My last new years resolutions

While I don't talk about it much it's no secret that I spent a significant amount of my life in therapy.

I was in bad shape, too. More than one psychologist told me he'd be amazed if I were still alive in five years. That's because I was drinking pretty heavily and was deeply suicidal, to boot.

Part of my problem was self-loathing. Imagine living with someone you absolutely can't stand. You can just leave, right? But when that person is you, leaving is not an option. So, you're only options are:

• kill yourself
• change yourself

Obviously, since I'm still here, I chose the second option. I spent a lot of time considering my life and made some decisions and decided on some resolutions one New Year's Eve, several years ago. This wasn't easy--I didn't just arrive at some revelation, snap my fingers, and was suddenly okay. This was the hardest thing I've ever done. However, given the state I was in, I had no choice.

First of all, read this article. While I didn't write it, this is all stuff I realized myself during this time, and this is an excellent, helpful, if somewhat brutally honest, article that sums up what I figured out.

After coming to some of the realizations in the above article, I performed a little exercise. I made a list of five things that would completely and totally make me happy, make me feel like life is worth living, make me like myself, even a little bit. Then I re-read the list, and decided that the stuff I had little if any control over would be crossed off of it.

For example, my number one issue was I was crazy in love with this girl who didn't return my affections. I decided, during this exercise, that I had done everything I could do to get her to give me that shot--everything else was up to her and that was something I couldn't control. So, that got crossed off the list and I quit worrying about it.

I'm not saying that was easy. It was incredibly hard. But when I found myself thinking about her I'd divert my thinking towards something else. It took discipline, constant vigilance, and slowly got easier and easier until it was something I could deal with. It took a while, but I got there.

When I looked back at the list I saw that most of the stuff on it was stuff like that--I had zero control over it, yet it was running and ruining my life.

So, I decided to make myself into someone I could admire. This was something I could control. Completely. It was all up to me. Again, not an easy thing to do. Even more difficult than the above. But I did it. It took a long time and a lot of hard work, but I got there. Again, it took discipline, hard work, and constant vigilance, but I got there.

I'm still there. And every year, on New Year's Eve, I remind myself what those days were like. And I resolve just to keep doing what I've been doing.

And I don't forget. I'll never let myself forget. It's all that I need to do to keep myself moving forward.