Blog entry for:

take care of myself! every single day, it seems i get a new lesson in what is was like to be me. when i went to check up on my Mom yesterday afternoon, she yelled at me, because she did not get the answers she wanted from the phone calls i **forced** her to make. what she refuses to see, day after day, is that she NEEDS to take responsibility for her life and caring for my Dad, when he gets home. doing research on the internet, making phone calls to care agencies and public health entities, and figuring out restaurant menus are all well within her ability, and yet she refuses to even try. it is all about being a “victim” and wallowing in a pit of self-pity and despair. what sucks is how familiar this whole scenario is to me, as i was in the same place twenty-three years ago, when i was “forced” into recovery.
i learned very quickly, way back when, that if i denied something for long enough, it would come back to bite me in my a$$, and things did, time and again. being “different” from my peers, meant that i was not desperate, just unlucky to have been caught. i was never going to be one of those “losers” who needed people, as i was quite capable of taking care of myself, oven though there was a mound of evidence demonstrating that was far from the case. coming to a place of accepting who i was, was quite a journey and over the course of the first two years of my clean time, it became evident that i was certainly not who i thought i was.
my problem was, way back when, believing that another day clean was enough. i am quite certain i internalized the message that IF i stayed clean, great things would occur and i would become good company for kings and the captains of industry, magically transformed into the fantasy i had believed for decades. what finally was driven home by my fist sponsor in this fellowship was that it was true another day clean was another day won, BUT if i wanted more, i would have to do more, the transformation i was seeking was possible even probable, if i learned how to live a program of active recovery. if i wanted to look myself in the mirror, i would have to learn what it meant to put my interests aside, actually see myself for who i am and accept that as the truth, in the here and now.
today, i see myself in a different light and having the “old” me, thrown in my face, day after day, is tough. one of the things i can do today, is to be flexible and instead of heading out into dawn's frozen light, i think i will wait until the sun comes up and burns some of these clouds away. it is a good day to be clean and a good day to find it within myself to deal with the FEAR others are feeling, even when they treat me like a slave to their every whim. m y task today is to accept that i do not like seeing snapshot of who i was and accept that it is not my job to expect anything more from anyone else, than they have the ability to give.

∞ DT ∞