I used to play golf.  There was a time when I was actually half way decent at it.  I would play two or three times a week.  Of course, the best games always involved booze.  I loved tournaments because we would get some guys together and stock all of our bags up with tons of beer and assorted goodies and it would be a whole day affair.  Drinking from early morning to whenever we finally crashed.  I didn’t always drink while playing golf.  There were many times that I would just go and play as a form of fun and exercise.  Sometimes a beer was had after the round of golf, sometimes we just called it a night and went home.  Pretty normal stuff.  At one of the last tournaments that I played in it was a different story.  I pre-drank to get there, then we had a few at the course.  It was my friends son’s hockey club tournament.  They had all sorts of games and prize holes and even some free drinks.  We had a great time, but one thing that stood out was that I remember thinking that I wasn’t going to be able to get drunk enough to fun with these guys.  I snuck into the clubhouse a few times in order to order some “double” whiskeys or jagermeisters.  This is crazy behaviour I know, but it seemed necessary at the time.  By the end of the tournament I was feeling pretty good, not wrecked, but on my way.  They had one of those raffles that you buy an arms length of tickets for a sum of money and you get to decide what bucket to put the tickets in.  Each bucket corresponds to a desired prize.  OF COURSE they had a few prizes that were several hundred dollars worth of liquor bottles.  OF COURSE I went and dumped all of my many tickets into those buckets.  At the appointed time of the draw I was excited thinking that I had a good chance to win a bunch of free booze (the fact that I had spent 60 or 80 bucks on the tickets was lost on me at the time).  The draw happens …… OF COURSE the ONE guy in the room that DOES NOT DRINK wins the big liquor prize……

Looking back on it now I find this hilarious.  I think the universe protected me from myself that day.  I can only imagine what would have happened if I had brought a prize like that home.

I had to leave the house.  I was sitting there brooding about this evening.  I was trying to read my book and I can’t focus on anything.  Then the cold hand of panic gripped me.  I start focusing on every negative thing in the world.  Why?  Why am I feeling like this?  I have done this before, the speaking part….and the panic part I suppose.  But the last time I spoke it was in a much bigger group and I did OK I think.  Maybe I am just not in as good of a head space right now?  I keep telling myself that no one is going to judge me, that no one will think less of me.  But it doesn’t matter.  I am terrified that I am going to have a breakdown up there.  I worry that I am going to start blurting out my 5th step and then everyone will know how unhappy I am right now.  I just want this to be over.  I feel like this is a shame and fear based reaction.  I don’t know how to control this.  I am so unfamiliar with coping with this without alcohol.  I was just remembering how I actually got drunk once at work and did a big presentation to a few hundred people about our base network and about all of our upcoming projects.  That was my coping mechanism back then.  What the fuck am I supposed to do now?

I know what the program tells me to do.  Pray, meditate, pause and reflect, and reach out and talk to someone.  I’m trying so hard to do this right now and it’s not helping.  I am sitting in a coffee shop and I feel like my heart is going to explode.  I have been here before and I know from experience that this is the edges of a panic attack.  Where I struggle in my experience is how to come back from this edge.

So I was asked by my sponsor to be the speaker at our home group meeting tonight.  I of course said yes, because I have been told that you should always say yes when asked to do something in the program.  Well as I get closer to the end of the day and the start of the meeting I know that I am going to be living with the butterflies in my stomach.  There is no real reason to be nervous in this case.  But I do tend to get a block thrown up between my brain and my mouth.  I know what I want to say but it seems to come out as gibberish.  Or at least that is how I perceive it.  My disease of perception tells me that everyone is going to be judging me.  Judging my story, judging my message, judging my recovery…..

I know that this isn’t true.  Because I have been to many speaker meetings and I have never done that.  But I still get slightly nervous even sharing when it’s a small group.  I guess I am scared of sounding dumb.  I go to meetings and meet and hear so many people that carry the message so well that I am intimidated by them.  Sometimes I pass when it’s my turn to share, even when i have something pressing that I need to get off my chest.  Which is dangerous for me.  I have to get this shit out of my head or it’s going to kill me.  This blog is a help for sure but sometimes it is nice to get a little feed back from someone who understands what I am going through.

So for now I am going to fight the urge to prepare for being the Guest Speaker and just let the universe tell me what I am supposed to say.

Here I go again, I’m letting the ill formed parts of my mind run the show again.  I haven’t slept because I am feeling the tide of anxiety forming behind me.  I have come to realize that I have this insane ability to jump to conclusions about things.  And I think that in this case this is because of my complete lack of self esteem.  I had made plans with some friends and it got cancelled.  Which is a pretty normal thing to happen.  I however jump to the conclusion that I have done something wrong, that I have made someone upset with me.  I can’t for the life of me think what that would be.  But in noticing this, I’ve realized that I have done this my whole life.  My go to reaction in these cases is to “punish you, by punishing me”.  I am hurting so someone else has to hurt as well.  I will cut people out of my life for something like this.  I have lost contact with friends over stuff like this.  It’s crazy.  I don’t want this to happen, but I have this angry pit in my stomach that tells me that I am not good enough.  That no one likes me.  That I don’t deserve to have friends.

I sort of know how to develop a more appropriate response to this, but it is really hard to break that cycle.  How does one overcome this reaction.  Do I just ignore it and pretend that it doesn’t exist?  Do I talk about it with someone?  I am scared to do that because I think people will think I am crazy and I certainly don’t wish to upset anyone.