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the extent of suffering brought by my active addiction, there is ALWAYS some denial about how far i can go to relieve that suffering and if abstinence and recovery is an actual blessing. i can say though, living a life rooted in active recovery has done a whole lot more than keep me clean, and i guess if you look at the damage done to myself, my family, society and the very few friends i had left, one could certainly say that finding a path to who i am today, is certainly blessing-like.
the life of a recovering addict may not be a “blessing,” especially in early recovery. in fact , for me, it flat out sucked! my recovery was FEAR based of quite some time. first, FEAR of the legal consequences of relapse. was that a rational FEAR? turns out that it was not, but at the time, it seemed very rational to me. recovery certainly got the justice system out of my life and has kept it out of my life, and yes, that is a blessing, had i not been prosecuted for my part in the criminal world, i would have continued to use, just as i always did, unabated and perhaps to the final ends.
just because i got off paper, my FEAR-based recovery program did not end. i then lived in abject FEAR of relapse and losing all that i had accumulated and that FEAR colored all that i did, specifically my meeting attendance, my service efforts and yes my step work. i threw myself into these recovery activities with a gusto i once reserved for finding and getting, and although i was always afraid of relapse, perhaps one could see that as a “blessing” of sorts, that behavior solidified what was a foreign concepts into habits of the daily kind, and habits i still engage in, today.
living in FEAR gets tiresome and exhausting and somewhere down the line, my FEAR turned to HOPE, as i grew more comfortable with my life in recovery. not having to face the “relapse boogie-man” every waking moment of every waking day, certainly was a blessing. FEAR morphed into the HOPE that IF i was diligent about living a program, i would stay clean. once i accepted that i was an addict and developed the HOPE that this recovery gig would do more than keep me clean, i could learn how to be okay in my own skin and actually learn how to pronounce anonymous correctly.
days, weeks, months and years of HOPE finally became FAITH, that if i lived this program, to the best of my ability, i could continue to make the choice to stay clean, day after day. that is where i am at today, FAITH in the program, keeps me clean and provides me the means to be better at all i do, socially, intellectually, emotionally and spiritually. had i known then, what i know today, i might have still chosen to walk this path, but of that i cannot be certain, as i see many of my peers, struggling on the edge of recovery and filing in and out of the doors over and over again. many of them have received a life better than what they knew, but when things got too different, made the choice to go out and use. hopefully they too, will find the rooms with some sanity relatively intact and some of their own teeth left in their head. my FAITH is based on the fact that once i let go of what i thought i knew, i got far more than i ever imagined, so in the long run, addiction has morphed from a curse and the bane of my existence, into my reason to do what i do, every single day, stay clean, live a program and choose to do the next right thing.

∞ DT ∞