Some memes

to stand up for principles, do what is easy, or defend the way i have always done it? questions, questions, questions and quite engaging ones at that. what i heard this morning, is that discernment is more about deciding what to do or defend, rather than judging a situation or person. i can easily go in that direction, as someone who walked in the rooms that would defend to death the wackiest and totally out of the ball park kind of ideas. more than once i went down a path of the “hill i would die on,” only to realize later i was totally fucked in the head. of course, being who i was, i never admitted or backtracked and used gaslighting to make it look as if i never said what i said. i was pretty good at that whole exercise and if i was going to take pride in any of my defective behaviors, spinning the truth would be the hill i die on. it is kind of ironic for a person who lived a lie,m to be so bad at telling lies, that he needs to spin the truth to make someone else think what he wants them to. one might think simply lying was the easier softer path, but for me, it became a sort of game., how far could i take the truth and still not be telling a lie.
ah, i digress into euphoric recall and i forget the stress and toil that game placed on me. these days, looking back on that time, and quite honestly it is a behavior i carried with me into recovery, i see that what i was really defending was my fragile ego and my fear of being found out as some sort of fraud. what others thought me was far more important than how i thought of myself. seeing that world through the eyes of my ongoing recovery, i certainly understand that what i was discerning was how things would be best for me. it was a life that i do not regret living, but if i regret anything, it is the transactional nature of my life before recovery.
today, i can look at my motives and discern whether or not this is truly the hill i need to die on. the simple fact of the matter is that the longer i stay clean the more i see that i do not know about recovery or life in recovery. that hill, such as it is, allows me the freedom to listen, assess and yes discern the truth between what i think i know and what i hear from my peers and loved ones. living in that manner, there are very few times i fall into that is the way i have always done it trap, as i become open-minded enough to allow myself to change.

∞ DT ∞