I have been off of work this week which has been great. I have had a wonderful time with my favorite tradition of taking the kids to the fair. I got to see my mom twice this week which is more rare these days. My niece and nephew each got a special day at the fair and I had the opportunity to do some shopping. So, when it came to going to church tonight, I thought about not going for a few minutes, thinking that I was kinda tired and not really feeling like going anywhere. Well, I moved past that and went. I am very glad for that because it was a message about something I have been struggling with for a while now. I think it about it. I haven't really talked about it. But, there it was, laid out right in front of me tonight. The title of the sermon tonight was Overcoming Slothiness. 

For the most part, I am a pretty busy. I can go months with things scheduled on the weekends. I work 1 full time job and 1 part time job. That part time job can be 4 hours in a weekend or 48 hours in a weekend. I work hard to keep connections with friends and get out to do fun things. So, I am busy. I wouldn't consider myself to be a total sloth by any means. I have my moments; however, in general, I have earned my downtime. We were challenged to dig deep tonight. No one is perfect and we all have area that we struggle to pay attention to. When life gets out of balance, we are sacrificing our attention to something else whether that be relationships, spirituality, health, etc. 

Recently, I have devoted more attention to my health and fitness. I have definitely been a sloth in that area for quite some time. I took the bull by the horns a few months ago and decided I needed to start doing something about it. In the recovery world, you will often hear "nothing changes if nothing changes". It's not just addiction, that's just life. So far so good, I have lost 14 pounds with many more to go. More importantly, I feel more energetic and ready to go. Something I really need to have with everything I like to do in a week! So, I am getting over my slothiness in this area.

I am on the ball with my recovery most everyday. As a part of my recovery, I have really focused in on my spirituality. Church is a part of that. Other parts are the volunteer work, AA meetings and mindfulness activities I try to do on a daily basis. So, no slothiness here. I know better than to get slothy in this area.

As they kept talking tonight, the one thing that kept coming up in my mind was procrastination. Everything is about "tomorrow". The laundry, cleaning the house, the charting at work. Everything is about tomorrow. Recently, I have sort of felt like a kid testing the boundaries. How long can I go with getting away with something before I really "have" to do it? I think back to the times when I was younger that I would go to the ends of the earth to make sure everything was done. I feel like in the past few years I have lost my edge on that. I lost something when I went to school this last time. I procrastinated so much and actually it paid off in a weird way. Apparently, I can be quite good under pressure. I wrote a paper 3 days before it was due and won an award for it. I started studying for the national exam for counseling 2 weeks before and passed with flying colors. I was still doing fine while procrastinating so it just reinforced more of the same. Procrastination just feeds on itself. 

I ended up having to work for a few hours on my vacation because of my procrastination. I tend to book myself at work with all sorts of things that I like to do and push off the things that I don't like to do. I like interviewing people for assessments, but I don't like having to write the report. I like meeting with clients, but don't like doing the charting. I like meeting with people in the community, but don't like having to set up 500 emails to go out to get the process started. So, I start with "I'll do it tomorrow" stuff. I do all the things that I like to do and even volunteer to things I don't have time for just to avoid what I don't like doing. I end up pushing myself right up against deadlines. I get it done. However, I end up causing myself 100x more stress than I need to had I just done the task in the first place. 
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I think my Higher Power wanted me to go to church tonight. I felt like I was being held accountable there tonight. I need to be held accountable. I get frustrated with myself sometime with this whole procrastination thing. It has become such a bad habit. I will start racing to get things done because I fear getting in trouble. I generate all sorts of unneeded stress. To be honest, I am not even really sure that I would get in trouble. Somehow, it is what I need at that moment to get the motivation going. I don't like being motivated by fear. I want to be motivated because it's the right thing to do. I have tried to change things because I was motivated by fear. It never stuck. I feel like I have lost some of my internal fire that used to automatically make me a self-starter. I have lost the balance between getting what needs to be done and taking some well deserved downtime. I am justifying downtime that I have not earned just to avoid things I don't want to do. 

I started by finishing up a project that I have been working on for almost a year with my 2nd job. It's a project that was tedious and kind of annoying. I was so close to finishing it. Every time I would sit down to do it, I would start something else and decide that I was too tired or bored to work on it this time around. I will work on it "next weekend". Well, it is done now. It won't be hanging over my head anymore. What a relief that will be. I need to start reinforcing the positives of NOT procrastinating anymore. It's great that I can do good work under pressure; however, I do it at a great cost to my personal peace and serenity. Why do that? I don't need to!

So, to all my fellow procrastinators out there, I challenge you this week to step up and get something done. Something that you always say you are going to "next week". From a recovery standpoint, don't procrastinate. "I will stop drinking next week" turned into about 10 extra years of drinking on an already lengthy drinking career. Recovery is not something you wait for. Recovery is something we have to take care of. Recovery starts with the belief that we are capable of change and the hope that anything is possible. I procrastinated on this decision and it cost me nearly everything. It was too hard, it was too scary, it was too _______ (insert whatever excuse). I kept digging that hole, finding myself farther and farther from the sunlight. When I finally got to a point of "no more excuses" and "today is the day", I finally stopped digging. It took awhile to actually get out of that hole. What a relief it was to stop expending all that energy digging that hole deeper. 

Wishing everyone a great Labor Day weekend!
​Julie

I follow a couple of recovery blogs out there. I was reminded by my fellow recovery bloggers that September is, in fact, national recovery month. Yes, prevention works, yes treatment works, yes, people do recover. Addiction is complex, recovery isn't simple, but with more education, understanding and support, we can all come together and heal a broken system that often turns away the sickest in their greatest time of need when they have the least amount of resources available. 

Over the past year or so, there are a few themes in recovery that have really been in the forefront of discussion. In the recovery community, the issue of anonymity (I did write a previous blog on this) and in the news, everything about the opiate epidemic. I get a little frustrated by both conversations and I would like to take this blog entry to tell you why. Let's take a look at each of these individually because they are really separate issues.

#1 - Anonymity
I did write about this subject not to long ago. I really understand both sides of the argument. For one, there is so much stigma and judgement out there against people who are addicted to drugs. Let's see -- what are the names that people call us on a daily basis: addicts, alcoholics, alkies, lushies, junkies, hobos, tweakers, stoners, crackheads, psychos, nutjobs, wineos, druggies. This list is endless. These are generally some of the nicer ones out there. You should hear what we are called in the medical field - waste of resources, frequent fliers, waste of space. No wonder no one is really excited to stand up and say - "oh yeah, I am addicted!"

On the flip side, we are silent. We have no voice. We have people who advocate for us but they are such a small group. We have little funding to help ourselves. Addiction recovery is starting to get some coverage these days which I am glad to see but we are still light years behind other causes and medical issues. Substance abuse counselors aren't even really considered "real" practitioners most of the time. My present job excluded, my starting salaries at other jobs rivaled entry level jobs out of college in customer service (I have a Masters Degree by the way....). Because our voice is so quiet, the general public is unaware of the 23 million people in recovery and what it took to get there. The general public doesn't understand what an addict is going through. Because the behaviors of addicts can be so frustrating and appalling, most people just want to get rid of us instead of taking the time to understand what help we need to get better. 

Things are going to have to change with the recovery community first I think. We have to strip ourselves of the stigma too. I clearly have no problem talking about the fact that I am in recovery. I adore when people ask questions about my journey and about addiction. I want more people to be willing to get out there and talk about it. I am hoping that with social media and the higher media attention that addiction is getting, that the stigma will begin to recede so we can band together as a community and advocate for the resources that we need to treat this disorder.

#2 Heroin/Opiate Epidemic
Opiates are sure getting a lot of attention out there right now. There are parts of the country where heroin is killing people at unbelievable rates. When I am talking about my issues here, I am in no way saying that heroin is not a problem. The deaths with heroin/opiates are tragic and totally preventable. My beef with this coverage is that people are dying from every other drug as well. People are dying from alcohol every day - car crashes, liver failure, overdoses. People are overdosing on meth causing heart attacks and seizures. People are dying from crack and cocaine overdoses which cause cardiac collapse and strokes. None of these drugs really got anyone's attention, why is that? Well, opiates hit the suburban areas and then addiction became a real thing. All these other drugs like coke, meth and crack were all inner city problems. And alcohol? Well, that's legal. So those people are just dumb.

The deaths with heroin are very tragic and very sudden. However, so are the rest of these deaths. In my book, I don't care what you are addicted to, it all sucks. When the brain is so preoccupied with drugs or alcohol, it is really irrelevant in my book which one it is. I care from a withdrawal perspective which drugs you are using because some withdrawals are deadly, like alcohol. Some withdrawals are going to take longer and be more annoying. I care about that because I want to be able to let you know what you can expect from a treatment standpoint. However, as far as addiction is concerned, a drug is a drug. Please give us funding for treatment for everything, not just for opiates. Where I work, we are seeing a ton more meth addiction and alcohol certainly supersedes everything else. Because we are not seeing mass heroin use, our addictions don't matter as much?

I want our conversation to be about addiction. About chemical dependency. Not about one drug. Not about 1 group of people being affected. Addiction does not care who you are. Money, no money, education, no education. The color of your skin does not matter, you age does not matter, your family does not matter. Anyone can develop an addiction. While some people are more vulnerable to addiction, it can happen to anyone. It is sad to me that it took the opiate epidemic to get addiction on the radar. Heroin has been around for years. Prescription drugs (which are really synthetic forms of heroin) started to increase in the late 90s. Alcohol has been around forever. Meth has been around for a good long time as has cocaine. Drugs tend to be fairly cyclical in nature. Talk to any counselor who has been in the field for 30 years, they can tell you which drugs have come and gone over the years. 

So, for National Recovery Month, I hope that we will not just focus on the heroin/opiate epidemic. I hope that we will focus on chemical dependency and recovery. Recovery is lifelong journey that requires an incredible amount of change. I joke with people saying "recovery is easy, you just have to change everything." As the old saying goes....behind every joke is a bit of truth. So, I give a shout out to all those in recovery this month especially for all the hard work you have done to get into recovery and all the hard work you continue to do to stick with it!