Quote from Loudermilk which is my new favorite show. It is fucking brilliant! How did I not know about this? John Livingston is a favorite of mine. His wry and sarcastic sense of humor slayed me in the original Office Space back in the day and he brings all that he brought there to this series.
I love it because it is about recovery but I also love it because he just says what he thinks, without filter. He says the stuff that all of us are thinking in meetings, but he just says it. And it doesn’t go over well most of the time. But he is undaunted. He just continues to be who he is and we just love him all the more, while kind of hating on him too. I can so relate to that.
I feel like that is kind of how people relate to me. They love me, but with some frequency kind of hate me too. I do not share everything I think. Which is why the hatred is more marginal...if I really shared all of my thoughts, then the hate would likely go up exponentially. Spoiler alert: I am kind of a dick in my head.
Today’s title is a quote from the show. And could be a banner in recovery. It is easy to hurt yourself. Look around, we do it all the time: drink to excess, drug, eat too much or too little, don’t exercise or go to the doctor, or over do all the things and spend our lives in a perpetual state of exhaustion...hurting ourselves is easy. It really is the living, without the constant and unrelenting push to self destruction that is hard. Well, at least that is my experience.
I cannot tell you how hard it was for me to begin to take care of myself back in the day. To stop smoking, drinking, drugging, sleeping around, eating nothing or sugar 24/7. These were the pillars of my life. EXCESS! I loved my life so much it almost killed me. And the ultimate truth was that my life that looked good still on the outside was killing me a day at a time. I was on a nightly suicide mission that I kept fucking up. Every day I would wake and my first thought, my very first thought when coming to was “FUCK! I am still here!”
I was barely hanging on and no one with any kind of observation of my life could have called it living. I was hurting myself and others on the daily. And I called that living. In truth, I was just dying on some sort of self inflicted installment plan.
I lived like this because it was truly easier. Being self destructive and conjuring your life in a way that assures that you are always the victim and you are being done wrong all the damn time, makes for easy living. And for me it just came naturally. I was drawn to the romance of my self inflicted, self destructive angst. It was self reinforcing. It was truly easier to live like that instead of doing the hard work to deal with my trauma and drama and get some help. That was hard. And that is what I would consider living. Doing the work to unfuck your shit.
And guess what? We all have shit to unfuck.
So it has been my experience that the path of self destruction, hurting myself comes very naturally to me. I am not sure why, and don’t think it really matters anymore. I feel like it was a few years ago that I finally turned the tide from all my sober self destruction and really began living. I know that seems odd, and for sure it has been a steady but slow progression but I feel more alive since I left the toxic people, jobs and relationships in 2022. Well and 2023. Fuck, this whole not hurting yourself takes some time to see, then find the willingness to do it differently. Because, for me, it is the hurting myself that is just innate, and living, truly living is actually quite hard for me.
But, but, the living is getting easier. Like every single day. I feel like I have grown exponentially on the whole living front since April of 2022. My life being freed from all the shit I committed to that didn’t really serve me, or only served me in a very limited capacity. I was living to hurt myself and now, by some fucking miracle I do not understand, I am just living. Letting go of all the self destructive bullshit that so easily dominates my life.
Life is painful and there is no way around that, but the misery and suffering really can be optional. And in my experience, the living gets good, so fucking good, when I surrender all the pain and suffering I am so married to and begin to walk in the sunlight of the spirit one fucking day at a time.
