Tuesday 16 February 2010

Neglect

Apologies to my meagre readership and myself for my failure to update this for a while. It's not been through a lack of desire but a lack of time - writing on here isn't just a case of hammering away at a keyboard for ten minutes, but takes a good few hours or days of thought first before anything consequential comes to mind.

I don't think I've mentioned yet that I no longer see the woman I first saw when I went to the place. She's been assigned somewhere else, so I turned up to an appointment and this geezer was there. He explained she'd been moved and he was my new one. Of course, it felt strange and like a hard reboot after all I'd talked about with her. Suddenly there's this guy in front of me who knows nothing about me apart from a few of her scribbled notes and he wants me to tell the story from scratch. It was a hard reboot.

Anyway, the first one flew by as I basically just repeated what I'd told her at the start. I must say, it wasn't helpful having to do that. It forced me to go over things, say things out loud, I've been working on putting in the past. I felt just like I did two months ago all over again, just by telling him the original stories. When I get into this line of work I'll remember what that feels like because I don't want to make anyone else have to do that.

The second one was more useful as we looked at an example of a time I went for a drink when I didn't "have to". By that we meant a time there was no pressure on me to drink other than my own inward desires. It was an illuminating experience because it literally put my thought processes down on paper on front of me. I have a tendency to think I know myself inside out but this kind of thing makes clear that I don't, because it showed me the thoughts I have which I use to convince myself that random drinking is okay.

It also reminded me of the problem I have living here at the moment. I don't have the option other people have of "going home to avoid drinking", because I don't like coming home. I need to get my own place again and I'm working on it, but in the meantime I need to find alternatives to going out with people other than going home because it's a bad option for me.

In terms of actual drinking, I've been doing well. Wiped out chunks of the week I may otherwise have gone out with people on, and stuck to my things at weekends. I miss people now and then, and get bored, but it's part of the mission to figure all this out. I've maintained control of an argument twice now in situations that otherwise would have got out of hand, which I'm very happy with because previously I let those get carried away.

In summary: breezes.

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