Blog entry for:

can make me ineligible for this program of recovery. a few fat fingers and i get to drop this little ditty, one more time. but first a quick daily call. as i sat this morning and on my little trek around the neighborhood, the same thought kept coming back, or better put the same theme. as long as i believed i was a victim, i disqualified myself from recovery. just to be clear, i know that many of my peers are very real victims and i have no intention of trivializing or minimizing their journeys. for me, my fantasies of being a victim allowed me to shift the blame for the consequences of my behavior off to someone or something else. in those last months of active addiction it was the a$$-wipe that ratted me out and got the 20th Judicial District involved in my life. for the next eighteen months it was probation and the judges. when i finally admitted i was an addict it was my “addictions” that were to blame, after all, if i could just stop, i would have never done the less than stellar things i did. somewhere in the set of steps, my second go around, i worked with a sponsor in the fellowship that is my home, i realized that i was not really a victim and what i called “addictions” were just how addiction manifested itself in my life. stepping out of the victim role for probably the first time in my adult life, allowed me to see that i was no different than my peers and that i COULD get what they had, just for today. &39;nuff said? no sir not by a long shot, however before i move further down that path:

Jay T,
TWENTY-ONE (21) years clean today!
Thank you for sharing this journey with me.

the question that arises today, is how am i still playing the victim card? or better put, do i still live in the fantasy that i am a collection of all my character defects, addictions and bad behaviors, just waiting for the opportunity to use and get away with it? the HOPE would be, not so much the reality is that it is not quite that simple. the state of being clean, is binary, i either am or i am not. the state of being in recovery has so many shades of grey that the book about it would need to be a million little shards of grey. hey maybe that will be my next project 😂
but seriously, how does one determine if one is in a state of active recovery? i cannot and will not answer that question for anyone else, but for this addict, it is when i feel connected to my fellowship, my peers, and to the world around me. it is when i understand that stuff happens and it does not indicate that i have been “chosen to suffer.” i get to CHOOSE my recovery path today and i can say that using something -- a behavior or a substance -- is always an option. the choice i make today, is to foster my recovery journey, rather than stunt its growth. i can carry the weight of what happened to me, for as long as i desire, or i can drop it off, right here and right now. today, i choose to live and be a part of my active recovery and leave the illusion of being a victim of addiction behind.

∞ DT ∞