Sadness, Anger or Disgust ...

The conversation started easily enough, "What a gorgeous day in Maine"

We were smiling at each other talking about the beauty of our State, the weather and the blueness of the sky and then ... "Journey Magazine amplifies hope about recovering from addiction"

Gone was the smile.

Gone was easy conversation.

The look in his eyes went very pleasant to dark in a nano-second.

"You can't leave that here" was his response.

My "how about if I just leave one for you to read" was met with "Don't bother" and he turned away from me and left me standing in the room by myself holding my magazines.

I've only had 2 hard "No you can't leave that magazine here" responses when bringing it around to local businesses in the last 3 years. The first one he said "Those aren't our kind of people" but there didn't seem to be any emotion tied to it that I noticed.

I didn't "feel" his no - just judgment and it slid right off me (and honestly I felt bad for him because he has no awareness of how amazing 'those' people are) ... but maybe someday he will.

Not like this 2nd no.

It's been a few days now since that conversation and I've repeatedly had to throw out every storyline that started in my head as I tried to analyze that emotion.

The strong emotions I've witnessed tied to this conversation about addiction are the extremes - sadness, anger and disgust - and on a human face they can look very, very different but I do sometimes "feel" that look.

Looks I've experienced in the past:

• Sadness - the look on my sister's face when, after rehab, I was drunk again
• Anger - the look on my boyfriend's face when I didn't come home for days at a time
• Disgust - the look on a strangers face when she saw me drinking a Budweiser very early on Sunday morning after coming out of the alley I had been sleeping in

These raw emotions can be projected externally and can have sticking power to me - if I let them. They can start storylines in my head that start a lie and can spiral into sentences that have the words like "never", "forever" and "always" in them.

• I'll never be ____________
• I will feel ________________ forever
• I'll always be __________________

Sentences that make my world and the possibilities in my world very very small.

Sentences that eventually could lead me to believing the lies.

Sentences that lead me to believe a drink is a solution to the emotion that gets generated when I start believing that lie.

But not that day.

That day, I went back to this bench and sat, breathed, prayed and wrote -- a habit that started during early covid lockdown for me and has served me well.

That day I found some solace and some cleansing from sitting there in the sun, on a gorgeous day, in the wind, letting those emotions from another unstick themselves from me.

I'll probably never know what that emotion was for him but for me it was a valuable reflective experience.

Grateful.