“It’s awful and terrible and it sucks. It hurts so bad. It’s like
you’ve been purposefully frozen forever and now you’re slowly
defrosting, and everything, everything hurts. (...) It’s like having
an exposed nerve.”
These were Glennon Doyle’s words talking about her early sobriety, and I
thought “this is exactly how I’ve been feeling”. Except I barely drink,
I don’t do drugs, or gamble. My addiction, my escape, what kept me numb,
I realised, was a chronic case of people pleasing. The strong believe
that I needed to be liked and fit in. Be accommodating. That everyone
else mattered but me. In the same interview, she continues saying that she hasn’t been “fine”
since she stopped drinking, because she was finally living. Being alive
means feeling, the good and the bad. For me, it was as if I had been
just floating through life for years but never really living. How do you
go on for so long without actually living? And so you never become
anyone. You just exist and make decisions based on existing, to keep
existing. And it’s not happy, it’s not fulfilling, but you don’t know,
because that is your reality. It has always been. And when you finally
wake up and see and feel for the first time, it’s so overwhelming, and
you don’t know what to do with all that. You need to process and
uncover, discover and for the first time choose. Choose for the person
you are meant to be.