Sometimes, the things we spend so long focusing on tend to do just the opposite. Fall out of focus.
Like, you spend just so long prioritizing an issue or a problem, you put so much attention and focus on it…and progress stalls out. You don’t succeed as much as you’d have hoped or thought by now…and the focus shifts away. It becomes less important. Less doable. Less possible.
Or at least, that’s how it seems.
And maybe that’s when it’s time to take a step back. Take the pressure off, walk away for a little while, and then come back later and reevaluate.
That’s where I’m at right now.
I feel like I spent such a devastating amount of time and energy focusing on something I wasn’t doing a good enough job at.
Fucking sobriety.
If you’ve noticed I haven’t talked about the drinking thing in a while, that’s because I had to step back from it. From the pressure I was putting on myself to succeed.
While I was doing incredibly well and was barely drinking anything at all both before and during my vacation in September, ever since coming home, losing my therapist, putting my dog down, having to start over and meet new therapists…I’ve been failing at any kind of sobriety pretty terribly.
And that’s been hard for me.
Knowing where I’m headed, seeing where I’m going, and not being able to stop myself from going there is extremely frustrating and disheartening. I’m back up to my regular typical amount every night and that just isn’t what I want for myself.
But maybe, just maybe, we’re past the hurdles. Maybe we’re far enough removed from the absolutely brutal sting of it all… and just maybe…we can begin to rebuild. And refocus.
I don’t want this life for myself. I want sobriety. Badly. I really do.
And I lost focus.
Quite frankly, I stopped caring altogether. With the amount of hurt and the amount of loss, I wasn’t going to be attempting sobriety and kind of soon at all.
So the focus shifted away from it.
But here we are, finding ourselves feeling just a little bit hopeful on a gloomy Sunday morning.
And maybe we can begin to shift the focus back onto our goals. Onto sobriety. Even when it’s hard and messy and…even sometimes just downright impossible feeling.
I can do hard things.
And today feels like a good day to start over.
There’s only so many things you can do at once. It’s okay to step back and restart when you’re ready. The important part is that you don’t give up. You got this.
I think taking that step back and reflecting for a moment is an integral part of success. But recognizing when those moments are needed is just so much easier said than done. And I’m proud of myself for recognizing one of those moments when they came up.
I’m proud of you, too ❤️