Originally Posted by Verte

Serenidad, I have a long history of shooting myself in the foot. Drinking was just one of the ways I obliterated the road to where I wanted to be. How about you just treat yourself with the utmost kindness, love and respect right now? Seriously focus on loving yourself and not the myriad reasons why you suck and are justified in hating the world and everything in it (or whatever). We all needed new tools when we stopped drinking. It makes sense that in order to forge ahead and create the life we want and envision that our responses to many things were going to need to change. There is no way to predict or prepare, you just have to commit to doing things differently as life happens. I have so many examples in my past year of perceived failure (that ordinarily would have led to drinking) where I needed to dig super, super deep and give myself time to reframe and envision how I was going to move forward. There was absolutely no room for self-denigration in this process. Drinking would have stopped the process of getting where I needed to be. You need as much support and tools as you can get. We all do. I work really, really hard in my everyday life and, because of the nature of what I do, never really get pats on the back or "thanks" or "you are awesome!!"s - when I realized that I longed to hear these things I started saying these things to other people in the same boat. And then started telling people that I genuinely needed to hear these things. Tiny but huge change that makes a big difference in my daily life. Hey Serenidad. You are awesome! You are awesome for coming here to SR and opening yourself up to the gallery while feeling vulnerable. You are awesome for doing what you do, day in and day out, and being willing to do something different to improve your situation. High-five!