Journal, B-SidesShawn Van DaeleMarch 22, 2023Frozen, Melting, Pause, learning to pause, fears, secrets, recovery, sobriety, alcoholism, addiction, drug dependency, isolation, growthComment

Frozen

Journal, B-SidesShawn Van DaeleMarch 22, 2023Frozen, Melting, Pause, learning to pause, fears, secrets, recovery, sobriety, alcoholism, addiction, drug dependency, isolation, growthComment

There’s a story of two men who went hiking up a mountain, each with a bottle of water. But one man froze his bottle of water before their hike. After climbing for hours in the sweltering heat, the two men break for a rest. The man who had frozen his water bottle takes a final swig and is left with nothing but a chunk of ice, rattling around against plastic.

The other man, who didn’t freeze his bottle, found his water too hot to drink.

Since one had ice, they tried and tried to chip away at the ice, so they could slowly pass slivers to the other bottle in order to help cool it down and make it drinkable. In a moment of clarity and pause, one man suggests to the other that rather than chiseling away at the hard ice and trying to get it out, they could just pour the warm water in to the bottle with the ice instead, and they could then both drink cool water from the same bottle.

The lesson here is that instead of chipping away at the cold, hard stuff, sometimes it makes more sense to let new, warm things in.

To allow the warmth of things outside yourself to melt your frozen parts.

We do a very good job of isolating ourselves while in the throes of deep, active addiction, building walls that would give Trump a hard-on, and walls always serve two purposes: they prevent things from getting in, but they also prevent and slow down the chance of our feral parts getting out.

The wild parts.

The parts we don’t ever want anyone to see.

The parts of ourselves we shamefully keep hidden behind tall walls and closed doors.

And the walls grow taller the longer we stay behind them. Or maybe, it’s that we grow smaller.

Alcohol worked like a liquid microscope for me, amplifying all my troubles and fixating on the small and insignificant things until they appeared to be of mountainous proportions. It kept me in a loop of looking too closely at all the wrong things, from all the wrong angles and added in a growing inability to look away, for good measure.

We fixate. We dwell. We drink to the point of our words and emotions spinning off in repetitive loops that create cyclones of tunnel vision. We go dangerously deep into dark rabbit holes that stop us from seeing that there are always alternatives.

That we have options.

That sometimes even just a little to the left, there has always been a different path we could follow.

But we travel the same beaten paths, over and over and over, on thoughtless autopilot because it’s the fastest route to a predictable destination. Our brains will always defer to what it already knows to keep traffic flowing, regardless of how the outcome is sorely disappointing every time – or how bumpy that old “faithful” (read: dangerous) road we always take has become, full of speed bumps, potholes, traffic jams and devastating, frequent accidents and crashes.

Our brain will always choose what is easiest, not necessarily what’s best.

This is where learning to pause changes everything.

This is where you give yourself the time and space you need to detour your tired and self-deprecating repetitive patterns.

This is where you finally discover a way to walk around the rabbit hole, instead of falling down into it, time and again.

This is where you begin to learn to question quite literally every thought, every word, every action and every emotion that passes through you.

This is where you begin letting things in so you can more easily tame your secret feral fears and more easily let things out.

Hard shells do a great job at protecting what’s inside, until what’s inside begins to sour and rot away.

Is it finally time to start melting?