Control...

My family has a history of addiction issues. I've talked about it before. Drinking, smoking, drugs, shopping, food, gambling, you name it we've got someone who struggled with it.

Brent says my addiction is fighting addiction.

Like I am hyper aware of anything I feel like I don't have control over. I watch my drinking very closely because I don't want to drink too much or too often. I am really careful around food issues because I don't want to eat too much or too little. I love little matchy games on my phone and will play them in stretches and then delete them when I realize that I've done nothing but play little matchy games for a stretch. When I quit smoking at 20 I took about a week and quit. And that was that.

I'm not saying I don't have bad habits, I so do. The food thing for instance, I'd love to get to a point where eating was just a natural thing that was done just in healthy balance for maximum benefit instead of what feels like a constant fight between what I should eat for health and what I want to eat because...cake. Same with working out. I would love to wake up with just the right amount of drive to be at the gym doing the perfect balance of healthy working out and then spending my day active enough to not undo it all.

But that's not happened yet. So I watch closely if my weight gets too high or too low or my working out gets too obsessive or too slack.

My addiction is fighting addiction.

If I get too much stuff it makes me feel claustrophobic. If I spend too much money I get nervous. (Possibly another reason beside the grief for the insomnia, a few bigger bills coming due right now and even though we can afford them, the part of me that remembers the first years, decades, of our marriage is still a little panicky) But if I stop spending money and become really miserly and tight then I feel like that's not good either. So I try to find some sort of balance line on what I spend and on what.

Should I be a minimalist? Or should I worry more about supporting local businesses and go ahead and by that hand carved thing that I am sure I really need even if I'm not sure what it actually is...

And if I have what feels like too much stuff I have to get rid of it in steps now because there have been too many times that I've panic cleaned and gotten rid of things that I wished I had kept. But in the fog of the moment I just wanted clean walls and cleared shelves.

And I know that right now a lot of my hyper vigilance around these things is related to Mom dying last year and two trips back to New Mexico within 6 months of each other. Nothing like being around family to see all of the potential avenues for addiction open up. And even if they aren't really having issues with it, you can see that it could be a problem, and then you wonder should you say something? Which of course is a resounding no. Because nobody wants to hear from a nosy family member that maybe they should be shopping, eating, gambling, drinking, hoarding just a little less....

So instead I internalized it all and brought it home to stew on around my own life.

My addiction is fighting addiction.

I need to be in control of my own situation.

I hate thinking anything outside of myself controls me at all.

Which is a control issues all to itself.

Which is a doom loop of too much self reflection.

Which could be solved with cake...

Wait! No! Stop it...

You know it needs a few rounds of Toon Blast!

*sigh*

Really, I've got it all together...

Brent also pointed out that I just do my own mental health counseling on my blog so...

You're welcome?