Surrender. To give up control of something to someone else.
You cannot fix someone else, you cannot make them get help, you cannot force them to address and acknowledge a problem that they are not ready to.
When you do addiction work, you hear a lot about that word. About surrendering. And also of acceptance.
Surrender to the process, surrender to the emotions…to all of it.
Until right now, until this exact moment, I’ve really never thought about that and what it actually means.
As we all know, I am basically the queen of control. I want to fix, I want to control, I want to help…and if I can’t, I feel like a failure. I feel like that’s on me, like I’ve not done a good enough job, like I’m both the problem and the lack of solution.
While there isn’t a specific person in my life right now that I need to surrender to….well, actually, no. Let me rephrase that.
The person in my life I need to surrender to is me.
I need to give up control. I need to STOP trying to fight myself. Stop trying to fight the emotions and the circumstances and all of the fucking feelings all the time.
I cannot control the things in my life that I’ve been trying to. And I’m not even talking about other people. That’s just a given. I cannot control my husband, I cannot fix him, I can’t fix my kids…none of that is within my power.
The only thing that is reasonably within my power, within my control, is me. And still, that’s something I fight every step of the way.
I still justify the fact that I have a problem with alcohol. I try to convince myself that I can get back to drinking like a “normal person”, and that it won’t completely take over my life again.
Maybe, instead of constantly fighting these things, instead of constantly trying to be in control of it all, I need to surrender to the fact that I’m just not.
Honestly, I really don’t know what any of this means. I don’t know what it actually looks or feels like to surrender to it in this way. I only know that I need to.
The constantly trying to justify, trying to control…it just isn’t working. Because this isn’t something that I can control. And I’ve been trying to for far too long now.
I can’t control these aspects of my life, so I just need to stop trying to.
I need to surrender to the fact that sometimes, I just need to let go, and give in.
To the emotions, to the process…to all of the things that I truly cannot control.
It’s time to surrender to it.