Blog entry for:

with the tolerance and forgiveness i seek for myself.
so all of a sudden, i feel obsessed with what happened at my FIFTH STEP the other night! well maybe not all that sudden, but certainly obsessed! here is once again, a line directly from my sponsor's mouth to a JFT entry. i could put a who;e lot of spin on the fact, that over the past few days, my FIFTH STEP stuff, has been in the JFT, or accept it as what it is, i am an ordinary, garden-variety addict in recovery, that does not need to stretch out very far, to find something similar pertinent in a book of meditations written by a committee of garden-variety addicts. moving forward, i can certainly go down the party line of, “of course as i get better and treat myself better, i will treat others better as well.”
as tempting as that is, i think i have another track in mind, and will head down that one. part of what i heard the other night, is that i am hard on myself, and i am hard on others. that was far from news to me, i knew this and part of my process to date was accepting that was who i was, and moving along, after all nothing to see her, let go and allow the POWER that fuels my recovery to deal with those traits. what was new to me, is that this was all related to the shame that i was carrying, that actually belongs to someone else. this was part of the betrayal, the pain, the hurt, caused by someone else. and this all boiled down to expressing that pain and hurt as anger and rage. the real issue, is not what i really expect out of others, i expect them to be human, stumble and fall. it is nor what i realistically expect of myself, because somewhere down the line i got the notion that i was never going to be the best at anything, so settle for second and move on. honestly, uncovering that little nugget of sh!t, did far more for me than anything else. yes i am pissed. i have cheated myself out of ewer even trying to be the best, because my expectation was that i would once again fall short and i am tired of falling short. no wonder there is always a bit of anger boiling under the surface, ready to explode with very little disappointment from those who were in my life and i see as somehow better than me.
you know what? THAT SUCKS BIG TIME! it comes down to what do i want to do about it? i cannot fix my character defects, that i know from my experience of continuous clean time. nor can i remove them. i do not care what one of my grand-sponsees says, character defects are character assets gone bad, if that makes him feel better, mo' power to him. to me, character defects are survival traits warped by active addiction into something foul and poisonous, that color my perceptions of myself and the world around me with an unhealthy miasma of mysticism and apathy, cutting me off from the source of who i am, and more importantly who i can be. i no longer have the desire to be cut-off and i want to become someone i have always dreamed of being, so as the day progresses i will allow myself to feel what i need to feel as i process the gifts i have gained as a result of the FIFTH STEP that i have just worked, STEP SIX, is not that far away, i feel it in my bones, as the cliché goes.
time to head on down to the lobby and meet my party for breakfast, it is a great day to be clean!

∞ DT ∞