I wanted to write tonight, because I really like to write. When I can't run, I like to write and because I drank about a bottle of wine this evening, which I rarely seem to do anymore, I like to write.
I don't talk about my addictions much on this blog. I wish that I did talk about them more, but since they seem to be past me at this point in my life, I guess I don't like to look too much to the past. It's hard to sit and write about something that is so hard to think about and talk about. Drinking a bottle of wine is a rare thing to me anymore, as is drinking in general. It's funny to me really, because I spent the better part of 10 years drinking, and drinking a lot. I guess you could say that I started drinking when I was 15-16 years old, and drank heavily, till I was about 23 and then it slowly started to taper off over the few years after that.
There are several things that I can think of that made me stop drinking. The biggest of them was pot. I smoked a lot of pot in high school, but it took a bike seat to drinking once i hit the age of 18 or so and I didn't do it too much after that, until I met my husband at 22. When we met I started to pick it up again and slowly it started take the place that alcohol had held so dearly in my life. I liked to think that I had "conquered" drinking. I liked to tell people that I really didn't drink that much anymore, but I knew that the reality was that I had simply replaced it with something that was just as addictive and powerful as alcohol was to me. I was a cowered. It wasn't until I quit smoking pot that I really discovered that I had quit drinking, because I didn't go back to it. I found God and running around the same time. I had found God before I really found running, but running had become something tangible for me, where as God was more of something to believe in.
I got baptized when I was 23 years old, a mere 3 1/2 years ago. I don't want to say that I place God and running on the same pedestal or anything because being born again is the single most amazing thing that has ever happened to me. When I got baptized, the way it changed me was so life changing, that the anxiety that I had been living with for 23 years of my life just... left my soul. I can't say that it left in one clean sweep and I was cured and pain was gone and better and life was good, because it wasn't. But the way that my life has been changed since the day that I was born again has been nothing shy of a miracle.
But I had a problem with tangibility. I like to use that word, because as a person that had spent their entire life physically avoiding life, I feel it was necessary to have an action to replace my actions. When I was a young girl I cut myself. Then I started drinking and smoking pot. As I got older I got into harder drugs and obviously horrible relationships with men. When I was 18 I developed a horrible eating disorder, an alcohol and pill addiction, and eventually started smoking pot everyday of my life to replace most of those. Avoidance after avoidance after avoidance was the way that I knew how to live life. I was broken for so long that I didn't know how to heal.
When I found God, my soul and my heart became healed. But it took a long time to find my head in the healing of a life's worth of addiction. That's where running came into play. I had always had a problem with being in the moment. I was anxious all of the time in my "previous life" and that wasn't something that was easily replaced with praying, as much as I wanted it to be. Life was still extremely rough, and things were very challenging for me after I found God and I needed something to take away the pain that was in my head.
So I started running. I had run for a long time, mostly here and there, a lot when I was in Iraq and had nothing else, but not so much after I left and pills and alcohol and anxiety became everything that my life encompassed. Like most addicts that choose to change, there needs to be something for them to divert all of their energy too. I was talking to a friend about addiction and running and he said that most ultra runners used to be addicts. It makes sense because ultra running is a very time consuming hobby, which takes the place of the time consuming hobby of addictive behaviors.
I came up with a motto a few years ago, when I was still battling with the daily decisions of whether to drink or not of "Run a mile for every beer you want to drink." So when I was having an especially bad day and wanted to go the bar and get drunk, I would force myself to run even harder allowing me to work out my problems on the road instead of in a bottle. And days where things weren't bad, I just wanted to drink for the sake of drinking, I would only run a few miles, giving me the change to clear my head and avoid making any rash decisions. I have never quit drinking all together. I don't feel that I need to in order to keep myself away from being an alcoholic. I did quit for a while, but it was more about controlling the line between having a drink because I wanted to enjoy a drink, and drinking because I HAD to drink.
For me control had always been the issue. I was unable to control my feelings and my actions for most of my life, resulting in years of bad choices. Running is the ultimate test of control and patience in a person. Running takes time, it takes commitment, it takes dedication and it has very slow results when I had always been a right here right now kind of girl. Like all addicts I feel, we don't like slow results, we want things to happen immediately. Getting out and running 15 miles does not happen immediately. It takes hours, leaving you a lot of time to be inside your head, which is something else that addicts do not like to do. And training for a marathon does not yield quick results. It takes months upon months of training and sometimes your runs are awesome and sometimes your runs suck and a lot of times you are in a lot of pain, which is a great metaphor for healing from an addiction. Because that is how it is.
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