Blog entry for:

...overwhelming personal problems, angry feelings, and despair. i sometimes believe that if i just work my steps enough, pray enough, or go to enough meetings, i will eventually, well, maybe not be cured, but be something! something more or something different, or possibly even a more normal addict, one that has some control and some willpower. i know, even as i write that it sounds quite silly to me. that all leads back to the reward and punishment system that i was taught life was all about. ironic, that still plays in my head, even after i have discarded it from my belief system of life , the universe and everything. how does that go again, oh yeah if i use, i will be punished by everything i have got being taken away from me, if i continue to be abstinent then i will continue to achieve material success and accumulate more trappings of the good life. simply put, it is all about not using! so if that is the case, why after a decade clean, do i still sometimes feel the way i did when i walked into he rooms?
so abstinence is not the key, rather it is the jumping off point. without abstinence there can be no recovery for this addict. abstinence is my connection to the material world and the doorway through which i enter a world beyond my wildest imagination. recovery is my guide to that new and different place, and while it is nice to have a comfortable home, and someone to love and share my life with on a daily basis, the real reward is what is yet to come, as i progress on my journey through recovery.
so i am getting something more, i am getting to grow a part of me that has been long neglected, i am becoming the sort of man i always wanted to be, and i am becoming a person who is part of the world on all its various planes of existence. okay, i am going way out on a mystical journey and i am uncertain if this is the direction i really want to be looking in this morning. i am a rational, modern human being, who doubts what he cannot see or at least discover a chain of evidence that leads to a conclusion. perhaps, this is the more that i have been looking for, a mystic manner of looking at the world, tempered by the rational, linear man. or maybe i have it backwards the rational, linear person, tempered by the emerging mystic. either way, i am beginning to see, that although there are consequences for everything i do or do not do, i do not have to live in a world of reward and punishment, i can just accept that there are consequences and it is my judgment that makes them good or bad. it is only if i continue doing the recovery gig, and i mean really doing it, by living the entire program, then and only then will i get to be something. what that something is, is undetermined other than a recovering addict and for me, that is more than enough this morning. BTW i still have not heard a peep from my MIA sponsee, but for some reason i have let it go for rigjht now.

∞ DT ∞