In about four weeks, I’ll be turning 41. Sometimes I find it hard to believe that I’ve lived on this Earth for 14,975 days. What’s even harder is the realization that over fifty percent of them were nothing but a blur of me chasing and living in multiple addictions. I missed out a lot on living life because in each of those addictions, I was doing nothing but hiding from it.
My life today is thankfully quite different. Just yesterday I went to the movies on my own, which is something that for the longest time I wouldn’t do. There’s a theater locally that many people had been raving about and told me I should go check it out. So I decided to go see The Great Gatsby which had just opened that day there. While I enjoyed the movie’s 3D effects and the plush comfy recliner seat I sat in, I found the film to run a little long and be somewhat slow at times. But this isn’t the reason for me writing this blog entry.
Doing anything alone was pretty impossible for me not too long ago. Besides movies, there are so many things that I never could quite get myself to go do on my own throughout most of my life. Rarely if ever would I go out to dinner, take a drive, sit in a park, lay on a beach, or hike on a trail by myself. Why? Because I hated being with me and I didn’t like my own company. The reality was that I just didn’t like myself and the last person I wanted to spend time with alone was me.
One of the first ways I began to counteract this resistance to spending time with just me was through meditation. Sitting still in silence and just allowing the crazy thoughts to go around my head proved to be extremely difficult at first. But eventually, I was able to go on and complete a 10 day silent retreat where I did nothing but meditate, walk, eat, and sleep completely alone and in total silence. It was worth it because when the retreat was over, I wanted to spend a lot of time with just me and God. Sadly, somewhere along the way though, I fell back into my addictions and obsessions, became severely co-dependent on others, and completely forgot how good it felt to just take a day or even a few hours and spend them alone.
With the limiting disabilities that I have been enduring now for the past three years, life has come around full circle from those days I once enjoyed spending alone. Ironically, I now prefer my own company more than not. Having these disabilities temporarily in my life has been a blessing in disguise. They have forced me to revisit a relationship that I left many years ago which was a relationship with myself. On many days, I’m in too much pain to do anything but sit in the house and work on a puzzle or lay out in the sun and read a book or magazine. What’s funny is that a bunch of years ago I would have dreaded the idea of doing one of those things for a complete day. Now, I cherish a day like that.
There’s a simple truth in why I like doing things with just me today. I like me. I like who I’m becoming more and more everyday. I like how I’m living my life because I feel more more pure than any other time that I’ve ever been alive. And I like the changes that God has been doing within me since I decided to let go of my own self-will and follow God’s instead. I can finally look myself in the mirror today without disgust and instead can say that I truly love myself. Even better, I do things regularly now alone because of that growing love. That’s a far cry from a life where I once couldn’t even function without having to have someone by my side all the time.
The bottom line with all of this is that the life I lived in addictions did nothing more than drive me away from getting to know and love myself. Today, I like taking myself out on dates alone because I love that person I’m going out with. But even more importantly, I love who God is having me become and the more I become that, the more I seem to like spending time with just me.
Peace, love, light, and joy,
Andrew Arthur Dawson