Blog entry for:

no matter what anyone else may think!
part of becoming the man i have always wanted to be, is to severe my need to maintain appearances at all costs, so part of being a winner to live a program that allows that process to continue. i know i come back time and again to this particular defect of character and time and again, i get the same answer. namely, it kept me in the real world and protected me from the storms of reality for so long that it became engrained in my behavior, perhaps forever. this whole topic of recognizing winners, drives straight tot that point, long before i ever came close to being a winner, in certainly did my best to look like one. taking key-tags while still using, memorizing the readings, being able to quote chapter and verse from our literature was part of that front, and in my own mind, it was what i saw as symptoms of being a winner. honestly, i am clueless if i fooled anyone except myself, but it really did not matter. as long as i looked like i was living a program, there was no ACTUAL NEED to live one. i could fall back on my old bag of tricks to silence any dissent: crusty looks, the biting barb of caustic wit or just a tad of intellectual bullying.
as i learned to work steps and more importantly as i learned on how to live each spiritual principle embedded within those steps, i saw what being a winner really was, and how to recognize the winner within. it was not that the inner winner was dead or even missing, just buried under the load sh!t that i piled up in active addiction and perhaps before i even used that very first time. as that man becomes revealed to me, i can more easily spot the winners in the rooms, even those who are just walking into their very first meeting ever. not that i am any where near perfect on that particular identification, but i seem to be getting better all the time. while the symptoms of being a winner defined in the reading are far from ambiguous, i can as always interpret them any way i want to, being more than capable of reading between the lines.
what does any of this have with living my program today? first and foremost, the winner ideal is certainly a great standard to strive for, as well as one that could be a ginormous baseball bat with which to beat myself severely about the head shoulders. my task today is to live as close to the that ideal as i can and allow myself the FREEDOM to be human, if i fall short. i got some stuff to get done this morning, so for right now, i think i am done. with that in mind, what i carry with me this morning is that it is more important to be a winner rather than to play one in front of my friends and peers.

∞ DT ∞