giving and giving up

In the last post, I explained that I am not Catholic but somehow I am the most Catholic of my family. I like church, i like the rosary, i like the hymns....etc...theres a lot of comfort i find in catholicism. i have considered getting baptized but have not gone forward with it yet. a few years ago i read an article in reader's digest about what people give up for lent. the article though discussed not just the idea of sacrifice but also the idea of being pro-active. its jist was that lent was a chance not just to give things up but perhaps to do things that you had never done before. one man decided to visit people in nursing homes for lent as a way to give something rather than give up something. i dont usually talk about what i give up for lent because as in most things, its private to me...i dont want to open the door for discussion or scrutiny or whatever may come with talking about it. but i always do something. this in year in continuing on, i decide to take the ideas that i had read and be proactive about my life during this time. like i said at new year's i've already made my resolutions and many of those involve items that i may have given up for lent in the past. i'm giving up self-sabotage for lent. anyone reading who says what is she talking about....knows exactly what i'm talking about...maybe not what i do but what you do...its the minute you get close to a goal, only to stop and pretend you dont want it anymore...its losing a pound and rewarding yourself with cake, its letting people treat you like shit because somewhere your inner voice said you deserve it. its treating other people like shit because you cant take how bad you feel about yourself. much of what got me to where i was and where i am now is the voice inside my head. there was a time in my life where i was surrounded by alot of negative people who used their bad self-esteem to confirm my bad self-esteem. we become who we surround ourselves with. i have eliminated many of those people from my life, not all of them but most. and the longer i know people, the more i know what to keep from them or share. in recovery they talk about getting honest...getting honest with other people but also getting honest with yourself. while i may not be in recovery for many of the typical issues people think of needing 12 step programs for, i am in recovery for many other things, things you dont know about and things you may come to find out about here. self-sabotage doesnt allow you to be honest with yourself. its the voice that gives you permission to derail yourself from your goals, from what you want with whatever incentive it needs to get you away from it...booze, food, love, unworthiness, lies, truth. sometimes self sabotage gives you what you want by you treating other people shitty or better than or whatever...there are lots of words i dont like to use (for a number of reasons) but its the projection of our own wants and needs and our belief that we are unworthy of having those needs met. i dont like to use the word projection but i know thats part of the ideal that i am giving up. i think internally i have always been a person that believed if i gave what a person needed then i would get back what i needed. but the problem was that i didnt give myself what i needed in order to get back what i needed from me. so for 40 days i am going to give it a shot and with that comes honesty and sticking up for myself and even distancing from things and people i dont know how else to protect myself and my goals from. from now till then, who knows what will fill up my easter basket.