Maybe the whole holiday ordeal was harder on me than I thought.  It looks like I’ve been on autopilot for awhile and it has kind of kicked my ass.  Now I’m doing the whole Oprah “I’m mad at myself” Winfrey thing, and while I’m writing this partially as a form of quick confession, I’m also writing it because it illustrates something that, when I read the story in the Big Book, seems kind of lame to me.

It’s the story of the guy who works at the company he used to own.  His pride is hurt.  He’s resentful.  He hits the road to go sell a car.  He stops for lunch, still butt sore over his stupid pride being hurt but not thinking about it and, hey!  I bet if I have some whiskey in a glass of milk it’ll be great!

First of all, who puts whiskey in milk, right?  Everybody knows you put Kahlua milk.  OK.  I put Kahlua in milk.  And second, that insane little idea did NOT come out of nowhere.  It had been cooking there, underneath the surface, for some time.  If he had been honest with himself about what was really going on with him, he would have had in front of him the tools to address it, and could have skipped the whole humiliating dairy episode.

But who wants to look at themselves that closely, right?  I’ve looked at myself that closely a lot, for a long time, and I have periods when I just lapse into that, I don’t even know what to call it.  It’s like autistic behavior; repetative, obsessive, unproductive, habitual, comforting, spaced-out behavior.

So over the last month or so I’ve slacked on paying attention to the details, just hoping to ride out the mean season without feeling too much. Without noticing how lonely I am, or how old I am, or how tired I am, or how poor I am.  And the net result of my ignoring the details is that a bunch of money that I should have has evaporated in the form of overdraft fees and 2/3rds of the work I did for my last class in school never arrived in my instructor’s  inbox earning me an F in a class that I got an 89% on the pre-test for.

And I’m so mad I could scream.  I feel exactly like that dude walking out of the car dealership that he once owned.

And I have these tools in front of me to address the problems I’ve created for myself, and yet my head is still telling me that I’m a victim and I’m right and I don’t deserve this crap.

I cannot put myself on autopilot and expect to stay on course.  I can’t hide under the covers and wait for December to pass, then emerge in January expecting everything to be fine.  In my brain, those actions originate from the same place that the insanity of my addiction resides in.  Denying reality is denial.  Period.  My unwillingness, or temporary inability, to remain conscious (honest) is a precursor to much more diseased behavior.

I suppose I should be grateful that I got so angry tonight; that a flag that was red enough for me to see went up.  If the autopilot system still doesn’t work there probably isn’t much chance that the “getting high like a gentleman” system repaired itself either, is there.