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that it has taken months and years to sort it all out. it is no wonder that the stories i told about my life today, differ in some very significant details from the stories i shared way back in early recovery. was i less honest back then? well this whole honesty gig can be a relative term. truthfully in the finite world i was, as looking better than i was feeling has been an overriding concern of mine since as long as i can remember. as i have always been a poor liar, editing the truth was something i latched on to, and honed to a fine skill. i know i have written about before, so i will leave it at that, i lied by omission when i came to recovery, in early recovery and even to this day, from time to time, when i think it may serve me well.
the reading did not really inspire me to go in that direction, what i heard was how honesty has changed for me across the course of my recovery. so other than the lies i told in early recovery, part of my problem with honesty was that i just could not remember the details of my juiciest stories. they were locked in the vault, covered with the dredges of years of use, and i thought gone forever. so what i did was to fill in the blanks with what i thought happened. as time has passed, those details have begun to emerge and man oh man, are some of those stories i told, really TALL fVcking tales.
as i have grown my sense of who i am and glimpsed at the direction of the man i wish to be, what i need to get out of telling tales is a whole different set of things than when i first got clean. these days those incredulous recounting of the idiocy of my active addiction are part of how i can relate to the members who are just starting this path. i remember how hard it was for me to believe that anyone could have over 90 days clean much less, years or even a decade clean. especially as i saw the way those people behaved. most of them seemed far too sane and centered tho have ever used the way i had to, so their stories lent some credibility to program and gave me my first HOPE that maybe this could and would work for me. so my honesty in speaking about myself has had to grow to fill that same need for the FNG.
most of all, learning to tell the truth of who i am and what is REALLY going on inside of me has been one of the great undertakings of my recovery journey, and it is dependent on STEP work to continue the process of uncovering the man who really exists under all the layers of BULLSH!T. the STEPS remove that bit by bit, and as i see more and more who i am, i can be honest with those who fill my life. quite honestly it is time for me to try a double dip before the heat really builds up. i am HOPEFUL today, that when i interact with others i can do so, honestly, just for today.

∞ DT ∞