I am not sure what has brought this on so hard, but I feel a void has opened up, and have lost hope in things, I guess.
Void. Check. Hopelessness. Check. The loss of motivation, even for things I once loved. A mountain of other problems that just kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger. Check, check, check.
That's what I called them—other problems. I kept thinking if I could only solve this one or that one, then it would give me something good and strong that I could grab onto. Then I'd be ready to pull myself out of addiction.
That kind of magical thinking kept me trapped. I had everything backwards. It's so obvious to me now. I just couldn't see it when I was looking at everything through the warped lens of alcoholism (addicted to a powerful depressant, mind you). Have you ever heard of someone who fell into the pit of addiction—that yawning chasm of hopelessness, where on the good days you feel apathetic, and on the bad days you feel desperate—have you ever heard of someone who reached that point and managed to improve his life
without first quitting? All the thousands of posts I've read here, all the people I've ever met, all the movies and books and conversations—and I can't think of one story like that. Not one. Why did I think it would somehow happen to me?
It's tragic how much of life can be wasted waiting for "other problems" to get better. For the time to be right. And the ironic thing is that the reality is so simple, and so much more manageable.
By changing one thing, right now, we make it possible to finally change everything else.
Focus, HP. Focus.