A beautiful flower
 

Here is how I see it:

A beautiful flower growing in the ground, contentedly braving the elements and soaking up the nutrients is plucked and placed in a flower press.

Squished and squished and squished...

Until removed from the press, dried out and transformed. Still 3-dimensional, yet flat-ish. Still smells and looks great, yet squished. A beautiful flower is a beautiful flower.

This is my attempt to write something positive about the past few weeks in which I have been my dark, stormy, contemplative self in a reality that felt more like crossing the river Styx. Well I made it to the other side and for better or worse, I spared you my postings. I've truly missed you guys! Here's to all the beautiful flowers growing and thriving in this New Year.

Hope you all made it OK or better than OK??

:grouphug:

I'm glad you made it to dry land Verte. I had periods like that. I called it crossing the river PAWS.

That's a useful analogy, LeTheVerte.

Next time, burden us with your trials and tribulations. Nothing you can say will squish our support.

Hi, my friend. Sometimes I was wondering where you've been in the past few weeks :)

I've been quite desperately looking for "familiar places" in the recent days and weeks, I guess hoping to find some sort sort of anchor against the events and their moderately crazy emotional impacts on my mind and in my life. And now I've found your post. Thank you :)

I had to make a large and serious collection of pressed flowers (plants) for my botany class in college a long time ago. Like 150 species. When I decided to choose biology as my major field of study, initially I was going to become a botanist or ecologist. So I took some serious classes in these, and also did field studies with groups of ecologists in my free time, whenever I could. So the technique we were required to use in that school did not allow the conservation of the 3D structure of flowers, but most often they remained identifiable. And then we would study them, write articles about their life, etc. Studying life using these 2D "memories", and then making blueprints of them.

I think many of us have crossed that "river Styx" here, maybe even several times. I know I have. I also know that I have a morbid fascination with not only wanting to know, but with experiencing the "crossing" as well.

So what have you found recently on your journeys into the Land of Odd?

Happy :nyaf and the rest of it!

Good to see you here! xo

Loved this post, LTV. Yes, this holiday season squished me pretty good, but I like to think that I am still a pretty flower; I just have to make sure that I tend to my weeding. ;)

Loved this post, LTV. Yes, this holiday season squished me pretty good, but I like to think that I am still a pretty flower; I just have to make sure that I tend to my weeding. ;)

Hey LeTheVerte, no need to spare us any of your postings, ok? Flowers are nice and all, but we can handle the yuckier stuff too! :)

Glad you made it ok though.

LeTheVerte, we have missed you too and I am happy to hear all is good with ya, and please post away, we all benefit from it. :egypt:
http://www.bestphotosworld.com/wp-co...red-rose-8.jpg

Happy New Year!

Hey you gems of friends. :hug:

Haennie, I needed you on speed dial. :) 'I'd like to phone a friend!' came to mind more than a few times while venturing throughout the Land of Odd. A genuine laugh would have been so welcomed and I am sure you all could have come up with something real good.

EG, I fought really hard with myself to figure out what all the psychological noise was about. Black and gray smoke was puffing from my fingertips as I sat at my computer reading and not writing. Words always seem to fail me when I need them most. All I knew was that the fight or flight kicked in hard core and since I could not flee...

When I first arrived here on SR I was asking WTF? That's the best I could do. And I found myself asking WTF once again. I put myself in a prolonged situation these past few weeks where my presence was required but I was not. If that makes any sense. Over two decades of my life spent with that crowd and I found myself questioning if I had ever truly been present. WTF? But I was most certainly a few weeks ago. The result being a strange juxtaposition of realities. Like wandering through Madame Tussauds wax museum. Slowly realizing we had all been co-conspirators in superficiality and meaningless passage of time. There were repeated visualizations of my past self as I would have been had I not chosen sober-ness. Myself fitting seamlessly among the crowd as a smiling wax figure with a raised glass of red wine in hand. Somewhat macabre.

What's the hurry? I kept asking myself but never verbalized. I was there. Cognizant. Weathering the pressure and discomfort. The more pressure to mold, conform, fit - to be something or somewhere other than I was at precisely that moment - the more slow and deliberate my thoughts and actions became. Washing dirt covered spinach leaf by leaf in record length time until not a speck remained. Slo-mo wilted greens preparation. Just waiting for, wishing, willing someone to say something. What's the hurry?

By the third day I had nearly exhausted my crowd coping strategies. As I walked down a long hallway, Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita...popped in my head from deep within the archives of my brain. Something I studied years ago during a time when I had little context for the content, but most certainly did now.

I sat on the bed trying to come up with a question to post on SR. Every time I tried to type tears burned my eyes. Argh! Painful. I looked at my phone and considered who I could call. What could I say? I think I'm going crazy? Maybe losing my mind? Stop being so dramatic. What if there isn't anything wrong with me? There is not a thing wrong with me. If there was just something wrong with me then this whacked-out, down the rabbit hole experience would be OK!

That's when I accepted that things have changed. I have irrevocably changed. My eyes remained open and I could not un-see what I saw. I did not want to un-see what I was seeing in real time. What I did not anticipate was how deeply this would hurt. The pain.

Anyhow. That's a start. Thanks for being here you all. :amen:

Thanks for trusting us with your thoughts and feelings, LeTheVerte.

I am sorry that you are in pain; we are here to share that, too, when you are ready.

Superficiality, the passing of time, inauthentic presence... none of that sounds dramatic or crazy, LeTheVerte. I've lately experienced a similar realization. More to do with purpose, meaning, and drive though.

It seems as I've aged, things have changed. I have changed :) Drinking abruptly ended as well. Massive change :)

Thanks for sharing your growth with us. Painful as it may be.

*hugs*

glad to see you LTV, thanks for sharing - and what EndGame said!
(((((((LTV))))))

I seem to be going through similar states periodically. Subjectively sensing that while I am doing many interesting things in my life and have lots of challenges, sometimes there is this disconnection between me and my experiences, the rest of the world, reality really. Numbness. And then as a response, I am looking for something (often pure fantasies) to intensify my mental world. And like you, I also have hard time to put in words what I am feelings sometimes. One could also describe forms of it as losing the meaning in otherwise meaningful endeavors... and then I lose my motivation, because I've been disconnected from what is normally my main drive. What's wrong with me? Why do I have to experience these states over and over and over? How could I do it differently? I've been through phases like that many many times since my childhood. Drinking did not help it at all, I think it just exacerbated it and made it constant, so I did not recognize the "phases" so acutely because it was all the time. I thought I could finally really do something about this in sobriety... well, it's much better, but did not go away and now I don't believe it ever will. It's part of being human, I believe... well my being at least. I think those flowers don't struggle with stuff like this :)

I've been having a few weird days in my head also just recently. It does help me to reach out when I'm feeling crazy, but then sometimes I make others crazy as well, which I don't like that much as a sober person. Anyhow, it's still a better option over isolating most of the time, because then at least we get a chance to work through all the madness...

I also often wonder about these changes in how we experience ourselves and life in general, over time, as we age. I certainly struggle with having the same kind of child-like wonder and enthusiasm about potential and perspective in a constant way, the way I experienced this in my teens and my 20's. And I would want it to be the other way around, but it's just hard to do in a stable way. I am well aware that a lot of these changes are related to normal changes our brains go through as we age, so I try to accept. I am also aware that most likely I fried my brain with many years of drinking and some of this may be permanent or will take a long time to change. Oh well.

The good thing, LTV, is that we seem to have a relentless drive to merge with our experiences and get the most out of them -- sometimes in good ways other times not so good, but we try anyway. Life is certainly not always flowers growing in the sunshine. Also, definitely not every one of us go through experiences with the same depth of perception, feeling, introspection, and desire to learn and grow. It can be painful to be surrounded by superficiality... but this is why it's so valuable to have places like SR.

This is a poem by a Chinese author that your OP (and my own thoughts and mental reaction reading it) reminded me of, just an association:

On Real and Artificial Flowers

by Chengde Chen

"If an artificial flower is made
more beautiful than a real one,
more fresh and bright,
more lively and touching,
with more charm of spring,
and dignity of autumn,
more tenderness of love,
and fragrance of imagination,
– it is more real than the real one,
so that in comparison
the real one looks artificial,
…
then,
why is the real one still preferred?
The only reason is that
it will wither and die.
So,
the possibility of death
is its ultimate value,
although no one realises this.

Man appreciates living things,
because he himself dies.
The sense of life, like that of sex,
is something within the perceiver,
through which that of the object
can be felt.
Those that have it respond to it.
Those that don’t won’t.
The charm of real flowers
is in living men."

Good to see you posting again :)

Words are failing me now, but I just want you to know I'm glad you're here and hope you find peace and happiness in your new life.

Welcome back home LeTheVerte - you were missed. :hug:

I love your post. You may have hit the mother lode as to "why we drink." The more appropriate question might be, "Why doesn't everyone drink?"

We know on a very basic level that there must be something else in life. To conclude otherwise is to surrender to a lifetime of despair. And we pray that whatever else is "out there" is better than what we know. But how to get there?

Even when we create alternate realities, they never play by the rules.

There is great risk in accepting freedom, in accepting the challenges that being offers...that it demands. And is it only the strong who survive?

Rather than re-invent the wheel, I've re-posted below something I posted on another thread...My retrospective thoughts and feelings around the time I put down the drink and in early sobriety. Your recent comments moved me to do so. I hope there's something good in it for you, and for anyone else who's found -- or lost -- her way.

Sometimes we need to fall apart in order to come together.

. . .

The short version is that I was living a shite life. My future no longer existed in the form I'd imagined it would in my early twenties. The best I had to look forward to was increasing pain and suffering, unbearable losses around every turn. I was isolated from the greater community of the living, and alienated from my truer self. Life as I knew it, or longed for it to be, no longer existed as I imagined it, as I knew it. I was a carrier in the quarantined land of misery, regret and despair. I received nothing good from my artificial world and had nothing good to offer in return.

On another level, the material world as I knew it did not at all align with my internal world. This is, I believe, always the case; it's part of the human condition. Yet now, instead of immersing myself in that relentless conflict, I was on the sidelines and virtually disappeared when I attempted to enter the world of the living. I had disqualified myself without reservation from outlets for genuine friendship, intimacy and love. That ever-present empty place inside became my home...empty calories for a starving man. I was a stranger in a stranger land, and came to expect, often wallow in, my misery. It was my closest companion, my constant lover in a relationship that did not come even close to the qualifier 'unhealthy'. And though it took me years to get there (or, from another perspective, to discover that this is where I'd always been, or at least was always headed), it all seemed to happen overnight. Time itself is an unrelenting adversary in a life that is not immortal, but even more of a cruel and unforgiving tyrant for those of us who seek to suspend it's power by attempting to flee it.

I experienced Nietzsche's death of God. A death that is not at all of the religious variety, and finds no solace in the illusion/reality that suffering is our lot. There was no saving grace in living, and the opposite only grew in its appeal. How, exactly, does one rise from the dead without a living God? And, given my set of circumstances, why would I even want to? I was writing a chapter in my life that should never had been written...living someone else's life.

My eventual recovery was "spiritual," not in the sense that Divine Intervention played a role in it, but that science, reason and logic were on holiday for the process. There is no logical reason why someone who is wholly dead on the inside should later on experience life and living for the first time, and no act of science or logical sleight of mind brought me there. Leaps of faith are often bandied about as though doing so were a choice in line with choosing fish or fowl as the main course. Instead, I see a leap of faith as choosing either nourishment or starvation; a starving man will eat anything to release himself from unbearable suffering, and it is the very false sense of fulfillment that lead me to starvation in the first place. At least with starvation I get all kinds of attention that I otherwise would not receive. My suffering reminds me that I'm alive, if not altogether living, and attention from others confirms it, even when it's only pity.

Putting down the drink only added to my misery, at least at first. I was no less a stranger to myself and, guess what? I had to change everything in my life in order to escape the world that, far from having built it with intention, was all I had left. To be, or not to be? Life or death? The starving person who'd learned to settle for stale bread crumbs was himself now crumbling, and there was nothing or no one to put him back together again (although, prior to this, being "together" had never been my strong suit). So I had to learn, not all over again, if only because I'd failed to learn the first time and during the subsequent times that followed. No, I had to learn all that I had avoided learning in the first place. In that initial suffering there was clarity: If I wanted to live, to live for the first time, then I needed to act. There were no other choices, having abandoned both life and living as a lifestyle for the years that preceded my fall. There was very little that I knew or had learned that was going to deliver me from a personal death to a better place. It was necessary for me to discard virtually everything that I thought I knew, which is in itself a painful process, and open myself to a world of possibilities, many of which were both uncomfortable and painful for me, but all of which needed to be tried.

We tell ourselves so many lies in order to sustain a style of life that is without meaning, with or without booze. As an active alcoholic, I was a lying machine that specialized in self-deception and bad faith. This clearly needed changing, and the pain that accompanied that change was exquisite.

I no longer abstain because of the predictable or inevitable consequences -- although that certainly has its place, if only because I live in dread that I'll live a life, my life, that will go unlived. I don't drink because I no longer want to drink; I want to be present for all that I do, for all that happens, and for whatever meaning is available to me. The more I act, the more I become who I am. These may seem like vague or "woolly" abstractions, and may only have meaning for me within the context of my own choices, my own life, but learning to live with and at times embrace ambiguity has its own rewards, while living with the certainty and the twisted security of an inevitable inner death only leaves me hungry to remain there.

I missed you LeTheVerte....and you have been on my mind.
I am glad you posted, although not glad to hear you have been weathering a storm.
But you got to the other side of the river relatively unharmed?
Hoping the beautiful flower that is you will bloom again now. :hug:

Love V xx

Hi Girl, again :)

More directly, to go beyond the metaphors a little, and you don't need to answer me at all. Just an observation, may or may not be correct. So if I try to interpret your posts on this thread (and also recalling some of your older ones): it sounds to me that you may feel being in conflict with your environment... maybe the people around you, lifestyle, or more than that, don't know. And you feel this now, sober, more acutely than ever because there is no chemical blurring. Am I wrong? If not, I think I know quite well how you feel and how difficult it can be to navigate it (although I did not quite experience this particular thing most intensely after getting sober, but long before, and it was more or less the cause of my starting to be a heavy drinker). I've also seen similar things in quite a few people in early sobriety as well, and it seems like a hard challenge and problem to resolve for everyone, for many reasons.

Makes sense to me. This is how I felt myself during a period of nearly 3 years in my life in the past. OK 3 years is not two decades, but it did give me a very profound experience. Putting myself in a situation that was absolutely foreign, and as I perceived, "incompatible" with me, my personality, my psyche, etc. Yet I did not flee. I fought it for a good while. And how did I deal with it while trying to understand and fight it?
(1) Drinking. That's when my drinking took a very steep slope of escalation.
(2) I found the one person whose being seemed familiar to me in that environment, and soon enough learned I was also "just the one" he needed for the same reason. So we got hooked on each other and stayed that way as though there was no tomorrow, profoundly obsessed. And drank together.

I've told the story of those years many times here on SR already, this is just yet another angle of it.

I tried to fight all this and tried to find a way to make that period work and to find a perspective for it... but in the end I gave up and chose the "flight". So did it resolve my ordeal? No, it did not. Yes, it helped somewhat (to be in an environment that I subjectively perceive a better fit for me, and where I also feel more appreciated), but it was no solution to me. It did not even help me get sober, I quit only a few years later when the motivation came from within, and the environment had minimal influence on this, to be honest. And now having been sober for nearly a year and still in the same (good) environment, I'm facing some of the same doubts, dilemmas, and sometimes frustrations. And honestly, I could not be in a more suitable condition for me now: geographically, professionally, socially... So in my case, it is true that I do better in a more compatible condition, but it's far from all of the sources of these dilemmas and internal conflicts. What I'm personally facing now, and I know that others on SR also struggle with this: how do I resolve it now? What else can I try? Is it total acceptance that I lack and should cultivate, something I have never tried before, meaning a very radically way of thinking, being and living? Or continue searching for answers (that's something I know how to do but what would it give me at this point)? I know full well that I have never been too good at the "living in the moment" thing despite considering myself an above average self aware person. So I just don't know. For now, I'm just living with these new dichotomies in my mind until I see something that I think could take it somewhere I have not been before. We always say here on SR that we should tackle problems head on, take action... well I would love to, only if I knew what to do right now?! Well, it'll come, I know that.

Don't know if any of this resonates with you, I just thought to write it down here in case there is anything useful in it. And I guess also just to get it out of myself.

Oh, and speaking of "crowd coping strategies" -- I usually do quite well just living in a crowded place, I actually prefer it. As long as the masses are just around me everywhere and don't want to have much to do with me :) But try to "crowd me out", and I'll certainly bite sooner or later. That's just the nature of being more of an introverted person than not... I've tried to work on this in my whole life and become more at home in all sorts of social environments, and it's been successful to an extent... but I'll just never become a social butterfly, be it people I love dearly or those I find annoying, like it or not. Unless someone applies some gene therapy thing on me to change my coding, I guess... :) If you are at all similar in this sense, I guess this is something better to accept radically and take / enjoy our private times when we can, to recuperate. And then get engaged again when we are ready.