RE: How's Everyone Feeling Right Meow?
June 1, 2016 at 2:08 am
(This post was last modified: June 1, 2016 at 2:46 am by Thumpalumpacus.)
(June 1, 2016 at 1:53 am)Losty Wrote: Thanks gentlemen.
Life becomes exhausting sometimes. I'm usually ok though. Just suck at finding constant contentedness. I wonder if such a thing even exists.
I don't think it does, hon. I know that for myself my emotions are like a sine-wave, and not a regular one. Especially once I entered recovery in January, my feelings were all over the goddamned place, because I'd stopped anaesthetizing them. They still have more travel than I'm used to -- I've spent a lot of time, money, and brain-cells fogging them out -- so I'm still learning to deal with them. Contentedness happens sometimes (glad to report that tonight was one of those times), but it is not and I doubt it ever will be constant.
From a lyric I wrote about 30 years ago:
You don't want to feel too satisfied,
or lose the edge that makes you alive,
but you're fooling yourself, and that's for sure,
when you're looking for problems but no cure.
or lose the edge that makes you alive,
but you're fooling yourself, and that's for sure,
when you're looking for problems but no cure.
That's not criticism, Lost One. But it speaks to a core belief of mine, which is that happiness can be decided-upon. In my recovery, I've started assembling a toolbox of methods I use to steer my emotions to a happy place: mindfulness (which is basically observing the act of feeling emotions from an objective viewpoint ["Okay, I'm feeling sad. Why? Is this something I need to think about right now?"]), gratitude, and understanding the limits of control I have in life, even over my own feelings, and knowing that even though I may not be able to control them, I can decide on whether or not I want to address them, and if so, at the appropriate time when my mental outlook is more likely to produce a result which comports to my goal.
This is a long-winded way of saying that sometimes I have to pick the time and place of my battles, and refuse to offer battle on terrain not favorable to my own mental well-being.