sunday and not so blue

Another Sunday night. My blog is turning into a hate on Sunday night session and this must change. So boring. So tonite is a different kind of Sunday night. I am not alone and I actually got the things done today that make me feel good at the end of the night--clean house, and specifically clean bed, fridge full of some good homemade soup and chilli and kids clean and asleep. This is the kind of stuff that can make anyone go to bed feeling good pretty darn accomplished--well, at least anyone with a two and half year old and one year old. I am drinking my sleepytime tea and hoping for some drowsiness soon. Last night I went to the Wilson House in Dorset for the first time ever. It was really an amazing meeting and it gave me so many good blog topics. The most interesting of which is how recovery I think is a game of the heart not the head. So often I've intellectualized, deconstructed, analyzed the living hell out of myself, my program, the program, other people's programs...all of the mind work might be healthy for some (even for me) but not on this topic. I really believe that for recovery to be real, to work, you have to feel it not think it. Dont get me wrong, I thought my way out of a drink for at least a year and maybe more and I dont want to let that important ability go, but the other stuff--not the not drinking but the enjoying life stuff--that is the heart stuff. The heart stuff is more elusive and I think therefore less discussed. I was driving with this sort of newcomer home from the meeting and while I could explain that I htink good recovery is a heart thing...I really couldnt begin to explain how to get it other then to explain that qualities that I think have helped me to begin to get there...honesty, self awareness and just a real committment to being real and then you have to share that honest, real and true self with other people. A meeting, a friend, a therapist--someone or ones. YOu have to let people know your real self which means sharing when you feel like drinking and when you dont, when you feel happy and when you wish you could disappear. I am speaking only for myself when I write that this process of finding yourself again (or for the first time) is so exciting and painful and scary and empowering that it blows my mind on a semi daily basis. To me, recovering yourself can begin anytime you want it to and for any reason--we all deserve to be loved for who we really are not for some pretend version. The man I heard speak at the meeting last night, I have heard him speak many times before, but never like last night--he said that he was doing things differnetly now that he was being honest about how he felt and what was hard and not just saying what people expected a man with twenty plus years of sobriety to say. He was emotional and vulnerable in a way that I had never seen in him and rarely do in others and it was so touching and helpful. Later someone shared that is in sharing our vulnerable sides that we help others, sometimes more then in sharing our strength--it hit home for me. Sleep well and keep it real.