Yeah! I feel like a pussycorn!!! (unicorn + kitten)

Yeah! I found my spark plug!!! It is Iodine! And I feel like this:

A pussycorn…. 🙂

Yesterday I walked 9 kilometer without trouble, without even thinking about it. Today 9 kilometers again in the pouring rain. No worries. If you read in the news that somebody has exploded out of sheer happiness it would be me! I’m high with it. It is amazing.

People that have followed me the last 5 months might have wondered whenever I would get my ass away from the computer and start doing things instead of procrastinating….. Well…. knock wood but I think I’ve got it. And as I said, it is Iodine. Now I google ‘Iodine procrastinating’ and low and behold what shows up: a book saying that heart medication that controls heart flutters as I had them actually depletes the body of Iodine. Nice. So that’s where it came from, my beta blockers. I think I’m gonna check back with my GP2 to inform her of that.

So… How happy am I?! I am over the moon! I have found my energy back and it was indeed my spark plug. I thought it was because if I do stuff I am ok, but the starting… blaaahg……. So there is this new feeling that I can actually look up, and change my view, look at the horizon again. Do you understand? The feeling that life can start again. That the speed of the world and everybody elses speed does not hurt anymore because I am no part of it. Now I can connect again.

I have not been so happy in years. I am back! 🙂 My body is back and we align again and wow. Wow!! This is as good as quitting drinking and maybe even better because the fog in my head is gone too. That took a while!! SKY HIGH! 🙂

Thanks to my mother’s educatation in nutrition and my fathers stubbornness I think that I finally found what I was looking for. Next up: life!

Experiences / luck happening

Yesterday was a strange day. Learned shitloads. And after learning shitloads the world continued to spin and the universe did it’s thing. While clicking an article of interest on Facebook on sexual obsession in guys and how our culture stimulates that – which in itself is a very good read specifically when you have sons, I clicked another 2 or 3 times an came upon this site on counseling  and it in the Free resources I continued on this video:

Which started with teaching me what I should have done differently in order to prevent damaging people (don’t try to FIX people, specifically do NOT get into that mode because it creates havoc), when the results of me screwing up earlier became present. And then it continued, yes…. on PROCRASTINATING and it explained what procrastinating really is. I have been looking for an explanation but had not found it. Then it continued on the ‘SHOULD’ issue and then it continued on ALCOHOL! All my issues on a plate in a few minutes.

He has a very interesting way of looking at alcohol abuse and getting people to do something about it. And funny to recognise it because it is what I did before I quit when reading the book of Jason Vale ‘Kick the drink easily’ where I, while drinking, would watch how I got into the drinking mode, where the addiction ‘attached’ to me, how it ‘got’ me and how to learn to cut that off of find other answers for that.

Isn’t that amazing? I thought it was. I am happy about it. Will check out more of his vids.

I went to pick up a book from the bookshop after that and got invited to have some tea with a few people sitting there. Before sitting down I became interested in this Tarot deck which card showed the back of what you would normally see. And I thought: ‘I’ld like to see that but it is still closed.’

And I sat down and 2 women had a tarot deck in their hands and the bookshop guy went over to get the other deck and said: ‘I’ld like to show you these.’ Which…. is a very good start I thought. And what continued is a conversation that included about 20 of the topics I have been thinking and learning about in the last months. It was amazing!

The guests left and I was about to pay and we came to speak about work and me not having any. And the conversation continued for 3 hours (!) after closing time in which he interviewed me about what I wanted and where my heart lay and slowly the fog in my head disappeared and started to show the real issues that keep me from doing stuff. I became just real tired. Not that continuous bleuh feeling that I had, but real tired.

And I really slept. And this morning I woke up and the whole world looks different again. I have not had my beta blockers for 2 days. So I guess I am officially cured from my beta blocker addiction. Yeah on me! My heart is beating ok, it feels like it is pumping blood instead of mud. Which in itself is a VERY NICE feeling. It’s alive! 🙂

And…. now I still do not know what to do with my life but I am practising having faith and thinking positively so: I will find out. 🙂

Look and you will find, ask and you will be given, knock and you shall be opened.

I am VERY HAPPY that I quit.

I want: dunno, that things are, I don’t know. More easy? But that is funny because I think I have it easy. Sort of.  I want to continue living and really live my life to the fullest. Ooh shit that means that I need to make decisions I don’t want to make. Aah…. entry into hesitation  discovered. I want to move to my homeland but I can’t do that if I don’t have a job there because I would be spending my money on moving and stuff and then be in an area where there are very few jobs in my field. So I need to move field. Hmm, need to investigate and turn these sentences into positive wordings and see what opens up then.

I need: food. I keep on forgetting to eat. Which is totally new. It came with one of the Schuessler salts. But the funny thing is I am not hungry and I can be hungry after I ate, so that is not going as it should yet. I took the salt for blood pressure stuff but is also ‘about’ something to do with hunger and not. I’ll just wait and see.

I wish you a very nice day from The Netherlands. I am hoping for snow here. It is 11:11 again, I keep on seeing that clock time almost every day.

Happy that I quit

Hi all!

I Just want to say that I am happy that I quit drinking.

And I am guessing that some of the erratic posts that I write may give you the idea that I am a total mess. Which could well be true. But nothing, nothing, nothing in my life is going to get better when I drink. Isn’t that cool?

I was looking to force my emotions towards normality by drinking. Now I find that I can steer my way through life way easier when not drinking. It does not always feel easier, but the steering is. And I haven’t got the hang of it, still not always walking the talk in being able ‘to choose my reaction’ (to admin e.g.), and I don’t know if that is ever going to be so. But there is an opening and there is light. Before there was deep, deep hole and it was pitch black and nobody knew I was there.

And with that, thank you for visiting my blog, reading, liking, commenting, because it helps. It helps me realise that I am not alone, it makes me want to shine light in the darkness and on the darkness. I think, sometimes, often I am afraid that what I write is strange and uncomfortable to read. Still I stick with it, because if I start to do the editing, I feel as if I am doing exactly what went wrong with me before; covering up the weirdness and the pain. Hiding. And I want to be clear and I need to let the light in. 🙂

Still not sure if I should write with disclaimers and all, I mean, past performance does not guarantee future results. It is an addiction after all. But I guess just like not thinking about drinking in the future, I should not worry about thinking about drinking in the future. I am not in the future. I am here! And sober! And happy! 🙂

A time of insight and sunlight. 🙂 Happy. 🙂

Substitute addiction / time to get a move on

It’s my 2 months sober anniversary! 🙂 And after reading Belle’s post this morning I remembered why I never signed up for a 100 challenge day; I thought I needed to get sober for forever. Yes, ‘looking for help’ was not in my dictionary. But I am going to ask help. If all is well I am meeting somebody next Tuesday – not a professional –  that I hope is going to help me with my eating pattern and daily life.

I do cheat a little on the trusting ‘not a professional’ because she is a vicars wife and she wants to be a professional in her specialisation and I am the guinea pig. 🙂 But I hope she can help me get on with the practical part of life because I still rather read blogs and blog but that will not bring bread to the table….

So… Reading blogs this morning (while I should actually be doing admin) I came to the post from Greg W who reblogged a post about substitute addiction from which I copied this part:

He writes that the addict in recovery “may maintain potentially magical thinking that the Higher Power will fix him or her without engaging in corrective action…and may try to use rituals of connection to a Higher Power as means to escape from painful feelings.”

Some of you might know that I am not religious but I do really like the spiritual-like insights and experiences that I have ever so now and then. I do not only like the Ahaa Erlebnis but also the relatively easy way it gets me to understand stuff. And even though I sometimes have to dig deep and face a lot of shit, it feels like I don’t really have to work for it. Which is I guess, true-ish. For me it is easier to feel my way through stuff and blog about it then, I don’t know… how do you solve issues? I actually don’t know what the other option is. Well maybe this explains it: it is easier for me to ride a craving and experience what it is trying to tell me, where it comes from and where it wants to take me than actually fighting it.

I know I can’t do the fighting. I would be afraid that I would lose I guess. Alcohol is strong. Do I lack willpower? Yes! No! Don’t know… My willpower has just been trained to say ‘I want to drink!’ And that statement feels very willpowery and convincing and real and true. I only realise that my willpower is fooling me when I get to the last check which is: ‘Does is make me drink?’ Yes -> not good, beware. Can I fight it? I don’t think so. And I do not want to try to fight it because I think I will lose. That scares me. Addiction runs deep.

So I need to find something that does work from my sober tool box. Most of the time that is bringing my thoughts, fears, feelings to the light. Which is ok. It has worked so far. Happy that I quit. But I’ve had so many beautiful insights in my addiction that by now I feel that if I don’t get enlightened at least once a day that I am not really alive. New addiction? Yes, it feels like it because I feel I have become dependent on it. And also no because it has transformational qualities in it. True addictions don’t do transformations do they? It feels like those experiences change my mindset, my cells, my DNA, my view on life and I need that.

To which my inner voice says: ‘Stop shitting yourself, you are addicted to life changing experience, you get bored if you do not experience stuff. And when you get bored your addict starts to speak up and you get to the danger zone. In alcohol you found freedom of the physical boundaries and you forgot what you call ‘the misery that binds you to the earth’. You now crave the explosion of inner freedom that is in the Ahaa experiences.’

😦 True. Or 🙂 True!!! So what now? So that is a wonderful insight and because I am experiencing this totally happy feeling about this conversations with me I can not imagine why I need to do anything about it. 😀 Gheghegheghe.

And I wrote the below paragraphs before I got the above conversation with myself, now I just can’t see what I was worried about. I actually am high on experience. Wicked! 😀 While 10 Minutes ago that I was worried and probably should be but I can’t feel it now:

Happy that I quit, not happy with that I am not doing the stuff I need to do. Yesterday I had such a big insight in how I face things that the insight itself gave me a splitting headache and I went back to bed and slept for hours. And I was doing exactly NOT what I should be doing. Which is the same I do now. Again and again and again and again. There is another part where I do not want to be clear. Hiding behind stuff, blog.

Enough thinking, here’s an anniversary song. For all of you that are out there and that are, or ar not on the happy train. Join in, sing along. 🙂

Now that I am reading back what I wrote I realise the intention of not doing stuff and berating me about it. I always seem to need something to keep myself down. (I am thinking ‘attached to the world’?) God forbid I should be genuinely happy and content with myself. Can’t have that now can we?

Yes, we can!! 😀

Say who was not doing what she needed to do???

I have alcohol dependency, works out that I have ‘human’ too.

I was just happily commenting along a post of Alcoholicsguidetoalcoholism when Paul commented: ‘We are all perfectly imperfect, it’s called ‘being human’.

 ‘Shit!! Do I have that?’

That is indeed what I thought. I felt caught, trying to find a way out, looking for arguments. Did not exactly work, or it did. This is another one of those posts where I let the crazy out. See what it does. It eh, does its crazy stuff allright.

I always thought (think?) I could just, just scrape by and not be human. Being human? That is ok in itself. For others. Being fallible? I sympathise with you. Really, I do. 🙂

How did that get there? And if I am not human, what am I? Trying to feel my way into this subject. And no, I am not crazy. Or maybe I can not judge that myself. Just trying to find out how it can be that I do not accept the humanity part (no… not part….). And the road to accepting that seems to be closed so I’ll beat around the bush a little, see what comes up.

Lacking female examples I think I am Thorgal. This is Thorgal:

This is Thorgal too:

How he got into this world:

He has a wiki page:

Thorgal Aegirsson: Son of Varth and Haynee, grandson of Xargos -captain of a spaceship on a way to Earth in search of energy sources. Raised by Vikings (after the spaceship crashed on Earth) but not one of them, he shows traits of character and morality that many Vikings consider those of a weak man. In reality, if need be, he is a courageous and skillful warrior and an exceptionally skilled archer. His life’s goal is to find a place for himself and his family to live in peace. For a time they strip him of his memory, and he becomes the pirate lord Shaigan, though his compassionate personality remained unchanged.

What comes up?

‘If I am human I AM A SUPERHUMAN!!! I MUST be very different from everybody else. Sure I wasn’t born. I was a revelation!’

Yesterday I was feeling cocky, now I am omnipotent. 🙂 Tomorrow I am a god, no, not a god, tomorrow I am a God. Note the capital. And note that I am a God, that is funny. Why not God? Or the God? There are bounderies to my omnipotence. 😀 Funny.

If somebody else was saying this I would get really angry.

‘WHO THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?!!!’

But still, I would not get past that because I would be angry because I would think the other would try to outdo me in being special. So it is dangerous not to be special. And the other is not allowed to out-special me. Need to stay with that. Going to let the crazy do the talking:

‘Don’t you dare be more special than I! Don’t you dare get out of this misery while we are still here! Don’t you dare to qualify for the love that I do not receive!!!’ Crying now.

‘Not enough love to go around. Lacking. Lacking, lacking something. Don’t know. I can’t be lacking love. I don’t need that. Stuff the security talk, there is no such thing! Piss off!! Get lost!!!! ‘ Crying now.

Today I want to feel special, not even normal. Just special.

‘Being special keeps me away from the groping hands. If I were special guys would not grope. They would worship and fear me.’

‘If I am human I could die. Shiiiiiiit.’

Those wer random thoughts popping up when I question myself. Nasty shit. I think I’ve had enough for today, no solution there yet, just information.

‘Ha! ‘Solution’, such a human word.’

Why don’t I allow myself to be human?

‘Where it is human it is alive, where it is alive it can die.’

Change of feelings: I am trying now to feel human and accept I can live and die. Yeah. 🙂 🙂 🙂 There it is…. I have plunged into my body! 🙂 🙂 🙂 That is NEW. My heart is happy, literally! It sings! 🙂 It is all connecting in my upper body and my head is with it. And lower body.

‘If it is sacred it can be demolished. Wear the taboo on your sleeve, it will scare people away.’

That last part is on promiscuous behaviour. And so much for the crazy of today. With unexpected ‘solution’. 🙂

Happy that I quit. It is, aaahr, quite invigorating. Here I was, thinking sobriety would be boring.

The mind might know it but the body does not

Out for a few days in my ‘homeland’. Brother and sister-in-law are on holiday and the house was empty so a friend of mine and I took the chance to some free holiday days. We had a wonderful 3 days. We started of with a quiet evening of cooking and reading and day 2 we took went for a walk  and played the game ‘memory’ at a lunchroom because it kept on raining. I lost and won 1 time from an 11 years younger friend so that is good.

Today we went biking and came along a forest where you can climb trees and do a sort of survival tour between the trees. 5 Meters high. That was…. interesting. Gooooood fun, good, good fun. Very heavy and I did have this moment where I lost my balance on this steel cable that moved to and fro. I hugged a pole like a koala bear repeating ‘I can’t move. I can’t move… ‘ I was paralyzed, could not think, could not move. We were in a harness, strapped to a life line so if we would fall it would be a drop of a meter or what, no harm done, but still… the mind might know that but the body does not. 🙂

So I got saved by this sweet 20 year old guy that is out there in his normal habitat. He just hung upside down from the steel cables to put some extra tension on them. And talked me through how to get up and continue. So I did.

Any insights? Yeah, I thought: God, I’m happy I don’t drink anymore. I would not have been able to get past this being paralyzed. I would have headed out there and drunk myself to oblivion ‘because it was such a fun day, whaaahahaaa, do you remember when I hung up there being all scared and shit, whaahaaahaaaha.’  I got up and arrived at the platform shaking like an esp leaf. And then we did the ‘jump of the platform and do the ropeway’. And I did and it was fun. We’re going to go next week again. Or in two weeks, when the muscle aches are over :-D. Wanno use every muscle in your body and not do yoga again? Try climbing through a forest.

I realise now that I have just accepted help, and I believed him. That is different too. That is very different. 🙂 This sobriety thing is cool. I love the opportunities it gives. From not being too tired to get up in the morning to winning at Memory (ok, and loosing) to daring to enter the climbing forest, being able to really do it without thinking ‘wish it was over so I could get a beer’. Being able to experience things for real. 🙂

Tadaaaa!!!! I feel normal. Yes! Yes!

Girls, guys! I feel normal today! 🙂

Not kidding. I feel absolutely normal, like I have not felt in more that 30 years. How normal? I will explain that with a tiny story. A few weeks ago I rang my sister-in-law but got her 11 year old son on the line.

‘Hi, this is Feeling, how are you?’

‘Am fine?’

‘Every time I speak with you it feels like you are surprised that I ask how you are. Are you?’

‘Yes….’

‘Why?

‘Dunno…… Why should I not be fine?’

‘Yes, true!’

I hope you can you remember the time that you felt like this? Or maybe I should start with saying that I hope you have felt / do feel like this; there where ‘being fine’ is so natural that you are surprised that people ask. I hope you have, I hope you do. For me that is at least 30 years ago, I guess it is pre-drinking time. It is also pre assaults time, and pre mother-gets-cancer time and pre parents-fight-night-and-day, pre school-drop-out time. But it was there. And I felt like that today. 🙂 Good.

No booze, no sugar. I feel normal. I hope it is that simple. We’ll see. But if you don’t mind I am not going to test it. 🙂

Happy-ish that I quit. It actually feels normal. Why would I drink? It feels like smoking: other people do it but I don’t. The sugar is more difficult, even though I never got more that a quarter of a teaspoon of that per day. Poison! Well, specifically to me. It also is more difficult to avoid and less accepted than not drinking alcohol. Aaahr, who cares. I feel normal! Ha!!

It really beats feeling like the subject of a Radiohead song.

Extensive blood test ok!

And another one in the series of ‘good news’; the extra ultra extensive blood test that has been done has is OK. Just a little high on the bad cholesterol and the potassium but nothing to worry about. They say the high Potassium could also come from the fact that I had to sit with this band around my arm for a long long time to get all the blood out. But I blame it on the Celtic salt I use which contains a lot of Potassium. Also; the real Potassium level of a body is difficult to determine in blood because the bandwidth is so small that the body will deplete every stock in the body in order to keep the blood level good. Bad Potassium levels influence the heart rhythm immediately. People with a longstanding history of drinking alcohol and not eating (their veggies or Celtic salt) typically have a low level of Potassium.

And… I would not be surprised that the standard for ‘good Potassium levels’ have been set AFTER the worldwide introduction of table salt which does not contain any Potassium at all (and is therefore bad, bad, bad).

I’m not going to worry about the cholesterol, that will work itself out. Need to read up on it because the whole ‘saturated fat is bad, it makes you fat and gives you heart diseases’ is not true. Sugar causes inflammation in the arteries and that causes heart diseases.  So I am confident that it will work itself out in a little while since I don’t drink alcohol and do not eat sugar anymore.  And excercise…

And now, will I be finishing of my stop-drinking-alcohol-the-nutrients-approach with taking extra nutrients? currently I am only taking multivitamin, omega 3 and kelp every second or third day. The kelp is because the Celtic salt contains little Iodine. Right now think I will take a half or a quarter of the dose of everything of the alcohol detox mix and then to continue with the anxiety/stress, memory and hypoglycemia mix. There is this thing where I don’t feel safe if I don’t do this. While actually I don’t have alcohol cravings and very few alcohol thoughts. I do have sugar cravings, even though I was very low on sugar anyhow. Today I ate 7 raisins. I feel like I cheated, it is like taking 7 drops of alcohol because of the alcohol…

Can hear my brother say in my head now: ‘You don’t need pills for hypoglycemia, you need them for insanity. 7 Raisins, yeah, ooooooooh, BAD!!!’

What I am curious about is how the part of ‘addiction is searching the solution from the outside’ comes up in here. I am guessing that my not really feeling ‘safe’ while I actually have no cravings has to do with the thought that quitting alcohol should be really difficult and hard and almost impossible. It has not been that way for me. But… they say quitting is not the hard part, staying quit is the difficulty. I would not know, I am not there.

Why is it that I lose trust in me now things work out to be easy and even in the extensive blood test there is no damage to be found? I guess it is because I actually feel like a phony. The mess I was in when I drank and now finding out how easy it finally was. It wasn’t about heroically fighting a dragon for days on end, hanging on to life and then finally winning in a last act of heroism. It was about letting go of a fake idea of good. I scare me a little because I keep on thinking that I must go flat on my face because this can’t be true. Well, got the time to proof me if The Plan is going to lead to A Job (or not?!).

And on the other hand, I did a lot of the quitting work before hand. Most of the goodbyes have been said before I actually quit. I think that really helped. I copied that method from Allan Carr’s book on quitting with smoking. He ‘allows’ the reader to smoke while reading the book so the anxiety of quitting does not interfere with their intelligence. I did that with reading up on alcohol AND starting with the home googled nutrient approach I developed for myself and the no sugar, no smoking, eating healthy part.

And….. being happy. Being happy is the strongest anti-dote to being unhappy. Which is a load of BS, but if works, it works. Happy that I quit. Do feel like I need to get a move on. Proud is out of the picture. Content is not happening because I have been writing here instead of doing yoga.

Have a nice day / evening!

Addict bingo

Having received a 1000 Euro bill on a 4 hour intake for a detox programme I thought: might as well set up my own camp. And, I am guessing with that I have come to complete all the exclamations of an ex-addict in repair. Like ‘I can do this by myself’ and ‘I am sure I will never drink again.’ and what have you? My book on Addictive Thinking has not arrived yet so I am not totally up to date with my own cunning.

However, I did think I’d draw up a ‘addict bingo’ like you have ‘buzzword bingo‘. So I turn to Google and search on addict bingo to get some inspiration. Works out that one can actually get addicted to bingo….. 😦 So, no results on addict bingo. Loads on bingo addict..

Of course there is a way around it with the below search. But I did not press that search button because already this autocomplete list oozes pain and aggression. I am guessing it were not addicts looking for a speech topic that entered these searches. 😦

So maybe I can, say, start to do something useful with my time. Like have a life. Do The Plan.

On thing: did I tell you my blood pressure is back to normal? Yeah!!!! 2 Weeks ago it was still too high and now it has dropped about 30 points in total on both levels together. Hurray! And of course that was before the pint of blood they took from me today for testing. 😉

Proud that I quit and that it is paying of in measurable numbers. Happy that the sun is shining. I’m gonna do some more cleaning of my library and sing loudly. That’s how I roll today. 😉

It’s working

Well, the alarm is working. I started cleaning the house about 15 minutes ago. Alarm was set for my 15 minutes check on me (questions: what emotions do I experience, try to relax, am I following the plan?).

At 15 minutes I had cleaned out the dry laundry in like 4 minutes and when the alarm went of I somehow found myself behind the screen typing. Duh???? I can’t even remember what motivated me to sit down.

So let’s say the technique is working. And uuuuhmmm, it is very smart of me to come up with it. And…. uuhhmmm, it would be good to continue doing STUFF, not blogging or what have you.

Happy that I quit, proud of it. I’m a chick on a mission now! I’m going to DO STUFF.