#and an ongoing existential crisis about learning that you managed to do the impossible?? so it's possible to do??

[rawliverandgoronspice]

How long do you think it took for Ganondorf to be captured and set to be executed after Link snitched on him, because he looks a LOT older than he was in OoT by the time of his execution in TP.

Did he just run to the desert to gather his forces before all of that or what?

Hey, thanks for the ask!!

So I have.... pretty extensive headcanons about that, but yeah basically I think he did manage to run away from Hyrule Castle, retreat in the Desert, and then waged war for a couple of years before being captured, tried and executed.

It's my HC at least, because first of all it would support the whole "him on his horse while surrounded by fire" thing the Sages introduce in TP, and it would also make the hylians less monstrous? I mean, I'm not putting it past them to take the word of a 10 year old and execute a man for crimes he has yet to commit (mostly, not forgetting about the Deku Tree, Jabu Jabu and the gorons), but I think the whole process of his death looking so ritualized seems to me like he proved himself a big enough threat that they needed to get drastic in his murder as well.

I think it's always hard to take his appearance as a cue for his age, because it's sooo open to interpretation that it's hard to say for sure. There are people who think his young model looks like he's 20, others think he's 40, and then Ganon in WW is hundreds of years old, and in TP he is basically a ghost-man?? He changes so much that I think it's hard to use anything as a baseline. But yeah, at least the hair grew back! That's something! So I would assume he ran around for at least a couple of years before the execution (and if he looks older than OoT even 7 years later than his first appearance, this version doesn't have the Triforce and, I would argue, have faced much more strife, war and trauma than his OoT counterpart. The skin care routine may have suffered as a result u_u)

[level3bird]

don’t call it a relapse

Ok, bear with me. I want to chat a moment about addiction and relapse and about how, for me, the drug of choice is the symptom, not the disease.

First, for those who haven’t been playing along on this blog, it’s been a hot minute since the days when I fell nose first into the shiny happy fishscale and was a more than willing partaker in the weeks’ long halcyon glow of the bottomless bottles of 4-bars obtained on the daily from a long list of pill doctors.

I’ve been able to string together, a day at a time, a chunk of clean time. 

A long time ago, I got to that point of devastation and despair, of being on the verge of death, that I knew I had to get real help and I accepted an offered hand. It made all the difference, did what two trips to rehab didn’t, and I was able to put down the coke and the pills.

In fact, it has been eight years, eight months and seventeen days.

Clean time that I’m very proud of.

And thinking back on it, I suppose I got that 8, 8, and 17 mostly by the seat of my pants without any real plan on how to make it happen or how to make it stick.  Maybe 5% rehab, 20% 12-step meetings, 35% the geographical cure and 40% the love and support of a wonderful partner, best friend, unintentional sponsor, confessor and all around fabulous fella. (A job he didn’t sign up for, but stepped into by default because he is that kind of a good man.)

I got clean in 2008 and moved to Australia in 2010. When I got here, I attended a handful of meetings, but ultimately decided that I shouldn’t go. My reasoning, at the time, was that I was in a new country with no idea of how to find drugs, who to talk to or where to go, and I didn’t want to find out by rubbing elbows with other addicts at NA. It was a cynical view to be sure, but I’d learned the hard way back in Texas that not everyone in 12-step meetings is clean and/or sober or wanting to stay that way.

Staying clean here wasn’t an issue for me. I had cravings and still had shit going on in my life, but I had a wonderful listener in my husband and I stayed rigorously honest and we dealt with things as they arose and I stayed clean.  

So much so that I quit referring to myself as an addict or even as a recovering addict.

I mean, why not? I felt like I’d turned a corner and I convinced myself that my previous years of addiction had been down to shitty life circumstances, which no longer existed, and since I’d changed everything else about my life, that the pall of addiction had also been removed.

In all the joy and happiness of a new life in a new place, with a new job and a new home and a loving partner, I thought I could say that my recovery achievement had been unlocked.

Except the fact that addiction is a sneaky bastard. As they say, cunning, baffling and powerful.  

A week ago, I took myself back into the rooms of AA and found myself reciting the steps and reading aloud How It Works.  I sat in those musty community rooms that smelled of cigarette smoke, and humbly listened to folks who have figured out some important things that I still haven’t. It felt both familiar and completely new.

I felt that awkward camaraderie you experience when you don’t know anyone sat there alongside you except that they are hugely flawed, just like you, and are trying to sort their shit out, just like you.

I felt angry at myself for still being a hot mess, while feeling compassion for the others there, who were/are also in that hot mess space like me, where it all seems overwhelming and at times impossible and that we all know, at the core of our being, that we don’t deserve another chance to get it right.

Those rooms are where I need to be, no matter how utterly soul crushing it is to admit it to you and to myself.

No, I haven’t gone back out and used drugs. My clean date of 24.12.08 still stands for that.  

But, then again, I’m not living in sobriety either.

And the bit that’s not clean/sober is as unmanageable as ever.

It may look very different than the baggie binges of years ago, but it is still the same distorted thinking, fubar-ed acting and reacting, lack of coping skills, and general madness that almost cost me everything.  It crept up slowly and I turned a blind eye to it until I’ve now found myself in a place where it is no longer possible to ignore it.

Alcoholics Anonymous refers to a “dry drunk”. That “recovery purgatory” where you’ve stopped with the alcohol/drugs (which is a good thing), but you “haven’t dealt with the underlying emotional baggage that gave birth to your addiction(s)” (which is a bad thing).  

It is “when one abstains from drugs/alcohol, but is still grappling with the emotional and psychological maladies that may have fueled their addiction to begin with, and continues to have a stranglehold on their psyche.”

The big book of AA warns of this syndrome when your regularly find yourself “restless, irritable, and discontented”.  Oh, hello self.

It has taken me quite some time to realise (rather, to admit) that my still being an addict is what underpins all that I’ve so far chalked up to mid-life crisis or existential angst or the search to fill a god-shaped hole.

What makes this realisation different from the way I felt the discontent last year, or the year before that, or the one before that, is that the consequences of my spiritual malaise have gotten out of hand.

Slowly, incrementally, substantially. 

It doesn’t take a drug or a drink to wreck yourself.

Not being able to “live life on life’s terms” also shows up in binge eating, constant cravings, compulsive overspending, severe melancholy, a heavy debt load, and the daily strain of trying to keep all the spinning plates in the air.

At least, that’s how the plates are spinning (and some are falling) for me.

It took having my liver enzymes come back at 11x over the highest end of normal and other blood test results circled in red for being way out of range. It took the nice doctor telling me that I now have significant liver disease, that my arteries are as stiff of those of an 80-year old, and that the extra weight is doing much more damage than just causing too many aches and pains for someone my age.

It took an honest assessment of the debt load I am carrying with credit cards and personal loans, an ungodly number (over which I feel way too much shame to even consider typing here) to begin to see that situation as it really is. Despite this, I’m still not able to stop buying things.

I wanted to think that I had this recovery business in the bag. I told myself and others that what I was experiencing was simply the discontent of having to deal with getting older and fatter and stiffer, just the normal emotional pangs that happen when you round the corner past 50.

I wanted to think that since my proper addictions to cocaine and benzos had previously been “cured”, that I needn’t call all these other unhealthy coping mechanisms, or lack of, addictions as well.   

AA literature says that “[addiction] instills a taste for immediate relief” and that “one of the most common attitudes or observable behaviours of people with addiction is poor impulse control and impatience. We tend to do what we want, when we want, with little regard for self-harm…”

I’ve heard it said that once you sober up a drunk horse thief, you’ve only got yourself a sober horse thief. It is the proverbial idea that you can put lipstick on a pig, but it is still a pig.

And I guess, with humility and much personal shame, I am the sober horse thief, the lipstick wearing pig, who has tried in too many ways to prove that I am now both normal and fixed, a paragon of happy wellness, when obviously, I’m not.

I’ve learned enough to know that most of addiction is hidden underneath the surface. The obvious bits that you see, the drugs, the alcohol, that what appears to be the problem, is really only the symptom. The greater part that isn’t visible is that huge mass of emotional turmoil and old traumas and unhealthy behaviours.

So, for me, this is a watershed moment, of really truly realising that recovery has to be an active, ongoing, endeavour and that to sit back and consider myself above it is the very thing that has put me back beneath it.

So that’s where I’ll have to start.

Admitting that my eating and my spending are out of control, that I am powerless over using them as emotional crutches to avoid the feelings swirling around in the river of old traumatic shit underneath the surface, and that I’ve gotten myself into an unmanageable mess because of it.

This is when I, with the utmost of sincerity and honesty, need to face that hurdle of coming to believe that a source greater than myself can restore me to sanity.

What I’ve done so far hasn’t worked. All the attempts I’ve made to manage it by myself have failed. And it has gotten bad enough, that I need to be teachable, humble, open.  

With my butt in a chair, in meeting after meeting, listening and learning and recovering.

Again.

[til-i-feel-whole-again]

heart like a stone

I’m posting this here just as I posted it on my main tumblr, in case you are one of the very few people who follow me both places. Otherwise it doesn’t matter a rat’s ass. I just didn’t want to reblog it because I’d like to start fresh here writing about this whole recovery journey. One more time. I didn’t want to turn my main tumblr into a spirituality, soul, 12-step, addiction, recovery jamboree; being compartmentalised is really the way to go for now. It also enables me to embrace some of that rigorous honesty that I’m sorely in need of. 

Relapse sucks!

~

Ok, bear with me. I want to chat a moment about addiction and relapse and about how, for me, the drug of choice is the symptom, not the disease.

It’s been a hot minute since the days when I fell nose first into the shiny happy fishscale and was a more than willing partaker in the weeks’ long halcyon glow of the bottomless bottles of 4-bars obtained on the daily from a long list of pill doctors. Despite my own proclivity toward self-destruction, I’ve been able to string together, a day at a time, a chunk of clean time.

A long time ago, I got to that point of devastation and despair, of being on the verge of death, that I knew I had to get real help and I accepted an outstretched hand. It made all the difference, did what two trips to rehab didn’t, and I was able to put down the coke and the pills.

In fact, it has been eight years, eight months and some odd days.

Clean time that I’m very proud of.

And thinking back on it, I suppose I got that 8, 8, and some odd mostly by the seat of my pants without any real plan on how to make it happen or how to make it stick.  Maybe 5% rehab, 20% 12-step meetings, 35% the geographical cure and 40% the love and support of a wonderful partner, best friend, unintentional sponsor, confessor and all around fabulous fella. (A job he didn’t sign up for, but stepped into by default because he is that kind of a good man.)

I got clean in 2008 and moved to Oz in 2010. When I got here, I attended a handful of meetings, but ultimately decided that I shouldn’t go. My reasoning, at the time, was that I was in a new country with no idea of how to find drugs, who to talk to or where to go, and I didn’t want to find out by rubbing elbows with other addicts at NA. It was a cynical view to be sure, but I’d learned the hard way back in Texas that not everyone in 12-step meetings is clean and/or sober or wanting to stay that way.

There was also the fairy tale that I told myself about being a new me in a new country with infinite possibility before me and none of the trauma and drama inside me to hold me back. As if.

Staying clean here wasn’t an issue for me. I had cravings and still had shit going on in my life, but I had a wonderful listener in my husband and I stayed pretty damned honest and we dealt with things as they arose and I stayed clean.  

So much so that I quit referring to myself as an addict or even as a recovering addict.

I mean, why not? I felt like I’d turned a corner and I convinced myself that my previous years of addiction had been down to shitty life circumstances, which no longer existed, and since I’d changed everything else about my life, that the pall of addiction had also been removed.

In all the joy and happiness of a new life in a new place, with a new job and a new home and a loving partner, I thought I could say that my recovery achievement had been unlocked.

Except the fact that addiction is a sneaky bastard. As they say, cunning, baffling and powerful.  

A week ago, I took myself back into the rooms of AA and found myself reciting the steps and reading aloud How It Works.  I sat in those musty community rooms that smelled of cigarette smoke, and humbly listened to folks who have figured out some important things that I still haven’t. It felt both familiar and completely new.

I felt that awkward camaraderie you experience when you don’t know anyone sat there alongside you except that they are hugely flawed, just like you, and are trying to sort their shit out, just like you.

I felt angry at myself for still being a hot mess, while feeling compassion for the others there, who were/are also in that hot mess space like me, where it all seems overwhelming and at times impossible and that we all know, at the core of our being, that we don’t deserve another chance to get it right.

Those rooms are where I need to be, no matter how utterly soul crushing it is to admit it to you and to myself.

No, I haven’t gone back out and used coke or benzos. My clean date of 24.12.08 still stands for that.  

But, then again, I’m not living in sobriety either.

And the bit that’s not clean/sober is as unmanageable as ever.

It may look very different than the baggie binges of years ago, but it is still the same distorted thinking, fubar-ed acting and reacting, lack of coping skills, and general madness that almost cost me everything.  It crept up slowly and I turned a blind eye to it until I’ve now found myself in a place where it is no longer possible to ignore it.

Alcoholics Anonymous refers to a “dry drunk”. That “recovery purgatory” where you’ve stopped with the alcohol/drugs (which is a good thing), but you “haven’t dealt with the underlying emotional baggage that gave birth to your addiction(s)” (which is a bad thing).  

It is “when one abstains from drugs/alcohol, but is still grappling with the emotional and psychological maladies that may have fueled their addiction to begin with, and continues to have a stranglehold on their psyche.”

The big book of AA warns of this syndrome when your regularly find yourself “restless, irritable, and discontented”.  Oh, hello self.

It has taken me quite some time to realise (rather, to admit) that my still being an addict is what underpins all that I’ve so far chalked up to mid-life crisis or existential angst or the search to fill a god-shaped hole.

What makes this realisation different from the way I felt the discontent last year, or the year before that, or the one before that, is that the consequences of my spiritual malaise have gotten out of hand.

Slowly, incrementally, substantially.

It doesn’t take a drug or a drink to wreck yourself.

Not being able to “live life on life’s terms” also shows up in binge eating, constant cravings, compulsive overspending, severe melancholy, a heavy debt load, and the daily strain of trying to keep all the spinning plates in the air.

At least, that’s how the plates are spinning (and some are falling) for me.

It took having my liver enzymes come back at 11x over the highest end of normal and other blood test results circled in red for being way out of range. It took the nice doctor telling me that I now have significant liver disease, that my arteries are as stiff of those of an 80-year old, and that the extra weight is doing much more damage than just causing too many aches and pains for someone my age.

It took an honest assessment of the debt load I am carrying with credit cards and personal loans, an ungodly number (over which I feel way too much shame to even consider typing here) to begin to see that situation as it really is. Despite this, I’m still not able to stop buying things.

I wanted to think that I had this recovery business in the bag. I told myself and others that what I was experiencing was simply the discontent of having to deal with getting older and fatter and stiffer, just the normal emotional pangs that happen when you round the corner past 50.

I wanted to think that since my proper addictions to cocaine and benzos had previously been “cured”, that I needn’t call all these other unhealthy coping mechanisms, or lack of, addictions as well.  

AA literature says that “[addiction] instills a taste for immediate relief” and that “one of the most common attitudes or observable behaviours of people with addiction is poor impulse control and impatience. We tend to do what we want, when we want, with little regard for self-harm…”

I’ve heard it said that once you sober up a drunk horse thief, you’ve only got yourself a sober horse thief. It is the proverbial idea that you can put lipstick on a pig, but it is still a pig.

And I guess, with humility and much personal shame, I am the sober horse thief, the lipstick wearing pig, who has tried in too many ways to prove that I am now both normal and fixed, a paragon of happy wellness, when obviously, I’m not.

I’ve learned enough to know that most of addiction is hidden underneath the surface. The obvious bits that you see, the drugs, the alcohol, that what appears to be the problem, is really only the symptom. The greater part that isn’t visible is that huge mass of emotional turmoil and old traumas and unhealthy behaviours.

So, for me, this is a watershed moment, of really truly realising that recovery has to be an active, ongoing, endeavour and that to sit back and consider myself above it is the very thing that has put me back beneath it.

So that’s where I’ll have to start.

Admitting that my eating and my spending are out of control, that I am powerless over using them as emotional crutches to avoid the feelings swirling around in the river of old traumatic shit underneath the surface, and that I’ve gotten myself into an unmanageable mess because of it.

This is when I, with the utmost of sincerity and honesty, need to face that hurdle of coming to believe that a source greater than myself can restore me to sanity.

What I’ve done so far hasn’t worked. All the attempts I’ve made to manage it by myself have failed. And it has gotten bad enough, that I need to be teachable, humble, open.  

With my butt in a chair, in meeting after meeting, listening and learning and recovering.

Again.