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today, i live life just as fully as the **normal** people i once scorned.
so this is one of those readings that generally takes me back to the day, when using and finding the ways and means to use more, was my chief concern. i get this, as for the longest time, that is where i thought the contrast was in my life, i HAD to tell someone how much i had withdrawn into the cocoon of chemical bliss, for them to see how far i had come back to the real world. or at least what more resembles the real world than my life in the world of active addiction.
anyhow, day after day, the readings give me a moment to glimpse into what my life was and could have become, had i not GOT this all those days ago. my sponsee, who is currently a guest at the Boulder County Sheriff's Bed & Breakfast, continues to provide me the what i need to see where i am coming from and where i am going. he is about to get a rude awakening, but i will leave that little ditty for another day.
what amazes me, is the level of entitlement that was once part of who i was and the extent i went to to protect that sense of entitlement, with rationalizations and justifications galore. it seems to me, looking aback from across the course of the recovery i have found, that all i ever wanted was everything to go my way and the world and all its inhabitants to fall at my feet in thrall. not that much, by my standards, after all, i was unique and there would never be another me!
it is true, there will never be another me, but i have uncovered i am so much more alike the rest of the world than i am unique. yes, i am an addict, but even in that designation there is a similarity to all the addicts, in and out of recovery, that cannot be denied. why i used, used to be a force behind why i stayed clean. i HAD to know because i believed knowledge would bring me the wisdom to avoid using and hence stay in recovery. i have some clues about what using was all about to me, but mostly it boils down to, i used because i liked being high. the normal world can never understand that, and for them, there has to be a reason better than that. so i was socialized into believing that getting high, just to get high was wrong, that is when i started manufacturing the excuses that became my familiar refrain. that is when i started to withdraw from the normal world. that was when my safety line was cut i plummeted head first into active addiction. i bring up my sponsee in jail, because something he said, reminds me of my quest to discover why i was an addict, from way back when. i have given up on ever succeeding in that quest and prefer instead to focus on my path to becoming the man and person i could never be in active addiction. as i learn to connect to the real world and live a life that bears very little semblance to the life i once had, i get that understanding the why is not important to me at all. i am what i am, as Popeye was known to say, and as i grow up in the program i find more than a little bit comfort in that, because i know that others are in the exact same place, looking for a better way of living under the curse and the blessing of being an addict. the curse is obvious, just like the curse of the werewolf, when certain conditions are met, i turn into a monster. the blessing? knowing what and who i am, gives me a way out, as long as i look to my peers for the voice of the POWER that fuels my recovery, i have the opportunity to continue what looks like such a normal life. today i am happy to be an addict and happy that i have found a path that leads me out of the curse of addiction, it is after all a good day to be clean.

∞ DT ∞