2020-09-26 — A Little Too Much Rabbit Food

They tasted so good though. And only 99 cents a pound. Didn’t really feel like I could say no. 😉 I think I bought a little over 3 pounds. Crisp. Huge. Juicy. Sweet.

I don’t usually like the green grapes as much as the red ones, but these were wonderful. So wonderful, that I enjoyed them all day–all of them. I think I might have mentioned yesterday that I’m grateful that I’m craving the rabbit food more and more? Well… I bought a bunch of it today, including the three pounds of grapes that I downed like candy (well, like I used to eat candy). Three pounds of grapes, though… that can… cause a little stir in the bowels. My body has actually handled it quite well… only uncomfortable for maybe an hour or so, but the night is still young. 🙃

It was a good day today. It started out rough. I woke up in the middle of the night and relapsed in my pornography and masturbation addiction/habit thing, and then again when I first woke up this morning. I’m having the urge to go do it again as I write this. I’ve reached out to two people so far, but no response yet, though the most recent was only a couple minutes ago, so it hasn’t been long. So for now, y’all will be my help…

…and there’s my mother. Thanks, mom 😊

There’s are a couple of things that I want to learn from this experience and challenge that I’ve struggled with for 30+ years that I haven’t yet learned: First, I want to learn how to struggle like this without choosing to be embarrassed by it. There’s a lot to this, though. The cause of that embarrassment runs deep.

Forgive me if I’ve shared it before, but it bears repeating or myself if I have, so perhaps you can bear with me. I get embarrassed because I feel like people will think less of me, that they’ll look at “that poor young man who just can’t ever get it together, can’t learn to control himself, is still struggling with things that he should have been long passed long ago.” (etc)

Why are other people’s judgments a problem for me? Because I have a a fault that runs much deeper than its manifestation as embarrassment. I have a deep-seated desire for everyone everywhere to think extremely highly of me, so much so that they put me on a pedestal above them and anyone they know.

Pride. The very epitome. I wish I could say that wasn’t the reason for the embarrassment, but it is. There’s no sense in hiding from it, pretending it’s not the reality. It is, and I won’t be able to work past that by turning a blind eye to it hoping it’s not there. It is.

So… in wanting to overcome my embarrassment, I really need to overcome the deeper, core issue of pride that is just as much a part of me as the great hunger I have to do good, to lift, to serve. It might seem contradictory, but it’s not. I’m like the proverbial two wolves in the Native American example of growth and progress. I am both of these things, and I’m trying to feed the part of me I want to grow and starve the part of me I want to die off. Most of the time I feed the good wolf. Occasionally, I feed the bad one.

Anyway, though I don’t want to relapse again, I also want to learn how to overcome the embarrassment. But to overcome the embarrassment requires that my heart be love, so that instead of wanting to be above others, I love them. Then, were I to relapse, it would not be a cause for embarrassment but simply a stumbling on the ever-forward path of becoming that I’m following.

So… here’s to love, right? Pretty much the cure all. Real love, that is. Not the lust and selfishness that society trots out as love when really the people who are “in love” are really only thinking about themselves and what they want. Which… isn’t love at all. It’s just… using each other.

Anyway… sorry… tangent.

The challenge here is that learning how to be love will likely be a pursuit of many many years. In the intermediary, I’d like to figure out how to stop being embarrassed by relapse, overcome these issues permanently, and be on to striving to replace pride with love in the other gazillion places it rears its head.

So… that’s what I’m going to attempt to do. I don’t want to relapse again, but I also want the confidence in myself that were I to, I’d no longer be embarrassed. I’d have at least become love enough that at least in this situation, love had replaced pride. I know that’s not really how it works. I’m leaving out some profoundly important pieces, but… this is the gist of the desire, even if the specifics are missing.

So… there you go. I’m going to work on that. I’ll probably spend a chunk of tomorrow working on that, as well as working more on my meditation, and maybe going to my favorite river spot up in the Mark Twain National Forest across the border in Missouri.

Anyway… so… there’s that. Here’s to progress. Here’s to getting up–again. Here’s to not getting down on yourself. Here’s to facing your weakness head on. Here’s to choosing love over pride.

#1. I’m grateful that today was a good work day. We got a lot done, and that’s a bonus, as is the financial blessing such a day brings about.

#2. I’m grateful for my mother who is currently pinging me every five minutes until I go to bed, as I reached out requesting assistance because I felt the urge to use, and I want my self control to be total.

#3. I’m grateful for produce that’s on sale.

#4. I’m grateful for the fun relationships I have with the AutoZone people. It’s often a bright spot. Fun times, joking, enjoying company during long days. I have to be careful with one of them, though. One of the workers is a woman, and there’s quite a bit of chemistry between us, and… she’s married, and… yeah… I’m pretty sure we both feel the chemistry pretty strongly, so I have to be super careful there–for obvious reasons and also many reasons that are even more important to me than the obvious.

#5. I’m grateful that my self surgery hasn’t gotten infected. It’s… a bit of a miracle really. I did a third day of surgery last night 🙃. This time… it was the craziest of them all (in terms of outcome, not in terms of having made poor choices in operating on myself). This time, instead of slicing parallel to the skin (first the dome, then a scoop). This time, I cut straight down–a square, which I pulled out. And what was below? A hollow place, I think.

I know, right? Super weird. So… what did I do? I squoze around the wound as if it were a massive pimple to pop, and guess what?!?! This huge glob of I don’t even know what came out almost as though it were a zit. Except it wasn’t zit stuff. I have no idea what it was–a ball of brown fat maybe? But it came popping right out of the cavern like it’s been living there for quite some time. I tried squeezing it again, and instead of another glob coming out, a bunch of little granules followed. Almost like a mom followed by a bunch of kids. 😶

Yeah…

It was gnarly. It left a pretty good cavern in there–a numb cavern. Super weird. A whole section of flesh without any nerve endings at all. Just excavate away (as long as you get the blood out quickly enough to see where to go next). It’s all super weird. I’d really like to know what is. I’d post pictures but… too lazy, and they don’t really show it well.

Anyway, it’s not infected. I’m not sure what to do with it. I’m taking a surgery break tonight. I might go in again and try to clear out the rest of the scar tissue that just seems to keep building up over the years over this cavernous area that’s apparently there. I don’t want the scar tissue to come back.

#6. I’m grateful for Sundays. I’m better prepared already for Monday than I have been in a while, I think. That’s nice. Hopefully, that’ll make it a lot easier tomorrow when I finalize the Monday workday.

#7 I’m grateful that my elbow braces came. I’m going to start wearing them to bed in the hopes that I can start to recover from my ulnar nerve issues. We’ll see how I do.

#8. I’m grateful for the smoothie suggestion. Thanks, Tish! I looked at frozen fruit and kale this morning while I was in the grocery store buying the other rabbit food. I’ll be picking up a bunch of everything, I think. I’m gonna have a hard time keeping weight on again if I go this route. It just melts away–or it did 6 years ago… don’t know how the metabolism has slowed now. We’ll see, but I’m gonna do even better than I am now. It’s an interesting mix in the diet right now. I’m trying to eat up all the old food storage that’s way old. Takes a long time. But perhaps I’ll have eaten through it by the end of the year such that we only have non-expired stuff left?

😁

I was happy for my tech today. He had a good money day. I’d like him to have days like today every day. Yesterday could have been one of those as well, but… things happen. We’ll see what else we can do for him.

What else…

That’s probably good for today. Thank you, mother for being there tonight and lifting my world.

Loves and hugs to everyone.

Lift the World.

~ stephen