Blog entry for:

the POWER that fuels my recovery, myself, and others.
to be honest, the meeting last night was one in a chain of meetings that were so mostly good for me, that perhaps it is once again time to share. there was only one share that triggered an emotional reaction and unfortunately that share came from a peer, whom i have always had a deep respect for. in fact that share was reminiscent of members coming over from another fellowship and telling us upstarts how we are doing it all wrong. when it comes to what i hear in meetings, more and more i am finding less satisfaction in shares i hear that are explaining basic principles, or telling me what to do. when an idea is presented in the abstract, without any attachment to what is going on in the live of the addict who is sharing, i find it quite irritating. the emotional reaction i have is anger, and i feel like a seventeen year old rebelling against his thirty-something parent and now that i have written that, the analogy is certainly apt on all sorts of different levels. :)
so what do i do, with that rebellious part that is quite tired of being told what to do, when sometimes all i hear is words and see very little evidence of putting those words into action. i can run away to another meeting or another group, where i am quite certain that i will not have to deal with that set of feelings, at least in this very limited and narrow set of circumstances. that feels so reminiscent of how i handled things back in the day, that i might as well be using. i can learn to accept that somehow i have changed and as i grow, i am finding less satisfaction in being lectured as part of a group on HOW this gig is done. just like that rebellious teenager, the time has come to leave the old fogies behind and spread my wings and fly, even though i am not certain what that may mean in this context. it may mean, putting aside my automatic reactions to my feelings in real-time, shutting down the judge, jury and executioner for the a minute, and listen to the content of what is being shared. when i do that, i see what was shared was valuable information, but it was the sort of stuff that needed to be passed on from sponsor, to sponsee, not so pedantically to the whole group as if it was written on stone tablets. which means that i am not yet spiritually fit enough to share anywhere but in my home group, still. it means that i need to allow my TENTH STEP work to take hold, and continue to identify why i am feel the way i do, as i am starting to unearth some ancient history in this process.
living in the past in not what i am about today, but seeing how my past affects me is. right here and right now, the time has come to hop into the shower and get rolling south west for another day of pounding the keys. it is a great day to be clean and when and if i get to have decades of recovery, i hope i will remember how i felt today, so i do a better job of carrying the message to the still suffering addict.

∞ DT ∞