Blog entry for:

change that fact that i am powerless and without outside help, my life quickly becomes unmanageable. looking briefly over my entries over the past years on this reading it seems fantasy and denial are recurring themes. one might think that i have not moved one jot forward in accepting that surrender, without conditions is necessary for me to stay clean and live a program of active recovery. that observation, of course can be countered by the piles of evidence that demonstrates my continuing progress forward in my recovery journey, specifically the number of days in a row i have stayed clean and my lack of desire to use today.
what i look to, is what one may call my index of misery. exactly how miserable am i today and what power can i exert to reduce that misery? when i first got clean, the most miserable factor in my life was my overwhelming desire to use and my obsession with wanting to feed that hunger. the power of the justice system to affect my freedom did nothing to relieve that misery, in fact it made it worse, as i chafed under its burden. day in and day out, i lived in a state of misery, biding my time until the day arrived when i could freely use again. i was never going to surrender to the fact that i was an addict, even though the misery i felt was certainly a symptom of untreated addiction. when i was finally relieved of the obsession to use, i lacked any sort of gratitude and believed it was through my sheer application of will, that i finally arrived at that point. in fact, i believed i was not an addict then and had never been an addict at all. now, the only thing that made me miserable, was pretending to be an addict, so i could have a life with people that were not using.
ironically, what actually dropped me to my knees and broke through my denial was that trip to New Jersey and the return of the obsession, as i watched those around me, freely enjoy the substances i myself once lived to use. my misery index shot back up to intolerable, but now i realized that maybe the folks in the room were correct and it was time to get off my f*cking high horse and join them.
when i consider my misery today, it is all about things that are within my power to alter: my job, my finances, my fitness and my general health. sure there are aspects of all of those that i NEED to surrender into the care of the POWER that fuels my recovery, but there is also aspects of each and every one of those parts of my life, that i can apply myself to and create a better outcome. my current job is the highest on my misery index these days, and has been for quite some time, even though i like the benefits of getting a steady paycheck. IF i want more from life, in this respect than i need to accept my reality, i have a job that i can do well and pays me very well. i can cringe internally by what i have to deal with on a daily basis, or remember what it was like to live in the shadow of prison and obsession. where once i surrendered to being powerless over my addiction, i can now accept that my job is my job and only i can make myself miserable by dwelling on the aspects that i find less than appealing. the time has come to surrender to the fact that i m employed and if i want something different, i need to work harder and let go of my expectations about what that something different may look like. in other words, just surrender, without conditions and see what comes down the pike.

∞ DT ∞