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i have come to believe that i can survive whatever i am going through to continue on in my recovery. as i start to write this, i am struck about how crazy i can be. this morning i woke up and there were two songs rolling around in my brain, with totally different messages. one was about living in the here and now and taking all that i could from life, because in no time at all, Spring will turn to Fall, the other, about a steel town in Pennsylvania, where the promise of the American dream had been breached, and there was nothing left. the fact that two, diametrically opposed songs could be occupying my conscious mind at the same time, says a lot about who i am, who i was and who i am becoming. dark and cynical, can give away to hopeful and optimistic. this transformation may be the result of the my work, but there is far more going on here, than the volumes of writing i have done, since the day i got clean, the day i finally accepted recovery was the path for me, and the day i woke and finally decided to be present for my life, in the fVcking here and now. i separate out those three events for a reason. that reason, is because each one, marks a start of a new phase in my life and each one was the result of something another addicted suggested i do, if i wanted what they had. the ironic part, is that each was the result of a simple suggestion, and although i heard each suggestion, many times before i finally adopted them, i resisted, i hemmed i hawed and did everything i could do,, to prevent making those three decisions, because even after some time clean, i WANT TO BE UNIQUE! as i sit here on Friday morning, i can see why Tuesday night created such a strong emotional reaction in me. the members who usually share recovery, spouted off bumper stickers, and the bumper sticker addicts, actually shared about life in recovery. that paradigm shift, upsets the little bit of me, that wants to think, that somehow i am different and that one day, i will be able to…
thinking about being the same, sharing the same insanity, at least on some level, makes me want to scream, after all, all my life the message was that i was different and unique. most of my teenage angst was about being a non-conformist and finding others who non-conformed in a similar manner. active addiction drove that message home, especially once i realized that i had to have something on board, every single day of my life, NO MATTER WHAT! when i finally started to listen, somewhere between my clean date and my arrival in recovery, i heard that almost every member in the room was in that state as well. what i thought made me different, actually qualified me for recovery and once that dam had been broken, well all hell broke loose, and here i sit many days later, thinking about the three seminal events in my recovery career. i have come to find that i can have FAITH in the recovery process, and that when i step back and let the world spin as it will, i am certainly much better off. the other part, the doom and gloom guy, is still here and is still expressing himself today. he is the one that focuses on the promise that my fellowship offers me, and says if FREEDOM from active addiction is all that i am promised, why should i bother, after all, with just one sumthin&39;, sumthin' i can be so much better and the best part is that i can do it again and again and again, to get the exact same results, and the work the get the means will not be that much at all, a phone call, a quick trip, giving up a little piece to disguise what i am doing and the next thing i know, i have returned to the life that once was so attractive to me. yes and with it all the drabness that i lived in as well. no thank you very much. so others have told me that i write and share about these scenarios far too freely, after all i am up on their fVckin pedestal because i am one of the long term members of the local fellowship and am supposed to be so much more than all about the thoughts of using and the insanity that rolls around in my head. to those who have said or thought that, i say a hearty FO! how can someone at the very start of their journey get any HOPE, if those of us who have time do not give them a place to see how similar we are. yes i have bumper sticker recovery and share all about the lightness and sunshine, but that is not who i am, i am dark and cynical and although that has been diminished, i sincerely doubt that it will ever be removed and i am grateful for that. in this fellowship, i may not be unique, but as a person i am certainly an individual, and my greatest fear when i started this whole process, was that i was going to lose that individuality. that fear kept me apart and asleep for a long time and today i am grateful that i KNOW that the STEPS do not make me any less of an individual, they just make me a better version of the man who was down on his knees in pain, when he arrived and did not even realize how bad he had been crushed.
it is a good day to be clean and even a better day to head on out and get paid for what i like to do.

∞ DT ∞