Blog entry for:

comfortable version of myself, BECAUSE I CHOOSE RECOVERY, TODAY. once again, a very late post because i made the choice to attend my home group meeting this morning in person, instead of virtually. when i sat and listened this morning, i kept coming back to the various “versions” of myself and when a peer shared about being cat-like, as in having up to nine lives, that theme was hammered home. as weird as it may seem, it does seem that i have certainly had more than one life and i am quite uncertain there is another one, still in the “bank.”
as my days of being clean pile up, i am approaching a milestone where i may end up being clean for longer than i used. that goal seems highly achievable these days, as it never seemed to be so in the past. when i arrived in the rooms, i had steeled myself against caring about others or sharing my life with them. even though i do not believe in destiny, i did believe i was destined to be a loner and social-retard the rest of my life, as i faded into a drug-induced sunset.
the “echo” chamber of my associates at that time was that people like us would use and continue to use, forever and ever, and that there was absolutely nothing wrong with that, as long as we continued to function on some level, within the world around us. i bought into that with a vengeance and it became the edifice upon which my denial was constructed. i may not have been comfortable with that outlook on life, but i was willing to accept it, as long as i had what i needed, to keep the barbarians of reality from crashing through my gates. there i was, comfortably numb and ready to defend my right to do whatever i thought i was entitled to do. being thrust into recovery created a situation from which i never believed i could recover what i had.
i was correct in that sort of thinking and am grateful that recovery did not restore me to the web of lies i lived for so very long. today, i get to respond rather than run from the world around me. today, when asked about something political by someone who i consider a friend, i can speak rationally to any fallacy they have taken as the truth and provide them the means to reevaluate their beliefs. i do not have to “convince” them to see the error of their ways, i only need to provide a second way of thinking which may trigger a response to seeing a different point of view. my “success” lies not in changing minds, but fostering as sense of wondering if they are missing part of the picture. the rest, of course, is up to them, just as it was to me, once i accepted that i COULD have a new way of living, that did not NEED to be lived in the fog of dis or dat.
just for today, i can revel in being clean, living clean and doing my best to become the sort of person who stands up for what he believes and does not need to bully anyone else, into seeing it my way.

∞ DT ∞