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my FAITH, STRENGTH, and HOPE comes from addicts sharing their recovery...
well, this morning has already turned out to be more than interesting. i have a so-called quick project of cleaning up the work of another developer. once i looked at it i see what a fVcking lazy developer he really was, and his work sucks and is full of shortcuts that are no longer acceptable to web browsers today. since i have taken over a bunch of his websites, he will be providing me an income stream for quite a while and the fix i do this morning for free, will certainly lead to more paid work in the future.
my little piece of running technology that i sent back for their crack fix, pay us $79 to change the battery or buy a new one for $200, is languishing somewhere in Kansas waiting to be taken out of its box. i called the main vein support, so possibly someone will actually look at my watch and i might get it moving through the process. not that i am lacking any patience in this matter ;).
how does any of that have anything with me finding a source of ESH, in this rowdy fellowship that i have come home to? that my friends is a story worth telling, and as i have the morning set before me, i do believe i will go into it.
a bit of background, in case you missed it. i was not a willing participant in my recovery. due to my inability to stay clean, regardless of the consequences, i was basically sentenced to recovery with the explicit threat being, IF I COULD NOT STAY CLEAN, I WOULD GO TO PRISON. whether that was a bluff or not, i never had to find out. anyhow, everyone that wanted me to stop using, my probation officer, my addiction counselor and my psychiatrist insisted that IF i wanted to stop using i HAD to attend the fellowship of AA, anything else would doom me to a return to using. all the other choices available to me, all came from this fellowship, and only this fellowship had the long-term recovery an person like me NEEDED to get clean and stay clean. i was told that attending other fellowships was fine, BUT i NEEDED to stay in AA as they were the only ‘proven’ path to long term recovery.
being in a compliant state, off i marched, pissed off about being forced to go anywhere, much less a place where i knew from the start i was going to have issues. somewhere along the away in those first six months, recovery started to take hold in me, and i lost the desire to use. it is true that i was an addict-alcoholic. it was true, that i attended three fellowships, but of the other two, only one gave me any identification. it is also true, that after working the 12 steps and getting a year clean, i was starting to slip away from AA. i was tiring of having to round-off my square corners to fit. i never got what alcoholism was all about, much less why in the world anyone would limit their use of mind and mood altering substances to one such limited one, i mean there are much better methods and substances available, to achieve the effect of escaping reality. more and more i was dissatisfied where my recovery, such as it was, was going, and because i had attended on a regular basis, another fellowship, i was in the right place at the right time: GREELEY COLORADO, OCTOBER 1998! at that convention, i finally heard the solution to my problem. i finally heard why i was having trouble where i was. i finally heard what they had been trying to tell me for the past 13 months, that i was an an addict PERIOD, no hyphen or qualifier required. it still took another 6 months or so, before i finished moving my recovery over to my new, permanent home, as i was (and still am) shall we say, more than a bit resistant to change. my isolation ended that day in October, and finally i had the model of recovery, that has become my life. by the way, as well-intentioned as those early influences were in my life in recovery, they were flat-out wrong. their insistence that the only fellowship where long-term recovery was AA nearly killed me, and today, i share about that for that reason. those members did their best, i was the problem. i was unable to identify and reach a place of empathy with those recovering alcoholics.
toady, i get everything i need from a single fellowship. here i find others just like me, who can teach me and guide me through the maze of life in active recovery. here i have a model of a recovering addict. here i have literature written by a committee of people just like me, that speaks to me without translation. here i fit without having to alter myself, my language or my experience. all in all, here i find all that i need to have the desire to stay clean today and recover. here i find the connection i NEED to allow myself to grow and here i find the gratitude for another day clean. yes that other fellowship brought me to this one, and i am grateful for that, AND I WILL NEVER LET THAT MISINFORMATION BE SPREAD BY OTHERS, no matter how well-intentioned, there is long term recovery as well as the SOLUTION for people like me, with to alterations required, in my home.

∞ DT ∞