small reflection

Today, I heard a song that I haven't heard since my last drunk days and earliest sober days. It has caused me to reflect a bit on how things have changed over the past year.

A year ago at this time, I was limited to copying and pasting song lyrics in my blog -- usually because I was too drunk to type. Well with the exception of [this other post], which was written at the beginning of a drunk that I REALLY didn't want to start. I didn't want to drink again. I desperately wanted to stop. But I still drank even before that post was finished.

A year ago, the lights were on but nobody was home. I was emotionally unavailable to the people most important to me. The only thing that mattered was my own pain and NEED to numb it with alcohol. The only thing that kept me alive was my victim mentality and my insistence on blaming everything but myself for my own misery.

The song I heard today was one that I played repeatedly on loop during the last week of December 2005 and the entire months of January through March 2006. (Umm, yeah ... I was really screwed up ... )

By adding my own interpretation to the lyrics, they inspired me to change. I needed to keep hearing the words over and over:

To live and not to breathe
Is to die in tragedy
To run, to run away
To find what you believe

And I leave behind
This hurricane of f*cking lies

I lost my faith to please
This town that don't exist
So I run, I run away
To the light of masochist

And I leave behind
This hurricane of f*cking lies

And I've walked this line
A million and one f*cking tries

But not this time

- Green Day, "Jesus of Suburbia"

I can't say how many times I tearfully white-knuckled it through cravings while hearing those words. It was good to hear them again today.

Today, I'm especially grateful because ...

• I'm 255 days sober.
  
• The mental and emotional hurricane that alcohol created in my life has stopped.
• I'm no longer walking the line between drunkenness and sanity.
• I lost my faith to incomprehensible demoralization as a result of repeatedly failing to control my drinking, but now I've found something to believe that keeps me sober.
• I'm not afraid to have hope.
• I'm not afraid to fail.
  
• I no longer need things to go my way, or to go according to my plans.
• I no longer need people to behave in a certain way to make me happy.
  
• I don't walk alone anymore.
• God made this happen.