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the map of the road to self-acceptance seems so simple to be that it does not need to be said more than once. but i know that i need to hear things more than once, perhaps more than twice or even more than ten or twenty times before they finally sink in, after all, i am stubborn and tend to dismiss ideas that i do not understand.
anyhow, here i sit starting at a blinking cursor, trying to come up with an eloquent, pithy blog about the path to self-acceptance and not doing very well. just about everything i have learned about accepting myself has come from the program that saved my life. first i had to come to grips with the concept of suffering from a fatal, incurable disease, whose apparent symptoms involve a single behavior -- using drugs. i know today that the disease of addiction actually displays more than a single symptom for me and the further away i get from my last use, the less important it seems to be. after all, i have enough other damage in my life to address these days and almost all of it comes from the disease of addiction and the set of behaviors i developed over the course of my getting and using and finding the ways and means to get more.
i also have to accept, that at least for me, using is always an option. that being said, it is not an option i want to choose today. so that leads me back to the whole road to self-acceptance gig. the only way i can get through today without using is to come to accept myself as i am, right here , right now and how do i do that. i show up at a meeting on a fairly regular basis, so i can see that i am not some unique piece of work and accept that there are others who see life through the same perspective. i have to tell the truth, sometimes that means puking what i am feeling all over the table, sometimes it means sharing my inventory with my sponsor and sometimes it means that i share what is going on with those i have come to love and trust. i did not understand either love or trust when i walked into the rooms and hence i almost missed the chance to move beyond my narrow view of the world. but most of all i MUST work steps consistently and with the same energy and fervor as when i was out to score. after all what i am scoring today is worth a whole lot more and lasts a whole of a hell longer. and you know what i am scoring today? a new and different way to live and the chance to learn to accept and love myself just as i am right now!
∞ DT ∞