I feel like a failure because I'm not GAL. I don't want a hobby and I don't want to spend time with other people.
Just like everyone else after BD! I cried all the way to work, couldn't hardly get anything done at work, cried all the way home and then just wanted to curl up in a ball in the corner of my room with the door closed. That's what I WANTED to do. What I did instead was came here, posted, read, listened, followed the advice. I made myself GAL, I mean dragged myself out the door kicking and screaming. At first it was just going to the gym, I could do that with minimal fuss. Drive there, work out for an hour, drive home and be miserable some more. But then I started talking to people more and more, and adding other activities. I got back into building R/C planes and model cars. I took a painting class with my daughter. I reached out to old friends I hadn't seen in a long time and set up lunches and dinners with them. I went from hating GAL, to tolerating it, to liking it, to loving it. And at each of those steps I thought about my XW and my sitch progressively less.
I do volunteer work for Habitat for Humanity. Do you know how utterly daunting it is to build a house? To look at a weed-infested lot and say you're going to build a house on it? How in the world do you do it? One tiny piece at a time. You clear the lot. You pour the slab. You grab a piece of treated wood for your bottom plate. You mark the stud locations on it. You drill holes in it for the anchor bolts. You grab a stud and nail to it through the bottom plate. Then another stud and another, then the top plate, etc. etc. You build it one bit at a time. At first it seems impossible. But then you see progress, and you find yourself wanting to push harder. Months later, there's a complete house standing before you. Sometimes you look at it and you wonder how it happened.
That's what GAL is. It's this huge, daunting task that you need to do even though you don't want to. You don't go from zero to full GAL overnight. You start with a piece, and you build on it. Don't be paralyzed by fear, pick something small and do it. Maybe it's walking around the block every evening after work. Or learning to knit, or paint. Pick something and spend some time every day doing it. Don't think about all the reasons why you can't or won't or shouldn't, just make it happen. It's that hard, and that easy.
