Blog Audit: Reflection

Ah, reflection. I’m noticing in most of these classes there is all kinds of reflecting and going back and making the material personal. Which is awesome, actually. In this field, broadly known as Human Development and Family Studies, you have to know yourself. Whatever sort of job a person ends up in, it’s most likely going to involve working with people. How you come to know and understand them, and you must if you’re going to be successful, will depend on how well you know and understand yourself.

In this blog I wanted to write about what I was learning. Specifically I wanted to discover how people are part of a happy couple. I’m not. Not sure I ever have been. I worked a long time in a job that didn’t leave room for a personal life. It was my life. Now Id like to see what else is out there, and I’d like to see what being a pert of a coupe would be like.

One of the themes that kept coming up for me was that of being in Recovery. I am, and it’s the most important thing I’ve got going. If I lose that, I will die. I’m not being dramatic here, just truthful. I see people all the time that do die from addiction to alcohol or drugs. I’ve been sober now for eight years and what I want is to help others get what I have. Living with addiction is a nightmare, and a whole lot of work, to be frank. Living in recovery is a lot of work too but it’s the good kind of work. Exploring how a person in recovery can be part of a healthy coupe has been wonderful fun.

Something that surprised me was that I used pictures of myself throughout it. I never do that. I’m on social media but it’s very rare I post any pictures of me. Just my cats. I take lovely cat pictures. I take many, to say the least. I go through them, I edit them, I pick the best ones, and write a funny or fun caption on them. Then I post a vignette of something like school or whatever. Very rare it’s personal. My public self, sure. My real self? Not so much. Mostly I’ve looked at pictures of myself and not been thrilled. Showing my real true self is very different.

And that was brave. I don’t actually like comments of how brave I am to talk about being an alcoholic. There’s much stigma going on about it, or mental illness, but for me it isn’t hard to talk about. It’s a disease. It happened. It’s how I cope with it that matters. Being brave is about being afraid to do something and doing it anyway. If you aren’t scared, it’s not bravery. Like getting up on stage and playing violin. I can do that. I do it all the time. It’s not brave. For someone who hasn’t done it, it’s scary. If they do it in spite of being scared, that’s brave.

Let’s flip that around. People are in relationships all the time. They are part of couples. It starts when they’re teenagers, and continues through life. They know how to do this. I’m late to the party. I don’t know how to do it, I’ve never done it, and it’s scary.

Now I want to. Now I have tools and I know myself better. I’m going to try, and for me:

That’s brave.