28 month sober – 1 week new job

Just wanted to post this because it somehow very much reminds me of my life.

Work is good, I am happy that I quit because I could never ever have done this job while drinking. My boss told me yesterday that he was very, very, very happy that he had hired me. I guess that is a compliment which also stretches out to me. 🙂 So that is good.

He has the same name as the nice guy I fell in love with at my former workplace. Sigh. And then the gods started playing with my head by sending in 2 other guys with the same name this week. So every morning I meditate and in that meditation discover if and how I am attached to the nice guy and let it go. In that letting go, which actually looks a LOT like what I did while quitting drinking, I realise that I am alone and can stand on my own two feet. Also: that the sort of addictive way I have in dealing with guys is, well, addictive. It is mist I create to not be clear, a ‘get away’ from what is. And the funny thing is: when I cut all these energetic threads I actually feel better so I do not understand the ‘need’ for it. Apart from me having an addictive personality and having difficulty with being at ease. 😀

So yeah, happy that I quit. Spending Christmas on my own. Need to really take 100% care of me and me said: not going to visit the family because I don’t feel like it and I need all my energy to cope with this new function. It has nothing to do with the function before. I did half a day of production work this week, just to get an idea. The rest was office/procedures/speaking with consultants on the trajectory we’re setting up. Not sure if we will get the certification.

From what I have learned discipline and procedures need to be way tighter than they are in this new factory. Which is why I asked my boss to set out a vacancy to try get two of the employees from my former work in the company. It is a bit tricky: that would be almost half of the former companies staff and the former company is a customer of my current company so… tricky. But then again, these guys have been looking for an opportunity to leave and now it is here. Not sure if they will follow, I have the feeling things have changed there since I left. But is would be good. Would safe me a LOT of work in training and get them the job they were looking for, not sure if they like the colleagues though, the whole company is so diverse that about 20% speaks Dutch, 30% English and the rest something Englishlike or another European language. German I speak, Spanish I can follow to understanding what it is about, Italian a little less but Polish? Pfff…. Not sure if it is going to work, my intentions are not entirely selfish so I feel I am being manipulative so, well, that is never good.

My head/concussion has not been bothering me but I need to really take it easy in the evening, back to having no evening appointments otherwise ‘the light turns off’ in my head. Lucky me: I have flexible working hours! And a day extra to spend because I started working a day before my contract started, and… a 36 hour workweek. So! Hey! I can sort of have 7 hour workdays and that = good for me. Still I have about 4 kilo of certification procedures to read over Christmas, getting paid for it though, not gonna do free overtime for this salary. He’s got my consultancy brain for 500 more than a production worker. Well, I should have stood up when he offhandely offered that. In hindsight it was sooo clear that he was open to negotiating. Ghegheghe…. my head was somewhere else: can I do this job, is it not too early, is it not too difficult? Actually I’m fine with the salary. I also realise that I do have to really keep a tight grip on my priorities and focus otherwise I will drown in the procedures, rules and fear of not being able to do it.

Just now that I am writing it has turned the 25th of December and I am 28 months sober. Happy that I quit. With the meditating I experience a lot of progress again in myself, I needed that, I was getting worried about the lack of clarity I was experiencing, the addictive mind was looking too much for distraction. I meditate till my mind is still and then a little longer. I got into a daily routine, then the job happened and now I need to incorporate this routine in my every days schedule again. Working on it. 🙂

Sending holiday greetings from The Netherlands. I am happy that I quit. I am happy that you quit. If you did not, I would really appreciate if you will consider quitting (again).

Now that I am back in a job which is more at my level I am feeling less ashamed about my drinking and what I ruined with that. Still pissed off about wasting away a lot of money by not working and living of my savings/inheritance. I have difficulty looking that in they eye. 😦 I actually feel I can only be totally cleaned of ‘this’ when I earn back that money. I am thinking this prolonged shame is something which going through the 12 steps might change. But I am not ready to let go, know that too. I feel the shame is some sort of ‘security blanket’ in a negative way. Well, by the time it is time to let go, it will go. 🙂

xx, Feeling

Journey To Being Alcohol Free – K.B.’s My Naked Life Story — This Naked Mind

I found this a beautiful post about mindset and drinking.

Figuring out that our relationship with alcohol isn’t healthy might not be the hardest part. The journey to being alcohol free can be a story of try, try and try again. K.B.’s Naked Life story is about not giving up and finally finding freedom that will last. Do I Have A Problem? I want to…

via Journey To Being Alcohol Free – K.B.’s My Naked Life Story — This Naked Mind

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First day new job

Gheghe, I have 4 draft posts on ‘first day new job’ since it was last week. Never finished them because too exited. I am process coördinator now in the same branch with the same product as I was in. Actually I have moved to the chique big brother of the former company. Last week was my first day and today my second. It is all pretty overwhelming because I came in at the beginning of the introduction of a new process and I am the one who needs to roll it out in the company supported by two external consultants.

Last Thursday was my first day, Friday was tax check day where the tax office was doing a semi standard check on my admin over 2014. Not sure what the outcome is yet. If it is bad I might have to pay back a money. We will see. I was so stressed out I could not move for several days. This total freeze is my go to mode. However I did manage to do some meditating as well and that helped a little. I could now see it happening in stead of being caught up in it 100%, so I guess there is some ‘space’ developing.

I think I should check out how I spent the first days of my former job because I have been freaking out ever so now and then. Yesterday night I was convinced that I would be fired today. I was totally out of control panicky. However again there was a little space for ‘reality’ (?) because I assumed that I was in panick mode and could take a tiny, tiny little distance. It took me 2 hours to fall asleep and I woke up several times. I remembered from when I worked as an employee, before I started my own business that in a lot of nights, specifically Sunday nights I would not sleep well, freak out of things I was sure  I could not do. I assign a lot of my serious drinking to that feeling, I would on weekdays, drink an average amount, not to get drunk but to be able to sleep.

Again, I guess what is in the way is The Way; so now it is time to learn about this insecurity and related panick. I am not joking when I say: that at those moments I would rather not be alive. Would be a bad joke anyway, but it is not a joke. No idea where it comes from apart from not being able to deal with insecurity, failure and ‘not being good enough’.

I remember I always had this reaction to having to do something I thought I could not. This immensely overwhelming fear of failure. It is a very unpleasant even to think of it. And in these modes it is very difficult to do what a woman who loves herself would do because the first thought is to assume that I do not have rights to loving myself. 😦

I am happy that I quit because yesterday I could realise that I was in a freeze instead of only being frozen and I have taken deliberate action to get me out of that freeze. Only worked for seconds but hey, Rome was not built in one day and learning to bike also took me several days, so continue. What is in the way is The Way.

Today I will take better care though and go to bed in time. 🙂

I wish you all a very nice sober day / evening.

xx, Feeling

Spoke with my neigbour on drinking

I have a neighbour, she is wildly fantastic but she drinks like crazy. I am afraid I can say her out of touch drinking actually kept me going too because ‘she was really addicted’ and ‘in comparison I am pretty much ok’. And STILL I have the urge to tell you how much she drank and how this was x more than I did.

This morning at 12:00 she came up the stairs telling me my cat wanted to get inside. She had already been drinking then and stumbling over her tongue. 2 Hours later I had to return some borrowed tools to her boyfriend and we ended up talking like we used to do. We look a lot alike: very open, on the surface there is not a lot to hide. We came to speak about drinking, she knew from drunk nights years ago that I thought I had to quit. And she knew that I had quit so now she asked me how long I had not been drinking. I replied that this was more than 2 years. She’s a party girl so she thinks life without drinking is very boring. I don’t know, it can be for her. I told her that I actually enjoy my life way better and that the more intense experiences and better and opener contact I have with friends and family help me in life. It makes me feel better.

Dunno, we spoke, she told what bothered her, I spoke of the ‘door to Lalaland’ of which we had broken the hinged by overusing the door. She liked that. I guess by now I realise that I should have listened more to her worries about not drinking. I did not push anything on her. By now I know that people only quit when it is their time. The best friend of her boyfriend died last week age 40 because of an acute liver failure. They process this by drinking. I would have. I am happy that I do not do this anymore.

Well, to me I am VERY HAPPY that I did not in one second feel the urge to convert her and for me that is a BIG win. 🙂 I guess for the world too. 🙂

Currently staying up late because I don’t want to go to bed because I don’t want to have to deal with tomorrow. Tomorrow brings a day where I need to de prep work for the tax check on my admin over the year 2014. 🙂 These inability to deal with adult issues. Ghegheghe. Well, I did make some improvement because over the last 2 weeks I have been meditating every morning for about 20 minutes and today I even did some yoga. That has been ages ago. And… surprise: I felt SO MUCH better. Just some easy bends and stretches, nothing fancy but very good. And a little confronting to realise how much I have let myself go. I have built up a lot of muscle in my former job but only legs, back, shoulders and arms. I did let my belly go. 🙂 So belly practice it is.

Ooh, you won’t believe what relieve I feel over actually having a job. And OBVIOUSLY I would not be me if I did not go out to spoil that relieve by saying ‘its not signed yet’. While meditating in the morning these thought obviously come up and then I let them go. As one yoga teacher once said: “Like ships on the horizon: you watch them but do not get attached, they show up and they disappear and it has nothing to do with you.” I think learning to do this is an important ability in life. This is how I dealt with cravings and how I looked at the different types of traps which could lead to drinking when reading the Jason Vale book on quitting drinking. Read the text and feel where it connects to me. Not sure how to explain that well. Anyway, I feel the meditating makes me more stable and less rollercoaster. Why did I not do this before??

Ok, bedtime. 🙂 I wish you a beautiful sober week filled with experiences which help you along on your path. I am very happy that I quit.

I am thankful for; my body which responds so clearly and joyfully to some yoga action, which, while walking in the supermarket now tells me very clearly what supermarket racks not to even go to because it only shelves rubbish food and which houses my soul in this world. Not sure why yet but I guess that it is good and there because it so. 🙂

No spellcheck. Off to bed here.

xx, Feeling

Guess who has got a new job….

Hello! Got a new job! 🙂 Starting next Thursday! Not signed yet but we shook hands on it. It is a function in quality assurance and more at my educational level, more of an office job but in the same production environment where I came from. And it is in a company where I want to work because of their environmentally sound production. Also it is a 30 minutes bike ride away which is very good for me and it pays about 1/4 more than the last job which is nice too. The company is looking to implement some new procedures for certifications and the follow-up of those procedures needs to be implemented and ensured.

I am moderately excited, mostly rather perplexed about the course my life is taking ‘spontaneously’. Some astrology guy told me about a year ago that astrology wise my life is repeating itself in a 30 year cycle now. And that is exactly what it is doing. My former job is almost the same job as I had 30 years ago. This job is almost the same job as I had after that and I was not even looking for it, he just proposed this when I did an open job interview. It is so strange. Sort of feels unreal. And I am also scared; what if the people do not like me, not follow procedures? But then again: I need to read back at how scared I was when starting in my former job and see how that was. 🙂 I just need to take my time I guess, take good care of me.

Since my last post I have been starting the day with meditation and that is GOOD. Also I have physiotherapy for/against the tension headaches which followed the concussion. That is good too.

I am enjoying the idea of having money to be able to have holiday some day. Already the idea of being able to stay to live here is good and not having to go hungry like a friend of mine did. Yes we have government support but that does not count for people who also have a company, even though that company is only there on paper. And maybe I can continue with Ayurvedic treatment! I found that my grey hairs are dark brown over the period that I took the ayurvedic pills. Now I am not vain, but whaaaaaaa! Ok, yes I am a little vain. Love my half dark brown, half white hair but full brown naturally is better. 🙂 Not sure if full recovery is possible but I can try. Ayurveda is very good at rejuvenating all processes in the body. And I am always scared (there is that word again) that the early greying is a sign of getting old quickly. Though it is not visible in my skin.

The meditating I makes me very much aware of all the processes going on in my body. What I try to do is to sit back and just be. And then life happens and I start to feel a pain, or worry about something and I try to not be involved but just look at it with detachment, like ships at sea. It is very informative and it gives a lot of rest. My brain really needs it. And I notice with paying attention to the frenzy of feeling this or that, it gets worse. I noticed that some stuff, like worrying, can very well be ignored too. Even better. Taking care and taking precautions is good, worrying is useless.

Side effects are: better breathing and also less Facebooking and more doing. One moment I just woke up inside, looked at FB and thought: “What the hell am I doing here, this SUCKS energy and it brings me nothing!” It is not like ‘all my friends’ are on there. They are not, a lot of people have backed away from FB and the younger ones continue with combinations of Whatsapp, Snapchat and Instagram.

Once, in a ayahuasca ceremony I asked my ayahuasca spirit what I would need to do workwise in the future. She said: “That is not important, the only thing you need to do is to get clear.” And I guess that is what it is. Meditate, get untangle from all the things calling me like beer used to do. Untangle from all the emotions sending me in all kinds of states. Untangle  Hmm, well, got a whole life ahead of me. 🙂

I am happy that I quit. 🙂 Hope you are too. I’m off to the supermarket for some partyfood. 🙂

xx, F.

Rockbottom 2 – the realisation that I NEED to change and deal

The alcohol rock bottom was a tough one. I’m thinking now that quitting drinking freed up time to confront me with my basic issues I have. Currently these are:

• sadness
• negativity, lacking gratefulness
• lacking direction, goals
• lacking focus, concentration, mindfulness
• serious memory issues
• administrative and financial troubles
• high blood pressure, food and weight issues

I experience myself as being energetically unaligned, not centered and it is getting not only irritating but also eating in on my Life’s energy. If I do not change I will not be able to sustain my life a lot longer. Not so much because I will starve but if I do not get direction I WILL turn depressed as I used to be when drinking and I WILL lose my wish to live. Since several months I have not been really happy or even glad anymore. I do not sleep well, I do not dream a lot, I am stagnating.

Thing is, I don’t know how to do things differently. I am immensely confused by the way this world developes with its Trumps, global warming, environmental issues, health issues due to sickening food habits, sickening health care. And I am very scared of all of that. I go into freeze state whenever I open Facebook or read the news. So I decided to not FB a lot anymore because there is nothing I can do to change it, apart from repost, share and like.

I also realise, and even more so when Trump was elected: if we want to change the world we NEED to change ourselves. I must not keep hanging on to the replacement addictions but to really get clear, which is my Life’s goal. I need to keep that in mind.

So I have set my clock to snooze every 9 minutes to remind me of the following:

• ‘What would a woman who loves herself do?’
• Breathe, relax, drink water
• Act, do, read
• Baby steps, progress, not perfection

These things are on a paper stuck to the timer. It is very confronting to see how often I am not doing what I set out to do. Even within 9 minutes I can change directions 10 times. I want that to change. This butterfly method might be cute when you are a butterfly, the tax office is not interested in cute. Neither is the landlord. The ‘read’ is there as a reminder that I can read instead of FB or Netflix.

Tax check on 2014 will be in 10 days. I need to prep but it scares me like shit. I don’t want to be scared anymore. I want to be able to deal. I am sick and tired of walking about scared. I mean, so many people have it way worse than I and here I am ‘ooh, scared…. ooh’ and hiding from Life. Not fulfilling whatever destiny there is for me. Or maybe I do so with being scared but I DONT WANT THAT! I wonder if I can treat fear the same way as I did alcohol; just block it when the thought comes up. I believe it has worked for unhappy thoughts for a while. Well, let me start with being distracted and go back to what I was doing.

I have had 2 job interviews and have been turned down for the one which had an opening due to me telling them that I might, at the Friday afternoon, after a busy week, have some trouble counting. That is a nasty lesson. Everybody tells me I need to learn to shut up and possibly even lie. By saying “I don’t want that, I do not want to live in a world where that is necessary.” I think I deny actually looking at the world and the way people work. I get onto my high horse and condemn those who do not follow The Rules as I find them to be honourable.

I am happy that I quit. I realise that I would be in an ENORMOUS hell if I had not. So that is good. It also gives me the opportunity to actually become aware that I need to change some of my behaviour in order to live. All this discomfort I have been feeling for a while now, I need to go through it, change the things I can change :-). Hey…. doesn’t that sound familiar?

Funny thing happened on the train: I was reading The Stateless State from Amrut Laya / Shri Siddharameshwar Maharaj when this women sits next to me and asks me what yogi I am reading. I got the book idea from the bookstore man, more than a year ago. Somewhere it says that people who are ill can go to the doctors but the real healing is in finding back your Life’s path yourself. Which I did with drinking and haha, need to continue to do since I’m not there yet. And ooh yeah, thát works out to be a very Dutch thing; ask people what they are reading, lot of foreigners complain about that in The Netherlands. 🙂

Also, I need to tell you: reading is a big word, I read 3 pages and then had to start again because I had forgotten them. Anyhow, we speak and I mention my ‘complaint’ one the ‘theory’ of ‘one-ness’; “Why for X’s name would oneness be logical? If that is so important, why have we not been designed as one biomass instead of all several people, plants, animals? What is the use of thát? If the design is so good, why do we not agree to the results as being separate beings / experiencing separation?”. At which she says: “Funny that you mention that, I have been reading Shri Aurobindo and he is able to answer that question.” Funny meetings in the train. Synchronicity happening again?

A woman who loves herself would continue to do the egg-timer trick untill she is on her feet again. And she would NOT continuously criticize herself for getting of track because criticizing makes her freeze and compassion makes her able to understand and learn.

Hey! No Facebook for 4 hours! 🙂 GOOD!

I wish you a nice sober day / evening, doing what a men/woman who loves herself would do. ❤

xx, Feeling

2000 light years from home

I guess that about sums it up. Life has been tough. Reading another book on the vanishing twin syndrome has really confronted me with the issue and the sadness I have felt all my life. All the details, every point of it, everything falls into place; even the constant oversharing I do on this blog. Between twins this is not oversharing, it is normal. It is the norm. And in doing so I try to recreate what was. Everything falls into place apart from me. I fall apart.

This immense overwhelming feeling of not being whole, of living and constantly looking for something which in reality cannot be found. Ever. The inability to settle in a house, a life, a job, an occupation even, a relation, a family, always searching, never finding. Always on the road. They call it a hole in the soul and yes, there it is and now it finally has a name. At first I was happy of having found what uprooted me even before I was born and turned me into somebody who is ‘different’, not normal. Now the realisation of having been born this way, knowing that what makes me different has rendered me structurally unsound, unfit to actually find what I am looking for, longing for.

I have always thought that what I am looking for is, well, must be around the corner, where else? I just have not found it yet. But it is not. I now understand this palm reader who, while looking at my hand called out: “I don’t understand you are still alive?!” Like it was written in my palm that I had died, or should have. I did not, my other me did. I have a simian crease as a reminder. 😦

I am tired, lost, lonely. And I don’t understand. I have finally found what ‘ails’ me but shit it hurts. And yes, I understand it must be strange for people to understand this, or even believe the existence of something like a vanishing twin syndrome but I know this is geographically correct, and probably, most likely historically. My mother had blood loss while being pregnant with me, well, me and my twin brother so there is more than ‘only’ my experience of him dying.

This is a sonogram from a twin brother and sister. He is too tiny to survive, holding his big sisters hand.

Funny thing: do you, since you quit drinking, know pretty sure who drinks too much and who is a normy? Can you tell within seconds of seeing somebody? Same here with the VTS. This openness, the hole in the soul, this hole in the aura even. The ability to bond and as I put it ‘make an energetic coccoon’ around two people within seconds. That. Excluding the world and only living for eachother. Where ‘you are me and I am you’ is reality.

Currently I am living in the darkness of his death. So horrific, so overwhelming to witness death up so close and not be able to do something, nothing I could do could save him, nothing I could do to save me from taking it all in; death, destruction, the falling apart from the essence that kept together what I knew as my brother, the other me.

There is not even a path to walk on. I am just floating through the universe and everything is far away. I don’t want to have to search anymore. I am so tired.

This vid explains it ‘all’. Like with the Craig Nakken book on addiction, in this vid almost every sentence is true for me. Please also watch when you are bipolar, have eating disorder, sabotage yourself, have co-dependent relationships and/or addictions. The addictions are not mentioned in this vid but are in the books and website info of a lot of sites. Please not the half black and half white puppet in the presentation, that is my description of me in this dream where I had ‘born myself‘.

 

It is way past bed time and I am not doing what I should be doing but I am happy, well, happy in a very sad way I wrote this post and found the vid. I am also happy that I quit drinking. Life is tough right now but imagine being so sad AND drinking. Ieeehks, not good. 😦

Thank you for reading. I know it is not the most uplifting post I have written. 🙂

xx, Feeling