Bad Behavior

This past weekend has been both awesome and...well...interesting. 

A dear friend of mine came in to visit me and we spent the afternoon talking about recent events in our lives and then we sat around, drinking beers, and reminiscing.  It was a great time.  It made me realize that I love exactly where I am in life...that the past was what it was...and most importantly, I have an excellent future ahead of me.

After my friend left, I decided to spend some time with some other friends.  Everything was going well until, well, I had drank too much and my mind started to spin out of control.  When I woke up, Sunday morning, I wasn't sure what all had been said or what all I had done, but I felt very ashamed of myself.  I know that a wonderful day and evening with friends had turned into a negative night, with the right amount of alcohol. 

I don't like the negative things that came out of my mouth, especially because they involved events that were in the past.  As I have said before, it's important to compartmentalize the past, experience the emotion of it, and put it away in order to remain in the present.   I let the past eat me alive on Saturday night.  I know, obviously, one of the best things I can do for myself right now, is to put away the drinks.  I have too much internal work to bother with drinking - it's just not a good idea.  (And the calories are counterproductive to my workouts!)

Today, as I spent some more time reflecting on it, I realized a few more things.  Well, one thing in particular, and that is that my behavior, though it was mostly internal, was rotten.  It was an outpouring of my old self, the one who still lingers, even though I work on shedding the old stuff everyday, and that old self behaved very, very badly to the new self. 

I realize where I am going in life and I have never felt more proud of my accomplishments and my direction; I feel confident everyday.  But how can I continue to improve when I engage in such bad behavior?  When the good-self is present, the good-self would never accept the behavior that the bad-self displayed on Saturday night.  That is behavior that is outdated for the the person that I am becoming.  There is no room in my life for that kind of negativity and it is behavior that makes only for steps backwards.

However, in all of this - all of the things that happened on Saturday night - there is no way that my determination could have grown to its current strength if I hadn't experienced such a set back.  It is through our relapses, in our most weak moments, that we can be honest with ourselves and tell ourselves what we truly want and how we truly want to be. 

It is when the bad-self, showing itself fully, comes forth so that we can extract it from who we are. 

From this point onward, we must accept that from time to time, the bad-self will come out again as we deal with our anger issues.  And as we deal with them, more and more of the bad-self will disappear and disintegrate.  We are merely humans and can only take on one item at a time and through this process there is much self-forgiveness to perform as well - forgiveness for this moment of weakness.