Blog entry for:

of my resentments, the capacity to forgive. i realize that holding on to such garbage is not only destructive to myself, BUT being the person i am, it often spills out to affect everyone i happen to have around me. what this really drove home, at least for me this morning, is the state that three of the men i sponsor are in. all of them are on the NINTH step and all of them are struggling with their current assignment, putting it off, deflecting and doing everything in their power to avoid looking at it. it is not that i am ignorant or unsympathetic to their plight, as i too struggled through the exact same assignment on my last NINTH step and did all that i could do to avoid completing that particular part of it.
what does this have to do with resentments, letting them go and moving into a spirit of forgiveness? well for me, the resentments i cling to the tightest, are those i hold against myself. after all, i CAUSED all that harm and chaos, i TRADED AWAY my life for the next high and i AM THE ONE who forms sick and twisted relationships, to replace stuff that i thought i have lost since i came to recovery. and man does that SUCK!
the irony here is that plenty of others have wronged me and harmed me, but all of them i have the capacity to forgive, most of the time. yest the person i spend most of my time with, is the one i choose to harbor a resentment or three against, day in and day out. before i go on, let me make this clear, i am speaking about my experience and not about my current state of affairs. as i am just starting the FOURTH STEP process, i am not yet sure if i have a resentment against myself boiling under the surface or not. i know i did back in the last set of steps and i know i am still cleaning up that particular package of harm, to this day. my amends to msyelf, is to be kinder and to allow relationships to happen as they will, not to force them to be something they can never be. those that do not and probably will not work, are those that i walk away from, and those that can be repaired or deepened are those i place my energy into, today. will i walk back into the sickest recovery relationship i ever formed? well i have been trading carefully there and am happy at the glacial pace i am proceeding in renewing that relationship, as i am no hurry to hurt myself in that specific instance again.
anyhow, today i will let go of those imagined slights that i explode into relationships and be as forgiving to myself and others as i can, and by the way, i did go to a meeting last night, just in case you were wondering.
so it is off to the salt mines to type away another day.

∞ DT ∞