I woke up hung over. My eyes are sensitive to light and they hurt. I am nauseous and coffee is only making it worse. My head feels so heavy and it is throbbing. I do not know why I put myself through this.  I do enjoy an occasional drink, but this hangover is not from over-indulging in alcohol.  This hangover was from an over-indulgence of self-pity.

Yesterday was a perfect day. The Saturday of Labor day weekend. It was a day that had no agenda. It was my favorite kind of day, where I did a little of everything but still a lot of nothing. All the kids were gone doing their own thing giving my husband and I leisurely shopped for an area rug and had went out for a simple dinner.  The night made complete, when I had total domain over the television, my dogs snoozing by my feet and my husband snoozing in the chair beside me, my life felt complete.

As I headed for bed, I paused on the landing of the stairs and looked at the closed doors to my children’s bedrooms. The quiet of those empty rooms and the snoring chorus of tired dogs and my overworked husband filled me with a sense of despair. It was not bedtime, but party-time with loneliness.

We partied by wallowing in sadness and over-indulging in self-pity. We listen to songs of heartbreak and wrote poems of sorrow. We cried a river of tears as we reminisced about the good old days when life was filled with people and activity. We laughed at how I complained then about my life being filled with so much noise and how I complain now that it is too quiet. All night long we consumed emotions. We mixed anger with fear and worked up to mixing guilt with shame. Soon I was intoxicated and unable to see straight. My good life became a blur under the influence of these emotions. My foreboding outlook impaired my judgment and I allowed Loneliness to invite Depression and Regret to the pity-party. I finally passed out from exhaustion in the early morning hours.

I do not mean to make light of addicts and their struggle. I have witnessed loved ones who have struggled with addictions and have seen the havoc it created. I have had a few alcoholic hangovers and I can attest that the way I feel this morning resembles that.   It leaves me to wonder if I could be a recovering addict of my self-pity. The transformation I have gone through is actually recovery of the addiction to my emotions and their delusional filter. I would allow my emotions to be felt in the extreme and all of my rational thoughts would go out the window.  Last night the realization hit me that those bedrooms will soon be empty for good as each of my remaining children leave the nest. I focused on the fear of the unknown future and off the wagon I went and into my addiction of self-pity.

Change, whether good or bad, is going to happen. It upheavals my life and I have to readjust myself to make room for it. In my research I have heard over and over that the mind can only focus on the future or remember the past. Last night my mind thought my future looked lonely because I am losing my purpose and therefore, my identity of what I have been for over twenty-five years. These are healthy emotions and I need to express them, just as I would have an occasional drink, but I took it to the extreme and went overboard.

The irony of this whole situation is that I am battling my loneliness in my quiet time, the time where I sit “alone” and contemplate life’s lessons. It is where I quiet the mind and feed my soul. What is loneliness to the mind is solitude to the soul. The soul drinks in the nourishment it finds in solitude and detoxes my mind of its negativity. It is the best cure for an emotional hangover.