February 12, 2007

Posted in Lori at 4:19 pm by wickedstepsisters

I’ve been rolling some words around in my head for about a year – words that still feel foreign and like they should part of someone else’s story…But every day they become more my own and every day, I’m a little bit more OK with it.

For all of my adult life I’ve struggled with a strong obsessive/compulsive tendency. It’s affected me in many areas – but most disruptively in worrying about incurable disease. Thousands of dollars, thousands of milligrams of prozac and probably thousands of Dr.’s visits couldn’t even begin to quell a mad obsesssion that migrated constantly or the insatiable search for something undefinable, I can best describe as being a ‘hole’.

There was a block of time over 14 years, where the highest dose of prozac, and an almost every other day 6 drink Grower’s Cider habit still couldn’t touch (and now I’m sure added to!) the inside hysteria. A year ago, after crashing mercilesssly into myself, a friend suggested that the 12 Steps might begin to address what medicine and everything else I’d tried, could not. I flushed the prozac, stopped drinking cider and aimed to live differently. Accepting that obsessive/compulsive behavior is almost identical to addictive behavior and should be treated the same way tho’, was a hard pill for me to swallow. I hate the word, ‘addict or addictive’ and refused to do the group thing. Instead I blasted through the steps in 12 weeks, thinking myself cured. I was astounded and disturbed this Fall to discover I wasn’t cured at all – and had in fact just been living out the same kind of obsessive behaviours in new ways.

I went back, (feeling very lame I might add) to Step one to readdress what being ‘powerless and unmanageable’ means. I think for me it means fully recognizing how o/c thoughts patterns affect all my life, feelings and decisions, and that in spite of my best (worst!) efforts to fix it with God, drugs or alcohol and even counseling and knowledge…can’t.

I’ve discovered things about myself this year I had no clue about before – ‘addictive’ personality being one of them…Honestly, I can get addicted (and have) to anything…ice cubes, scotch mints, mini carrots, prescription or non presecription drugs, alcohol, the computer, writing, research. causes, activities, anything. Anything to distract me from the scream of the inner hole…I live in extremes, hating the middle ground and railing against it all the time. I understand now that parts of who I am are more messed than I ever imagined…that there’s reasons (that I still don’t all understand) for coping with life the way I did (do) and that I do in fact need support in spite of wanting to go it alone.

So there you have it. I don’t really know how to define what kind of ‘addict’ I am or if that’s even the point. But it sure feels like obsessive & addictive could be siblings…And I’m part of the family.

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