Healing All the People...

No, I do not mean the masses. I mean all the people we are inside ourselves.  All the different versions of ourselves that have coexisted, well, forever.

I think healing is especially hard because we have the trauma from our childhoods and that being needs safety and to stop being terrified.  Then there is the teenage version of us who is angry and is out for blood.  Then there is the wiser more mature versions of ourselves that is tired and just wants peace.

How exactly are we supposed to find a common ground where all these divergent versions of ourselves can exist in serenity?

Well, that just may be our purpose in this life.  An examined life anyway.  If we aren’t examining our lives and ourselves, we are pretty much doomed to repeat everything we have already survived.

I have been watching a show and there are several characters who are addicts.  And the show does a great job of showing how addicts often do not recover, forever.  They do well, and their lives improve, but then they fuck up and relapse and then it is hard to get back to any kind of stability.  And they are stuck in this endless cycle until they are locked up or dead.

When I put my life in perspective that I have those same issues and somehow I have seen my way through to being clean and sober through everything that has occurred these last 30 years, I am amazed.  Totally amazed.

Somehow the childhood wounds and the insolent adolescent have not convinced me that a drink or a drug would be a good idea.  That I have found a way to work towards the serenity I have lacked most of my life.  It is an evolving thing that is not ever perfect in its application or exhaustive search.  It is a day by day thing where I move forward with the realization that the only place the childhood, adolescent and adult me will ever find any  kind of harmony, peace and serenity is with the foundation of sobriety.  This is the only plane the three me’s can exist in a relative comfort.  Oh sure, the adolescent me would prefer drugs and alcohol but that does nothing to help the childhood me or the adult me, it just creates more wounds.

So the bedrock for my life has become and is this place where I am physically sober all the time, and emotionally sober most of the time.  This is the only place I can heal all the people in me.  It has to start and end there otherwise I am a goner.

My healing is my life’s work.  It matters not at all that isn’t what I wanted to use my life for...I thought there would be more of some other things, like love and sex and shopping and travel.  But alas, the healing is the journey and those other things are more likely to rob me of peace than provide it.  Well, except for travel, travel has never done me wrong, not once.  In fact, travel is the only vehicle I really have to deepen my experience with myself, for myself.  So I do that as often as I can.

Healing isn’t easy or a great deal of fun.  And it absolutely is not on my timeline.  But regardless of my varied levels of acceptance about this being my life’s work, I do believe that it is my job to heal all the people who reside inside me.  And I know with absolutely that I have to be sober to do any of that.

Again, still...