OpheliaKatz

At the risk of sounding like an obnoxious know-it-all... "apart from the drinking and its effects" is fallacious. The reason I say this is because our lives need to be looked at as a whole, not as parts.

Imagine looking at a building and saying, apart from those styrofoam bricks over there, those other clay bricks make the building look good. Does that make sense? So in a way, you're letting go of things that actually did not serve you no matter how much bodily fluids you expelled during the building process.

When you leave a life stage or phase, a new one isn't waiting for you to step into; you have to create it. Initially, when I was leaving my relationship, I did not know where to start "creating" my new life. But the idea that I would know "where to start" is also a mistake -- that's assuming that the act of creation actually has an instruction booklet. It's best to just start with what you need: money, food and water, shelter, exercise, better sleep, better relationships... the basics. The rest follows if you keep cleaning up after yourself. As I discovered myself, I slowly shed things that were not "me": clothes, furniture, appliances, books... other things I collected that marked moments of time in the relationship (there are always more than you think you know). I am slowly replacing those things that I deem necessary with versions that I feel are more "me" and less "us".

If it doesn't scare you, challenge you, and make you feel like you're at least trying to make one of your childhood dreams come true, it's not going to make you grow. EVEN IF YOU FAIL, you will still grow from the experience of starting again from failure.

I imagine where I would be today if I had not left my toxic codependent, abusive relationship. I would be standing still, both literally and figuratively, watching someone slowly, compulsively, try to kill themselves through the most pleasurable way THEY think they can, even until the point where they got no pleasure from it. I would grow old before I am old. I would eventually stop moving altogether (and in fact, I had gained a lot of weight while I was in the relationship). Life is getting better day by day as long as I am busy living it.

Now, I'm not going to lie, I think about what I "lost" every day. But more and more often I don't think of what could have been... I think of the lost time. I think of how much better off I would be today had I never met my exAH. I could be healthier today if I had never met my exAH. But thinking about lost time is... a waste of the time I have.