little bits

Money is still tight, but it seems to have slightly less of a stranglehold on my world right now. I got paid for that cellar clean-out, which is nice. We can pay the cable/Internet/phone bill now and see if they'll come fix the damned cable box so it doesn't sound like it's inhabited by crazed squirrels. No audio makes for tough watching on football Sundays. We can also get some heating oil, which will be nice. And maybe pay back one friend who lent us money last month for rent.

I did some writing this morning in my journal. Journal writing for me is very different from what I write here. Here I know I have an audience (all both of you, bless your devoted little hearts), but in my journal, I write for me. Sometimes it is like a meditation, sometimes it is like a prayer. I try to do some exploration, and I allow myself to write in a free-form, flowing style much like that old "stream of consciousness" stuff we played with in years past. What I write here is thinned by my internal filters. You get the funny stuff, the witty stuff, the sarcastic and zippy stuff, but not the vulnerable stuff. Not the scared stuff. Not the really, really scared stuff, the shame, the self-doubt, the insecurities, the negative stuff voiced by the chorus of demons that are my alcoholic thinking, my dysfunctional upbringing, and the sometimes hostile world in which I live.

I can dig pretty deep here, and get pretty honest, but the stuff I write before I have my first cup of coffee is the stuff you don't even dare whisper aloud in the dark. It is the stuff I keep hidden from myself, and it scares me sometimes to even put it on a page. After that first cuppa joe hits, the really intimate stuff fades back to the interior and hides. The witty stuff comes out to shine and get the attention. And the writing gets just a little bit less real. Less close to the bone. Less dangerous.

So this morning? Well, this morning I got started on that financial step work stuff I talked about yesterday. The thing that is scaring me is the personal inventory I need to take, where I look at my behaviors and my feelings and figure out what is worth keeping and what needs to be thrown out. When I was ready to do this step with regards to my alcoholism, my sponsor at the time said to me "all you have to do is be ready to change everything about yourself."

That's huge. Everything about myself is, well, everything about myself. My identity is what it is. It is how I define myself, for good or bad. To look at the parts of my life as they pertain to my financial mental health and discover that big hunks of stuff really have to go, well, that's a scary proposition.

I did it with my previous inventory, and while I did change some things about myself, I don't think I actually really changed everything about myself. I think maybe I changed a whole lot about my behavior and how I think and feel, and I suppose that might seem like a lot, but from where I sit, I am still me. I have not changed my identity. I am a new version of me, not a different person. I guess I can have faith that this new inventory thing that I am doing will have a similar effect upon me. I can look forward to a new version of me. And I guess I can handle that. We'll see what tomorrow's writing session brings for me...