Cowabunga baby

I should have gotten up this morning and written but after my run last night I slept like the dead and did not want to get up AT ALL this morning.  Work was too interrupt driven to really get my thoughts down so here I am, waiting for the heat to abide so i can pretend I want to go running again tonight.  The craziest thing I have ever done is give myself this dumb exercise to think of things I am grateful for and good at and then talk about my inner critic.  I spend my empty space trying to think of things that I am good at or thankful for so I am ready to write it down.  I am pretty sure I will not be able to do this longer than a week just because I will run out of ideas of things to report on.  Focusing on the good and putting the critic in its place yesterday gave me hope and raised my spirits and loosened the chains that were keeping me tied to despair.  That sounds sooo melodramatic, but this weekend I was a shell of myself and having a hard time so regaining my composure was very needed!

Ugh writing with goals is so contrived but here I go.  I am very thankful (grateful) - wait what is the difference between those two? I found this thankful-vs-grateful article and I realized there is at least a perceived difference.  However I found this forum where Aupick defines the two probably the closest to my understanding.  Grateful is something you attribute to someone (or thing fate/god) rather than just pleased or relieved.  I do believe in Karma/Universe giving back type thing so I think I am trying to focus on the bigger more difficult to explain grateful.  I digress.  

I am grateful that I have the capability to find myself again.  I have been through many dark times, sometimes self-inflicted sometimes not, but I do better than just survive it.  I am grateful that I am good at (see how I did that) being able to see beyond the immediate trauma drama and find myself a way to the other side.  I think that is pretty impressive actually that I am in the midst of despair able to become aware enough to drive myself to a better conclusion.

My critic comes at me with two points of contention.  1) I end up in the same place over and over again so I do not really do it all that well.  2) I often get myself into bad situations so it is my own fault that I suffer.  Funny thing about that criticism is that while I really believe those points they do not really sting like the good/bad fail/success inner critic.  There is a stronger side of me that I think knows that 1) I am doing better and life is NOTHING if not a series of lessons to learn from 2) I have always made the best decisions I could at the time.  They may not have been good decisions but given where I was, what was happening I really tried to always do the things I would not regret.

A few years ago when shit really fell apart again I was so surprised to be hit again with the same old tidal wave but I needed that to really look at what I was doing and why.  It helped me break the patterns I had developed as a result of other things and re-factor myself again.  Yeah I would probably could learn in a much less destructive way but I do learn and I make progress.   I think the things that I am suffering from now are so less emotional and dire that it almost makes it harder, but that is for another day.
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