I would think about exercising, but I wouldn’t. I would consider calling a friend
to talk, but I didn’t. I knew that if I tried to find a job outside of the media industry
it would help, but I couldn’t motivate myself to look. I didn’t feel comfortable
going back to coaching people because I felt like such a failure myself.
I knew what I needed to do but I couldn’t make myself take action. And that’s
the thing that makes changing so hard. Change requires you to do things that feel
hard and scary. Change requires courage and confidence—and I was tapped out of
both.
What I did do was spend a lot of time thinking. Thinking made everything
worse. The more I thought about the situation that we were in, the more afraid I
felt. That’s what your mind does when you focus on problems—it magnifies them.
The more I worried, the more uncertain and overwhelmed I became. The more I
thought, the more paralyzed I felt.
Every night, I’d have a few drinks to take the edge off. I’d climb in bed drunk
or buzzed, close my eyes, and dream about a different life—one where I didn’t have
to work and all of our problems had magically disappeared. The moment I woke
up, I had to face reality: my life was a nightmare. I was 41, unemployed, in financial
ruin, struggling with a drinking problem, and had zero confidence in my or my
husband’s abilities to fix our problems.
That’s where the snooze button came in. I hit it...two, three, or four times a
morning. When I hit that snooze button it was the one moment every day where I
actually felt like I was in control. It was an act of defiance. It was as if I were
saying,
“Oh yeah?! Take that, life! **** you! I’m not getting up right now, I’m going back to sleep. So, there!”By the time I finally got up, Chris had already left for the restaurants, the kids
were in various states of dress, and the school bus was long gone. To say mornings