Blog entry for:

last night i shared some stuff in a meeting where i very rarely share. not that i am afraid to share as a general rule, but this is one of the meetings i attended while deciding if i was really a member or not. this meeting has members who happened to be there when i was so full of bullshit about my life, recovery and the program in general, that i find myself hesitant to share at all. after all, what will those people think of me today, several days down the road, still struggling with this whole recovery gig. nevertheless, i did share about how some days the ONLY thing that keeps me clean is my current service commitment. i know i shared what i did because another member doubted the depth of his recovery as he approaches his one year anniversary and did not believe that he was recovering because the only thing that kept him clean was the 350 or so days he had accumulated. so when i sat down this morning to read and saw those words on the page i had to flash back to the period of time before i accepted myself as a member.
all of my life, i had felt like an outsider, not only did i not belong to anything, there was nothing that i wanted to belong to. i kept thinking about the old groucho marx quote, "I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member," after all if their standards were so low that they would accept me...
well i know today that it is not about standards and i do meet the only requirement for membership -- i have the desire to stop using today and i finally got that desire after many months of sampling recovery. i look around to those i see in the rooms today and often wonder how many of them are feeling the way i did for those seven months of attending but never belonging, after all i did not have the desire to ever get and stay clean during those days.
so do i belong today? without a doubt. can i continue to be a member? well that is up to me! now that my silence has been broken, my step has been finished, and i am ready to tolerate what i find unacceptable in those relationships that are still less than healthy, i think i have a good chance of being a member tomorrow too!
BTW -- the answer is to my private query is no. justifications and rationalizations prevent some of us from remembering our commitments to ourselves. and the disease of addiction often prevents us from seeing how we are destroying ourselves and those with whom we have built relationships. it is what it is!
∞ DT ∞