Mental Self Check

I was on a walk yesterday, feeling like crap. I had drunk too much caffeine yet again. In my head, and even out loud, I berated myself. I asked myself over and over what is it going to take for me to learn my lesson about my caffeine addiction? But, as I walked, something shifted in my mind.

I understood that it wasn’t about learning a lesson or putting myself through mental abuse until I learned a lesson. It was about deciding to stop.

I didn’t need to learn some grand lesson. The lesson had already been taught repeatedly. At this point, it was about deciding I had had enough. I decided I wasn’t going to put myself through the caffeine anxiety crazies anymore.

But I do agree that sometimes learning a lesson can lead to making a decision to get sober. But at some point, I had to see the absurdity of my actions. I had to choose because I didn’t want to keep doing this to myself. It’s like that saying about insanity that states “insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.” That sums up my caffeine addiction quite nicely.

I have made a similar decision about hard things over the past seven years. First, it was staying with therapy. Then it was refusing to quit a hard job because I was done running from hard things. Each decision guided my actions, but man it was hard.

I understand my caffeine addiction isn’t a heroin, meth or other hard core addiction. Those hard drugs put my caffeine addiction to shame. But I do believe the first step to getting sober is the same. You don’t have to hit rock bottom to make the decision to get sober.

It sucks people get addicted to all kinds of things. I wish the human brain and body were incapable of forming addictions. But since that would be a world of science fiction or fantasy, what we are left with is the ability to choose.

A few months ago, I was going through a very rough time. One night I couldn’t sleep, so I wrote in the hopes sleep would follow. Some of it didn’t make sense in retrospect, but some of it stuck. I wrote that we have these two powers in our life, the light and the dark. And even though the darkness can seem so overwhelming and terrifying, there was one thing it couldn’t do: take away our power of choice. That no matter how dark it got, that power to choose could not be taken away from us.

Decision, choice, or whatever word you want to use, it is within our power to make choices. Getting sober was a hard choice for me, because once the haze and fog cleared, I developed clarity. And clarity is a double-edged sword. It helped me to start rebuilding my life, but it also allowed me to look back into my past and see the kind of person I had become. It’s still hard, but each day it gets a little easier.

I want to be clear: I don’t pretend to have the answers to addiction or changing one’s life. But I do know for me, when I decided to do something hard and stuck with it, it changed my life. It took more time and was way harder than I could have imagined, but I don’t regret any of those hard choices. I just wish I had chosen them earlier.