Blog entry for:

that have infested my life, since long before i got HIGH that very first time, still hold me back from being the person i have always wanted to be. as dour and dreary as that may sound, there is a bit of HOPE in that little ditty of negativism. today i have choices, in fact many to counter those patterns and a lifestyle that fosters making choices that lead to healthy and far less destructive choices, in my life today. this is not, however, going to be a writing filled with rainbows, unicorns and sunny days, but a few may be sprinkled in as i go through the process.
well before i used that very first time, i felt dissatisfied with my life, who i was, my family's social standing and where i fit into my peer group. i felt alone and isolated, because i just did not “get” people and lied constantly about who i was and what my life experience was that point had been. the fantasy person i built up, slowly took over and was clashing with my reality more and more every day. i was certainly a boy without any direction and was quickly learning how to blend into any crowd, by being what they expected me to be. my only problem, was in my transformation, there were too many of my peers, who knew me and would be quite capable of destroying the persona i had crafted so carefully. i learned them that when i made the change,m i also had to leave my peers behind, if i was going to be successful in convincing my new peer group that i was one of them.
getting high did two things for me. it thrust me into the 70's counter-culture where not “fitting in” was expected and it relived me the burden of having to reconcile my fantasies with my realities. <BOOM> i was all of sudden in the perfect storm that led to twenty-five years or so of active addiction. i had the skill-set in place at the beginning, to become what i needed to become to sustain my using across those years and i was mostly content with the emptiness of that life.
when i was forced to go to my first meeting, it was time to don a new persona. i was Mr Super-Compliant, after i got out of jail and was in the halfway house. “Yes M'am” and “No Sir” entered my vocabulary as i feigned respect for the bureaucracy of the Twelfth Judicial District, it was just another face and i was never serious about doing anything, other than getting out of their clutches and using as often as i could. that whole little stint, did not end well, at least from the perspective of an active addict. in my life, however, that ending was the start of becoming who i am today. even if it took eighteen months or more, for me to accept that i had a problem that required a solution outside of me.
the stories i told myself as a child and the need for those stories, still have a grip on my cajones today. it is the current nature of my insanity and i am having to find the HOPE that i can be restored to a life when i did not believe i was good enough, just as i am and that i could be better if i allowed myself the freedom to be who i am.
it is quite true, that i can don any of the many masks i had to create to sustain myself, across those many years. it is also true, that i no longer NEED to do so and it is only my DESIRE to appear better than i am, that creates that NEED. when i let go of who i think i am and allow myself to be the person i know that i am, that NEED diminishes to practically nil. the HOPE is that as i work through this SECOND STEP i can see that practically nil, no longer has to rule my life, just for today.

∞ DT ∞