HuskyPup

Hello, I’m new here and a refugee from SMART recovery, a group where it seemed like all people did was argue and debate so much that it got in the way of making progress in recovery, and I came to the point where I could no longer stand the place and especially the people running it, the direction they were taking it, the cold, aloof, snooty attitudes of Jvb and others there who eventually got tired of me asking too many questions and kicked me off, more or less. Well, no love lost, and it feels good to be gone from that place. Lots of negative energy there, lots of games. Enough.

Kilgore, are you around these parts?

Sorry to rant….I will miss a few friends, but must avoid that God-forsaken site and it’s non-stop insistence on Ellis and REBT as if they were God or something. After 4 years, I found the cognitive/rebt approach had little effect…..it was just too cold, and I don’t think certain things can be addresses just by a rational approach.

About me: I’m 41, a bit of an artist/writer/rebel, I feel like a punk rock teenager inside, and kind of look like one still. I write poetry. I love nature and the wilderness, and animals. I fix up old pinball machines sometimes. I have a BA in English, and work as a library assistant, I have had had a lot of financial problems, old medical, dental and optical bills, wages are being garnished, credit is in the toilet.

I read a lot, mainly serious literature, philosophy, natural history, and an entire oddment of topics, really, from comics to Kafka.

These days I have been struggling, drinking too much. Not every day, but every 2nd or third day for maybe a month now.

For a few years I had it down to where I was going a week or two, even a month or two, and now I feel like I’m back where I was almost when I started. I have never been one for rules, regulations and a lot of structure…..I am not religious in any traditional sense, and AA was not really a good fit. So I have tried to find a kind of approach that uses some of the cognitive ideas, but have found I think I need to add a spiritual dimension as well, Not a magical higher power, but maybe a ‘helpful’ faith in something that can give me strength, something to believe in. And this is the problem, I was brought up with no religion, I was fascinated by science as a kid, never went to church, have always had to ‘see it to believe it’. Faith is very hard for me, yet I long for at, as without faith, there is doubt. It’s hard for me to even have faith in reality, let alone the spiritual world, So I feel this void needs to be addressed somehow, all this doubting of anything and everything, the way I have been all my life.


I tend to drink at night, then stop for a few days, even weeks, then drink too much. I’m what you would call a binge drinker, I never just wake up and rink, or drink around the clock…..ion the morning, I run for carrot juice and health foods, as if they are some kind of savior

But like I say I Am having a hard time finding the motivation to not go out and drink. It's like I know what's missing in my life, but the void get so overwhelming, I can't seem to even begin to fill it, the loneliness, the doubt, the lack of faith. My own crazy moods, insomnia, the heat, the smoggy city air, the man with no legs in the wheel-chair on the bridge asking for help, the kids selling water for a dollar a bottle up and down MLK Blvd., the broken glass, the two Baltimore's, the one for people with money, and the bigger one, the one for everyone else. All the sadness there, the vastness of it. The civil war ended years ago, but Baltimore still shows the scares of many years of segregation, of poverty; there are places that are vast areas that are like a third world country, right here, right now. And it goers on and on and on and politicians babble and nothing happens.............and being a sensitive soul, I cry. I break down, I cry. And on the front page of the Sunday paper, the top ten earning CEOs, all men, all white, looking out from the page as if seeing none of this: after all, this helped them get to where they are now: the CEO of our power company made over $15 million yet says they need to raise the rates again, they raided them 70% last year, but he needs the rest of us to bleed some more, to drive a few more of people over the edge. Sometimes I wonder why we don’t raise up as one great mass, and topple these empires, take action…….and yet such complacency: we seem to small to take on all this, we have other worries, and so it goes, and is sad and the way of the world, of the way power is structured, of who controls things, of who has the money, and calls the shots. And it makes me cry. I understand that5’s how it is, that’s human nature, that’s life in the big city, that’s the way the cookie crumbles, that’s the way the ball bounces…….but it hurts my soul.

So much on my mind, so much to process living in the city with no easy way to just move out, don’t have the money or job, but have been trying, sending out resumes for a long time now, almost had an hoping up in the mountains that might have worked, but I didn’t have the cash to make the move, for the deposits, truck, and all.

One day............I hope they find a cure for pain…………that would impress me more than all these I-phones and stuff………all they do is add more worries, more expense, another thing to break. Such a crazy world. I have never had a cell phone, I'm still holding out, and it hasn't killed me yet!

What a rambly post, but gives you an idea who I am, I guess.......

Husky Pup
__________________
"Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you criticize them, you're a mile away and you have their shoes."-------Anonymous