Life By Me: from Lifebyme.com


This is a little piece about change which I wrote for the amazing site LIFE BY ME. It's running over at their site Lifebyme.com as today's story. LIFE BY ME is the brainchild of Sophie Chiche, who I find massively inspiring. Thanks for reading. Nick  
CHANGE
Life for me is all about the capacity for change. I believe that no matter how tight a corner we find ourselves stuck in, there’s always a way to step out of that reality and reset the tape counter of who we are back to zero.
As a child, I used to fear change and took badly to moving house, changing schools, my father going away on business trips, or my mother being sick in bed for a few days.
I was scared all the time of something happening to my family, of every ache or pain, of boarding a plane that might crash. That fear, which grew as I grew, set me up pretty nicely for addiction.
When I had my first drink, at the age of 14, my fear instantly evaporated.What liberation, I thought, and had another drink. But the next morning, the fear was back. My first thought was, I have to drink again. And so began a descent into alcoholism, which climaxed when I was 24.
Once sober, I took up swimming at night after work. My logic was that there were no tempting glasses of wine while I was swimming disciplined lengths up and down in a community pool. I wanted my hands to be busy, and they found their work pushing through water.
During those night swims, I mentally and physically built the foundations of my sobriety. I came to know the simple spiritual joy of becoming healthy again. I began to re-think change as something beautiful, a supreme gift, and to un-think it as the epicentre of fear.
Stopping drinking led me to leave an uninspiring job, break from destructive friends, and return to college to study journalism. When I felt low, it seemed that everything I had been was gone. But then I’d remind myself that it was me who’d chosen to start over. I would meditate on that as I swam and swam.
Since then, across 17 years of sobriety, there have been many further changes. Some I chose, and some were chosen for me. Even if I feared certain changes as they came into sight, every time I reset my tape counter back to zero, I learned that no matter where we are in our lives, whether we’re young or old, stuck severely or just uncomfortably, there’s always the capacity for bold and beautiful change.
Nick Johnstone

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