I've had 3 drinking dreams in the past week... one was particularly intense and I woke up feeling really sad. I'd been offered a drink by a 'cool' person in a 'cool' room and had to say no and walk out... wandered around this hillside place and someone from my past was being mean to me.. I was trying to find Mr D because he had some keys I needed but I couldn't find him..
(I know other people's dreams are really boring and hard to follow but wouldn't Freud have a field day with this one??!!)
I woke up at 5.30am feeling sad, then lay in bed and listened to this talk by Tara Brach to help me with something that's going on in my life.. I was kind of finding it hard to focus all the way through (29 minutes long) but then I got to the end and she said something and I just burst into tears and sobbed. It was very intense and weird.
Later that day I was sitting at my sisters kitchen table talking to her about stuff and I was all watery and had teary eyes but I didn't mind. Usually being watery would be a very uncomfortable place for me to be. But I didn't mind.
We left her house and went walking to the park with the kids. I got a coffee from the nice man in the coffee caravan and then pushed my Little Guy on the swing. It was windy and I felt so alive.
Even in my tender, watery state I just feel so thankful to be living, really living and really feeling and really moving through my life in a totally alert fashion.
That night I got a babysitter (Mr D was away on work) and went to a quiz night for a dear friend's school fundraiser and had So. Much. Fun!!!
Last night I speed-read "Smashed: Growing Up A Drunk Girl" by Koren Zailckas. A great read if you want to read all about someone's crazy boozy exploits (and boy did she have some crazy boozy exploits). As seems to often be the way with these memoirs the bit where she got sober was pretty brief (this is always what I want to read about) but she does sum up nicely what she has learned about herself since she took the booze away (a lot, and not all of it peaches and roses). She ends by railing against the alcohol industry; "which alternates between pandering to women and using us to bait men" and with a great feminist rant about all of the evil alcohol creates for women; "I've had it with a world that has created a generation of women who are emotionally dependent on alcohol".
And then there's this: "I'm tired of the world that won't rescue girls until we're long past the point of saving. Too many people rely on outward signs of aggression to indicate their daughters or girlfriends or sisters have problems with alcohol. They wait for fights, or D,U.I. charges, or destruction of property, when girls who drink are far less apt to break rules in overt ways. As a gender we are far more likely to turn our drunken destructiveness inward, to wage private wars against ourselves, to attempt suicide, to be pinned down by fear and depression. "
So very true. Remove the alcohol and we un-pin ourselves and really start to live.
Love, Mrs D xxx
