Blog entry for:

although this mix probably would not happen before coming to recovery, we meet on mutual ground with our focus on the two things we all have in common -- addiction and recovery. the diversity of the fellowship, well maybe not where i live, or at least that is what one of my sponsees was quite adamant about telling me, especially when he was resisting my suggestion to go to more meetings. he was certain that all the members of the local fellowship at that time were blue-collar, lower class, trailer trash -- that is except for himself and me. well he has moved on, and in a sense so have i. i still live in the same place, i still attend some of the meetings i have always attended and guess what i am still clean. is he still clean? i certainly hope so, as even though my staying clean is not dependent upon the fact of whether he is clean or not, i still would not wish the horrors of active addiction upon anyone. the fact of the matter is, i NEED those members, whatever their social status is, to stay clean today. i was going to go on with a sociological treatise about the economic class stratification of the various fellowships in my home town, but i realized what that was, a diversion from thinking and writing about what is really on my heart this morning. what is on my heart is the intolerance i feel at times when someone from the **other fellowship** pops into one of our meeting and deigns to tell us how it is done. for whatever reason that really chaps my hide, the only thing that has changed for me, is that i no longer call them on it. in the context of this reading and the thought i started this reading with, i guess i can see what is going on, i am jealous of the class of addict they attract leaving us with everything else. not a very pretty picture of someone who purports to live a program of recovery and what does it really matter if our members are doctors and lawyers or mechanics and factory workers -- recovery is after all available to me regardless of what those i share the rooms with do for a living.
for me, it is all about appearances, and yes i can still find myself caught up in that. so when those members of the other fellowship show up, i feel less than because i feel they are slumming or even worse trolling for members. part of this comes from the fact that i was part of the process that built our fellowship, scraping our members out of their fellowship to start with and sitting in their clubhouses, looking at their slogans and gazing at the shrines to their founders that they have prominently displayed. like a rebellious teenager, i want to lash out and tell them to leave me alone, and especially keep their noses out of out stuff, after all we are not good enough for them anyhow.
hmmm, what i thought was a resolved issue, is still bubbling under the surface, it is no wonder that i feel so intolerant and the only thing that has changed is i no longer need to act on that feeling. so what i guess i need to do, is to let go of this whole class status thing that i have imposed upon myself and the fellowships of recovery and accept that for me, i am where i need to be to recover. i could never stay clean, working the steps over powerlessness over any one or even two substances. whether i recover with street people or with the rich and famous, the end result is the same -- i GET to stay clean one more day, and it only my pointy little head that is keeping me hung up on what my peers do for a living instead of whjat they can do to aid me in my recovery today.

∞ DT ∞