Blog entry for:

for the emotions i once believed were killing me, is not what i was looking for, when i got clean. time and time again, i hear my peers talking about using drugs as a means to change how they felt. their desire to change their feelings carries over with them into recovery, resulting in all sorts of substitutes for their obsessive, uncontrollable use of drugs. in fact i have heard many of them say that because they used because of their strong emotional response to life in the real world. i have to take them at their word, because when i look back i used no matter what i was feeling at the time. in fact i used, because i liked to get high and being high had a very pleasant side effect of making not care what was going on around me, unless it threatened my ability to get and stay high. what i did not expect from recovery was the means to feel a full range of emotions and actually have the desire to do so. without going back through my archives i am pretty sure i have said all of that before, so it should come as no surprise to anyone that i find when my peers say they want to change the way they feel, i hear they just want an excuse to get high. that is me, just projecting the way i think onto they say and do.

Scott M.,
Congrats on EIGHT (8) years clean.
i HOPE life is treating you well.

as i stay clean and find a bit of emotional stability in my life, i often wonder what i would have been like, if i had used that first time and had not enjoyed it quite so much. as interesting as the answer may be, the fact of life is that for me, once i got “high” i was doomed to keep getting high, because the way addiction manifests in my life, if i find that i like something, i keep doing that something with an obsessive and compulsive fervor, to the exclusion of everything else. for me, that is what i lump into the bucket of “addiction.” i could have certainly seen myself becoming and emotion junkie and for long periods in my life i loved the thrill of physical risk and the adrenaline rush it brought. even when i was using, i often pushed the envelope of what was a “safe” dose, just to see just how “high” i could get. part of my wall of denial was that, when i backed away from those bouts of “insanity” i could assure myself that i did not have a drug problem, not too much unlike my denial of my dependence on nicotine, that i have recently had to come to terms with, in my life. the fact is, when i like something, i do it and there is no balance or sanity around that activity in my life.
i am quite sure i will never die from a feeling. i may be miserable and uncomfortable, but it also and quite sure that any feeling will pass and i do not have to do anything to change the “way i am feeling.” i can cherish what i feel, rather than grudgingly accept them as reality, the choice is certainly all mine today.

∞ DT ∞