Gratitude for the Past...

My past is something that is colorful and messy.  My solution to childhood trauma was to attempt to destroy myself with booze, and men.  I did a really good job at making a good run at total annihilation.  For the last two years of that time, I thought about dying every single day.  I hated my life but I could do nothing to change it.  I was just on this very hard and painful hamster wheel that I totally, intentionally got on, but I could not get off.  It was just Groundhog Day every day.  Until it wasn’t.  

One day, just a tiny moment of a day, I heard the voice of reason.  And I realized the futility of my experience and the way I was living.  I knew something drastic was required.  And for whatever reason, I was willing to take that drastic action.

And thus began a far more constructive and meaningful life.  I had no way to know it then but I was laying a foundation for the rest of my life, a life that was worth living.

So when I say I have gratitude for the past, I mean it.  I see very clearly that I had to have the destruction to get to the construction.  I had to have the ruble in order to be motivated to rebuild.  And because of this one giant experience in my life I have been able to see it is in the nature of things to fall apart and come back together, reconfigured.  Over and over again.  

There have so many times in the intervening years where my stable, nice life has begun to crumble.  And believe me when my first thought was not, “oh, this is supposed to happen, it happens all the time, remember!”  No, my first thought was, “UM, EVERYTHING IS GOING WRONG AND IT NEEDS TO STOP RIGHT FUCKING NOW!”  But because I do this gratitude practice, I have been able, relatively quickly, to accept the circumstances as being exactly the way they are supposed to be, and move forward with a little more grace than I experienced initially.

So I am immensely grateful to my past.  All of it. The pain, the loss, the suffering and the recovery.  I am who I am today because of all of those experiences. And I am grateful for all of it!  I go back to the 10,000 things that got me to where I was on that fateful day when I was ready to ask for help.  So much shit had to pass under that bridge to get me to be ready to admit defeat and ask for help.  So much.   And between then and now 10,000 other things have had to happen to lead me to this moment right here where I am writing this blog experiencing the full consequence, depth and weight of all that has transpired to get me here.  

Sure there are things in my life I would like to change currently.  And I trust that if I stay the course, they will.  Not on my timeline and not in the ways I think they should, but change comes for all of us.  We can demand it, we can work for it, or we can bemoan that the change isn’t the right kind or what we want.  Change is change.  And I have learned that whatever is happening is the change in action.  I may love it or I may hate it.  Regardless, reality always wins.  And I do best in my life when I am willing to shoulder the responsibility of my part in the change.

My past has taught me that the worst things that ever happened to me, never actually happened.  They were all things that I just worried about or was despondent about the fact that they might happen.  Today, because of my sordid past, I live relatively free, not without issues and problems and hardship.  It is of our nature to suffer as we rail against what is.  And if there is anything my past shows me, it is that everything will fall apart and it will always get put together, with or without my cooperation.  It really is just how much and for how long do I want to suffer.

Again, still...

Today’s Gratitude List:

I am grateful for

Cats

A good night’s sleep

Being an early riser

Grace and Riley made it home safely

Logan’s text message

Quiet peaceful mornings

Feeling isolated and knowing I have other choices but allowing myself to just be with these harder feeling for now

A relationship with a higher power

Home group today

Gratitude

Lulu

My bed

Photo by Rodrigo Silva.