotions one at a time, you are really only doing more damage to yourself and everyone around you.
So when I “came to” at 25, I had no skills. None. I was a live wire that had been stripped of all insulation and I was just active and hostile and volatile. That was what I had to bring to the party we call life. And that first year was fucking rough. I mean, really fucking rough. I almost offed myself, true story. But somehow, all the dysfunction and baggage and pain and loss and disappointment and hurt that raged and roiled beneath my exterior began to find expression. I would not be so bold as to call that coping, but it was a bloodletting of sorts. A release of all that pent up rage over time that I am sure sounded just like it felt, like some sort of high shrill whistle of gas being leaked from a very constricted opening.
And I was fucking toxic. And caused some wreckage even as I set about cleaning it up. It was my best effort even though I am sure it just looked like a sober continuation of the already in progress shitshow. But I was trying and I was doing things differently, slowly over time. Little by little, slowly by slowly. I was changing.
I went to therapy to gain some resources. Some skills to self soothe and to calm my over active and over stimulated nervous system. And I got them. Again, they didn’t work overnight but they did begin to take root and grow.
It would still be another two decades before I really began to cope. But in the meantime, I was able to piece together a pretty good life that was always trending towards whole and healing, even if sometimes I encountered some major setbacks, usually men. Men have been a constant and unremitting set back in my life. But fuck have I learned some valuable lessons from them. Ones that I would not have had to learn perhaps if I would just skipped one of them in particular. But apparently they were needed, every fucking one of them. And I supposed, today I am grateful for it all.
Coping generally means to deal with and attempt to overcome problems and difficulties. So numbing out while effective as a strategy in the beginning will never survive the negative and harmful effects numbing out traces upon your existence.
And so I learned, painfully, very fucking painfully, the difference between numbing out and coping. And of course, because I am me, I learned it the hard way because that is the only way I ever learn anything.
It wasn’t until I got my ass handed to me and my heart dashed to a zillion fragments that I really learned to lean into the hardships of life. Prior to that, I was all about avoiding them. Avoidance is my most favorite past time. But I couldn’t avoid the heartbreak and the loss. I couldn’t numb it, I couldn’t control it, and I couldn’t eradicate it in other numbing ways. I just had to live with it. Every mother fucking day until I healed that wound.
I hiked the mountainsides around my home with vigor, dedication and with solemnity. I set out to walk the pain away and what I found instead was a way to lean into it. The more I hiked and cried (cryking was born in this time) the more I increased the range of my emotions. They were ever expanding. And what I didn’t know then that I know now is that each time I leaned into the pain my capacity for joy and positive feelings increased also and almost in equal measures. My life got so much better because I didn’t try to numb my feelings, I just found a way to sit with them, even though I wasn’t sitting. I was hiking but it fucking healed me from the inside out.
Today I look back over that two year period and I relish it. It was alchemical, I was forever altered, changed and rearranged. And it took away a great deal of my fear that had caused me to reach for numbing every fucking chance I got.
So today I get to cope and not numb out. And old habits do die hard. I just had a speed bump recently and I totally over shopped and over ate...but I knew I was doing it as I was doing it and I stopped. And that is fucking huge, normally I figure out why I was doing something like several months down the road. So the fact that the behavior and the acknowledgement and cessation of that behavior was contemporaneous seems pretty fucking cool.
Coping is the precursor to healing. And while numbing is immediate and healing takes time, anyone who has ever survived themselves engaging the later will tell you that coping toward healing always produces better results than numbing out and shutting down.
I am not sure my desire to numb out will ever get supplanted as the number one thing I want to go to when life gets lifey. But I will tell you that I no longer spend a great deal of time or energy or thought in that particular death spiral any longer. Nope, I see my dysfunction, and I own it. I mean, it is mine after all, who the fuck else is going to own it?
My life is and always will be mine to check out from or check into. The choice is always mine. Totally, fucking mine. And today, I choose healing and coping over numbing and avoiding as often as I can. Again...still.
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