i sigh a lot, Cow.
my sighs are nuanced, depending on scenarios.
truly, in real life i sigh a lot, but mostly think it's just about taking a deep breath.
breaking silence already!
thought more last night about my own struggles with "powerless". just sharing now:
when i got sober, my thinking really was in the "'muster more intellect to command more power to engage more stick-to-it-ness!" even though it hadn't worked that way for me in the gazillion tries before. it was the only lens i had to see it through. even though my own experience didn't fit through the filter.
the whole idea i had of AA and powerlessness was an offensive and obnoxious blur; for basically stupid weak people who needed religion to get through the day. (just telling what i really thought. pretty awful. sigh)
after a year or two sober, i "allowed" the percolating stuff of the disconnect between my own experience and my belief-system about it to come to the forefront. i thought of it in terms of choice. eventually labelled it "the choice-thing". it took me months of conversation on my LifeRing forum. the gist: if i had choice, why would i have kept choosing to go back to drinking when i had chosen not to? and of course i made a choice, except...it never presented as "choice" in the way i understood that in other areas of my life.
if i were truly freely choosing repeated returns to this misery, i must be insane.
i wrestled with this for months. felt like a battle between my own experience and my intellect. i needed to "get it" on an intellectual level. i needed to make sense of something that didn't. because my experience was true.
i did this from a distance, and you're in a much more immediate spot.
the reason i'm writing all this, sigh, is that i finally got it: my choice was impaired. by addiction/alcoholism. i had choice, but couldn't access the power or control to use it the way i had decided to even just that morning. and having choice but being impaired in the access is NOT having it.
i didn't realize til much much later that the entire choice-thing is about powerlessness. it finally clicked.
i had lost the power of choice.
the sigh about that is solely one of relief.