This Is The Day

“This is the day your life will surely change.
This is the day when things fall into place.
You could've done anything -- if you'd wanted.
And all your friends and family think that you're lucky.
But the side of you they'll never see
Is when you're left alone with the memories
That hold your life together like
Glue.”

This Is the Day by The The

Sometimes the memories that hold our lives together like glue are the same memories that hold us bound to our addictions like glue. And sometimes we’re able to hide those addictive memories and secrets very well; so well, that family and friends think we’ve really got it together or are actually “lucky.”

Prior to entering recovery, I thrived at being an overachiever. It always seemed like an oxymoron to me: I thought I was a living piece of shit and yet I thrived at work in public and press relations. I edited award-winning publications; winning awards on local, state and national levels. I drove a beautiful car that one coworker told me she lusted over. I had fabulous suits and ties and always looked like I had just stepped-off the cover of GQ. But I felt like a total fake.

Everything felt like a mask to me. My clothing masked how badly I felt about my body. My accomplishments at work masked how insecure I felt about my talents and intelligence. And my fabulous car masked how badly I felt about the totally flawed person who was inside that body, under those clothes and claiming those accomplishments.

Every day I waited for the other shoe to drop. Surely, I feared, someone was going to figure everything out about me and they were going to pigeon-hole me into revealing the loser who had been faking everyone out. That would be the day my life would surely change. But it never happened that way.

There was no one out to pigeon-hole me, except me. And eventually I imploded. I projected all of my feelings of worthlessness onto others, from bosses to coworkers to friends to total strangers until I felt so bad and so paranoid that I finally shattered into a million pieces. All of the “glue” came loose. None of my addictions of preference—from people to shopping to eating sugar—could hold me together anymore. I came to learn that this is known as “hitting bottom.”

For years I had believed that my addictive patterns were ways of helping myself. I had no clue that they were actually means of destroying myself. They were all I’d ever known that could in any way bring me some sort of comfort. Looking back now, I guess I never realized in those days just how short-lived the comfort was. It never occurred to me that the comfort I experienced when I acted-out was just a band-aid between bad experiences.

When I finally hit bottom, however, I did somehow realize that I had to do more this time. It wasn’t going to be enough to run to Lazarus to buy some new clothes, or to Ear-X-tacy Records to buy a bunch of new CDs, or to the Mrs. Fields to get a sugar-high. If all of my shattered pieces were going to come back together, I was going to have to do the one thing I feared the most: See a therapist.

My parents had always stigmatized therapy. “If the neighbors find out, well, heaven’s forbid” was their philosophy. Instead they believed in keeping secrets, pretending you’re OK and praying for miracles. I had already tried the praying for miracles angle. God knows I prayed a million times to St. Jude because prayers to St. Jude were boldly declared to “never be known to fail.” Well, fail they did. Let it be known! So I knew I had to fight my fears and find a good therapist.

Therapy saved me eventually. Through therapy I was made aware of my dysfunctional patterns of behavior, and I was introduced to the 12 Steps and to Codependents Anonymous. I learned that I had been heavily addicted to certain people, toxic people who were stand-ins for my parents. I then realized that I had spent my whole life trying to convert emotionally unavailable friends and lovers into being emotionally available to me. Subconsciously I was trying to right my very wrong relationship with my parents through these substitutes. And I tried doing that through 1) losing myself totally in these people; 2) caretaking; and 3) people-pleasing. When I failed at controlling and changing these people, I turned to my other addictive patterns to medicate away my failures: Shopping, sugar, etc.

The The's This Is The Day (Your Life With Surely Change) had been a favorite song of mine in the early 1980s. As I continued to progress through recovery, the song suddenly had new meaning. Things were changing alright—in scary new ways. But things were changing for the better. I was now having to find ways to make my relationship right with me. My focus totally changed. I couldn’t begin to make my relationships right with my parents or anyone else until I first made things right with me.

Through recovery I’ve come to learn that I am not a fake. I am a talented, intelligent worthwhile and lovable person. I don’t have to worry about fooling anyone anymore, and so I don’t have to worry anymore about being “found out” either. I no longer see my life as an oxymoron, but I still struggle with my well-ingrained inner-demons. Sometimes I still buy myself too many things, from clothes to CDs, or eat too much sugar in order to calm my inner-storms. But that’s noticeably happening less and less. I can say “No” now while understanding that my negative feelings are a “trigger” to acting out. When the trigger goes off now, however, I know that I need to allow the discomfort inside to simply be what it is until my feelings play themselves out.

If you are in a recovery program rejoice because today and every day is the day that your life will surely change for the better!