Bye, Felicia : The things we have to move away from in order to become who we were made to be.

My eyes opened. I lay there for a minute – slightly nauseous and still exhausted. I could still smell alcohol – on my skin, in my hair, on my breath. I sat straight up in my bed, turned to my right and looked at my reflection in the square mirror that hung above my dresser.

 
It was a poignant moment in my life.

 
Clear –

 

Almost out of body.

 
As if time slowed down.

 
I saw the mascara down my face, my tangled hair and my empty eyes.

 

But I saw deeper.

 

I saw me.

 

A moment of clarity.

 

The words rolled out of my mouth, without conscious thought or awareness.

 

“What are you doing to yourself?”

 

Again, I felt these words escape my breath, as if to come from a place beyond my own understanding.

 

“….What are you doing to yourself?”

 

It was January of 2008.

 

I was a junior at Penn Sate – 20 years old, and realizing that I wasn’t quite like the girl next door or across the hall, or downstairs.

 

My all-or-nothing personality, my competitive spirit, my dare devilish and willful character was a deadly combination with my shame and childhood trauma.

 

And this wasn’t supposed to be me. I was the kid in high school that never drank. I went to parties, declining the forbidden red cup, strong in my resolve that I had soccer the next day.

 

I thought about things like being the designated driver, and what we would do if the cops came.

 

I was the nerd who called my mom when faced with alcohol for the first time, asking “Can I have a sip of something called Mike’s Hard Lemonade? Just one sip?”

 

I’m not kidding.

 

My childhood friend, Devon still laughs about this.

 

But then college happened. And an injury.

 

And quickly – very quickly, things changed.

 

I found escape.

 

I found identity.

 

I found a way to ease my anxiety and to relieve myself of the burden of self.

 

Drinking had stopped being a social endeavor, and instead became an internal ally.

 

Alcohol took on a life of its own– like a monster with claws, and whispers, and demands, each time growing stronger and digging it’s claws deeper into my spirit.

 

Once it entered my body, it took up residence, and robbed me of my power and self respect.

 

For someone who considered herself disciplined, I found that once I started drinking my discipline was void of its authority.

 

At first, alcohol cloaked me with armor, making me feel safe, and apathetic. (Apathy was a gift for someone who cared too much, about things that don’t matter.)

 

Until I entered a different dimension, where I had left completely, only to wake up the next morning with nothing but shame and wonderment…and not the good kind of wonderment.

 

There’s a lot of moving pieces to this story, but the most important piece is that I made a decision to turn my will and my life over to the care of God on January 17, 2008.

 

It wasn’t because I failed out of school – the opposite is true. During the time I drank the most I was on the Dean’s List.

 

The irony is, that I actually struggled the most the first semester I stopped drinking.

 

It wasn’t because I got kicked off the team.

 

 

I was still playing, and able to train, and train well. I went to early morning lifts, still drunk and dancing in the weight room.

 

It wasn’t because I was homeless, or on a corner with a brown paper back under a bridge.

 

In fact, I remember listening to others like me for the first time and thinking “I’m not like these people. I’m an athlete. On a scholarship. I’m not some druggy bum, who’s lost everything.”

 

And in that space – in my first encounter with people who shared in a common malady, a woman in her 40’s with only the love a mother would have, grabbed my face with both hands and said “sweetie, this is not the life that God has for you.”

 

In that moment, I broke.

 

God spoke the words right through her.

 

The words I knew to be true.

 

The words that led me to that place at that time, and cut through my soul.

 

The stories I heard about people’s losses – I learned those were my “not yets” and they didn’t have to happen.

 

Looking back, I did have a deep fear of what could happen.

 

I still do.

 

The loss of school, and scholarship and soccer.

 

 

I had fear about all the things that could result from my behavior.

 

 

The roads it could have taken me down.

 

But, most importantly, I had a fear that I would never be able to live the life I wanted to live – the life God intended for me to live, if I kept drinking.

 

This is the take away.

 

Drinking diminished my light.

 

It wasn’t about a physical rock bottom for me, it was about a spiritual rock bottom.

 

I had arrived at a place where alcohol stopped allowing me to escape my pain and started bringing more pain to my life.

 

Over the last 11 years, I’ve had times that I’ve been proud of my sobriety and times where I’ve felt shame.

 

There are times where I feel different –

 

And sometimes that’s uncomfortable.

 

But, this is me, and here’s my truth.

 

The reality is, that whether it’s alcohol, shopping, food, relationship, exercise, business, busyness, etc. – we all have ways of escaping our pain.

 

We all have toxicity in our lives that we need to be rid of.

 

… We all have things in our lives that will prevent us from becoming our best selves and living our truest purpose, if we don’t identify them, and do something about them.

 

Oprah talks about the reality that we are spiritual beings, having a human experience.

She also talks about the fact that we are all here to figure out our purpose and to realize that purpose.

 

I believe both to be true.

 

For me, this was a time where I had to remove something for the health of my spirit, and the health of my relationship with God.

 

Perhaps I’m writing about this, because I feel that I’m here again, in a different way.

 

For each person, this walk looks different.

 

It’s not linear.

 

It’s riddled with chapters of accelerated growth, and what feels like decline.

 

There are setbacks, and challenges, and roadblocks.

 

But the thing I know to be true through the complexity of this experience is that we cannot find peace in the dichotomy of spirt and human unless we honor our spirt first, because that is who we really are.

 

And in order to honor our spirt, we must first honor God.

 

By doing both, only then, are we able to find our purpose and realize our potential.

 

And God said “For I know the plans I have for you,” “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future,” (Jeremiah 29:11, NIV).