Grant me this day

Hi blog friends - this most recent blog vacay wasn't planned - it just sort of happened.  Not only have I not posted but I haven't been reading either...at all; so if there are any stunning revelations or huge happenings that have transpired in the blog kingdom - I missed 'em!  Feel free to fill me in on the dirt.

When last we chatted, I was reeling over the unexpected and sudden passing of our family's youngest and most canine member.  The loss shook me in a way I couldn't have imagined.  I still went to work and did the things I do, but definitely felt a pall hanging heavily and experienced waves of tears and sadness more often than I would have guessed.  It's been almost 2 weeks, and while I miss him like crazy, I'm getting used to the house without him.  I'm starting to feel less lopsided walking without him - he was great at pulling me up hills and suddenly dragging me off the path in order to traumatize a squirrel or crouching kitty.  It isn't as acute and constant as it was for the first couple of days.

I haven't gone back and read what I wrote last post, but I know I mentioned that this was the first experience of unfettered grieving I've experienced.  Painful, sad, inconvenient, messy, wet (very wet for the first few days with those feeling storms that blew threw), but I totally recognize the experience as a gift, and a revelation of how evolved I've become through recovery and just living long enough to continue to grow up and get better.  I'm so grateful to be able to experience my feelings without having to numb them, or myself, in order to move through.

Which brings up emotional eating.  Food has never accomplished the mind altering effects that alcohol did for me.  But I've used food my whole life in order to survive and cope with whatever I didn't think I could. So  I still have no idea just how raw and splayed open my psyche, my heart, my soul would feel if I didn't succumb to the food thoughts that just "pop up" on a daily basis.  I've gone a day, or 2, or even weeks without responding to food's seductive call, but always and eventually I cave in when I just can't hold out any longer.  And that is the point at which my greatest discoveries about myself and my feelings are blighted - again.

There's a guy in my morning AA meeting I love - he's a lawyer, very funny and very irreverent.  He's been coming around to AA for about 7 or 8 years, and so far he has about a year of sobriety as his longest time.  The reason...every time he and his wife go out of the country (they've been to Germany, Australia, Italy, England) he "decides" to drink.  So far he's been able to come back and not drink on US soil.  Next week he's going to Paris, and he's sounding very much like he plans to do it again.  He's cheating himself - because at some level he still doesn't believe he can really live fully and have an absolutely amazing wonderful time - or life? - without an occasional encounter with booze.  How could his life - his inner landscape - change and expand DEEPLY and for the better, by not drinking a day at a time for the rest of his days? ( I know mine has, in ways I couldn't have imagined.  Had I written my own script for sobriety I'd have cheated myself because I couldn't have imagined a life as rich and full as I have today.)

This guy  reminds me of myself with eating;  I claim I don't want to live a life where I can't have an occasional food orgy - not unlike my lawyer friend.  Problem is, I CAN'T, because once I invite the binge behavior back in, I never know when I can slam the door in its f-ing face again.  Sometimes after a day - sometimes it's weeks before I can rein in my cravings, which aren't cravings for any specific food - rather for EVERY food I think I have to have to ...what, survive?  That's how it feels at times.  And really - I need occasional food orgies to make my life BETTER?  Really?  What does that say about my life?  When I deconstruct my thinking, it's clear that my eating not only doesn't make my life more worth living, it diminishes it in a thousand ways.

This experience of losing Lou and the emotional journey I've already traveled has informed me that maybe my life would still be great, fun, rich, fantastic, sad, full of family, friends and love - without an occasional food orgy.  The thing is, I don't have to swear them off forever.  I only have to swear it off for today.  The only time a food thought overcomes me and sends me to my own food and fat ruin is in a single day, at a single moment.  I have the resources to get through a single day IF I choose to access and use them.

So that's where I am.  I'm not striving for peace with food today - I have it if I choose it.  I don't want a war in my mind of having to fight back food cravings - I surrender, hopefully to win.

And now I'm off to my cadillac gym from which my membership officially ends on April 30th.  Might as well use it while I can.  And I'm looking forward to catching up on all my blog buddies' lives.