Blog entry for:

can be the beginning of a lifelong relationship.
i took a break from writing this, to read a letter from a a sponsee, who has struggled staying clean across the course of our relationship. one of the question he asked was about how one can continue to surrender, day after day, minute by minute, one day at a time? it is a question that i ask myself, over and over again, HOW DO I DO THIS? it is true that i understand the deleterious effect that addiction has on my life. it is also true,,m that the longer i stay clean, the more trappings of a normal life i seem to accumulate. and the most disturbing fact of life for me, is the longer i stay clean, the less horrible life in active addiction seemed to be and the more powerful i feel over substances, after all, it has been years since i last chose to use.
all from a single question and the daily reading.
extending the metaphor about love and infatuation, could be fun, but as i consider it, i believe it is complete and needs no more comment from me. what i am thinking is how to tell my sponsee, how i surrender day after day, minute after minute, when i am most clueless about how i do it myself? seriously, it i have done it so much, and so often, that most of the time, it happens in the background, with little or no conscious effort from me. as i am smack dab in the middle of a step that requires a surrender, conscious and without reservations, it is probably a good place to pause and consider how this state, my daily surrender, came to be and what it means for me today.
way back when, in those early days of my recovery, my sponse, who did not fire me after he found out that i was less than diligent about staying clean across the course of our relationship to date, told me that IF i wanted what he had, i HAD to do what he DID! he told me, that i would NE$ED to get up every morning and admit to myself that i was an addict, that i was powerless over addiction and ask for the power to stay clean today. i paraphrase, because he was and still is following a different path, but the point is, what he told me, stuck. i had to use certain terms and wash any loopholes out of that admission. so terms like ‘some sort of’, and ‘addicted to’, had to go, and i had to own what i was and what state that made my life. as tough as that was to swallow, i was desperate to stay out of prison, so i took direction and did as i was told, even to the point of borrowing his concept of a HIGHER POWER and his method of fostering my contact with that POWER., it worked, in fact it worked so well, that as i began my transition from substances to addiction, i believed i could do this gig without any human intervention and became quiet convinced that i had this stuff down, another year or so and i would no longer need to do this, as i would be off of paper and once a again a citizen. paying for and being in the same room as a friend doing drugs, brought me to my knees, and i was miles and miles away from the program and the people who had helped me achieve that state. i got so scared, that i recommitted to a program, got a new sponsor in the program that has become my life, and surrendered once again to the fact that i am an addict and i am powerless over addiction. that level of surrender continues to this day, and as i think about it, it is because i have done it so often, that i have become habituated to doing so. i have become addicted to surrendering to my addiction :).
when it come to once again, deepening that surrender and tolerating and accepting that change is necessary for me to become the person i have always wanted to be, i NEED to remind myself, of that day in September, when i first admitted that i was beat up enough to at least crack open my closed mind enough to ask someone, HOW they did it and now that i think about, their answer was the same, they consciously surrendered daily and over time it became part of them, as it has for me.
surrendering to the conscience of the POWER that fuels my recovery, does not quite fit into my current scheme of things, but there is an opportunity to allow my current scheme of things, divine and mundane,m to grow a bit as i progress through my step work and guide others through theirs'. so off to the showers and into doing what i need to get done today.

∞ DT ∞