I start back to school Monday. That feels so weird, to be saying that at my age. It will be my second senior year of college. Hopefully, it will be my last. Fighting for financial aid for this one last year was a job in and of itself, and I just don't want to go there again.
I could sit around and waste a lot of time and energy kicking myself in the ass for not doing the whole college thing back when I was a kid.
The truth is, had I done the college thing back then, I would have wasted it in the years since. Addiction is a motherfucker.
Recovery helps me fight all those negative emotions, the self-loathing, the fear. That is, recovery helps me fight that shit when I let it, when I am actively working a program.
The truth is that I sometimes let my fear, insecurities, and character defects rule my life still. That's something that I have to work on. I have to continue to follow through on my commitments to my friends, I have to continue to "accentuate the positive", I have to continue to change the character defects into character strengths.
And with the help of a few good people, I continue to move forward. I continue to grow, I continue to change into something better than I used to be.
So, Monday, when the new semester starts, I will start with some new behaviours. It's time for Cindy to grow up.
Back in the dark ages when I lived in a village in Indonesia, and was seeing (traveling with) one of the boys from the village, I learned a hard truth. Regardless of anything, we are super blessed to have school systems that, once we have our acts together, we can actually go back into. And be financed for.
ReplyDeleteMy boyfriend, one of many children in his family, was going to age out of the narrow confines of university age before his brother finished his degree. And his father would only pay for one child at a time ... so basically he was shit out of luck and guaranteed a hard-scrabble life as a result. I didn't keep up with him ultimately, so I don't know how things turned out. But I always said I would finish my degree well at 80, and I quickly became incredibly grateful I could.
I do not tell you this to take away your feelings, to tell you that you should feel something other than what you feel. But knowing that we live in societies that, as completely imperfect as they are, give us those of us that need it the room to move through hardship brought me immense comfort back then when I truly couldn't do more than get up in the mornings and make money to support my addiction and recovery.
(I know there are dangling thingies in those sentences, but I have to get back to keeping my house and pushing myself to do regular chores so I am not going to take the time to figure out how to write them properly.)