Soulshine

I’ve been living in Washington, D.C. for nearly two months now. And I just realized something’s missing from my life. I felt an interior void. What’s missing? I asked myself several times— and then I realized what was missing: My daily dose of self-created DRAMA! It felt weird to no longer be creating needless drama, but I also realized I had a choice now. I could either adjust to my oddly uncomfortable drama-free days, or I could go back to the “old familiar” and return to creating drama for myself. Seems like an easy choice, but it’s really not when something— even something negative and self-destructive—  becomes familiar and oddly comfortable. Then I stopped to differentiate between drama and being busy. Yes, with the cross-country move and the struggles of learning a new job, I’ve been busy, but there’s been no self-created chaos, and I’ve not chosen to create a drama with anyone. Busy is just a fact of life. Drama doesn’t have to accompany it, unless we choose to add on t

For years, many of us have stayed stuck in the addictive behaviors we learned as children because we were unwilling to change. To be fair, we first had to gain awareness of the fact that we had a problem in order to be willing to face it and change. But even after entering Recovery programs like Alcoholics Anonymous or Codependents Anonymous, many of us chose to stay stuck, even though are eyes had been opened. Why? Because initially we were unwilling to change our old patterns of behavior. They felt familiar and comfortable, even if they made us miserable. As Gary John Bishop says, it wasn't until we became unwilling to be manipulated, verbally abused or emotionally frustrated that we finally said "we're done with this!" It was then that we became unwilling to accept abuse from anyone anymore, including from ourselves.  And that is when we finally became willing to change our ways of thinking, acting and being. We became unwilling to exist any lon