Failure and Triumph

This quest for a bit of recovery from my anxiety-based issues of smoking and attachment to weighing has brought me so much insight. I've gotten insight into myself but also into the underpinnings of my anxiety--the roots, I guess you'd say.   This has informed every relationship.   It's been a gift beyond measure.

This past week was a watershed time for me.  I time of upheaval and of stuff surfacing that had remained quietly under wraps and also quietly sabotaging my personal success and happiness.   I quickly realized that it was time to exorcise the ghosts and demons both psychological and spiritual that were sucking the life out of my life.  I spent a lot of time at church and in prayerful meditation and talking to trusted confidants and friends about all of it.  

It's personal some of the stuff I encountered. Deeply personal.  Some of it I can wave off with a smile and a joke.  Some, not so much.  It's much more than a scale and a cigarette,  I always knew that.   I just didn't know how much more it was. But it turns out that the scale and the cigarette are the tip of the proverbial iceberg.  Like if K2 were an iceberg, kind of thing.  It's the kind of stuff I want to talk to my friends in Alanon about.  It's not currently stuff I want to discuss here. 

This forum makes me visible and, with courage, compassion and resilience, I could openly share some of what these insights have meant for me--later on.  But right now I seemed to have hit on something that requires a bit more of an inward quest.  So, I'm going to forgo talking about the weighing.  I didn't mind relapsing on the weighing, but I really minded smoking.  I went 87 days without a cigarette. Then I choked when big stuff began to surface.  I've smoked 5 and half cigs in 101 days. All in the past 2 weeks.  I sure wish I could be telling you that I went 100 days without one.  But that's not the truth and the truth is very liberating if not equally uncomfortable.

I have a lot of budding peace about my imperfect execution of my stated goals and then the public sharing of that failing.  I figure it would have only been a true failure if I didn't learn anything, which I most certainly did.  The only kind of failure is really the failure to try and stretch myself a little further.

This is always such a great transition time--a bit sad for loss of the long, hot summer days.  But the possibilities of a new year are so enticing.  I still always equate the beginning of a new year with school and the smell of pencils, fresh paint on cinder block walls and brand new tennis shoes squeaking in school hallways.  I always thought I hated school and I probably mostly did.  But I also did always love the idea of a fresh start, "this year will be better" I would tell myself.  

I think this year really will be better.  And I may even make it back to school.

Who knows? 

Here's to 2012-13.