Thanks for letting me go. Nearly 5 decades chasing or running from you–was no way to live and no longer how I understand and do love.
Recovery teaches us— Love is kind, direct, courageous, enduring, transparent, nurturing, loyal, and unconditional. Wholesome Good Love is a commitment, rather than just a feeling. Finally, disentangled from my placeholders for love, I now experience and treasure loving connections in healthy relationships. When we know better, we do better.
I am grateful for freedom from those who threaten, shame, gossip about or banish me. #thatisnotlove There will always be people who choose those to do those things, only, now, I no longer confuse them for loving people. To be clear, I learned what I lived and brought unwholesome and deeply damaging behaviors and ways of being into the world with me– but I have been healing and changing, one day at a time for nearly 10 years. Unlearning takes time. My recovery is a process not an event.
Today in church I realized, with a feeling not unlike like pride, that my life now flows from Good Orderly Direction. I no longer make choices out of shame, fear, or guilt—where previously, those posed as my gods and guides, my constant companions.
That I do not GAF what others think, is not at all the case—just that the opinions of others do neither inspire nor frighten me. I do my life and people either like me, hire me, make friends with me… or they do not. Fear of rejection, retaliation, and reprisal–this is not a dynamic to which I will consent, now as an adult with a choice and children–who are watching and learning.
