Blog entry for:

that friendships require work.
so a bit of context here, for those who are not following along. i arrived in recovery, majorly retarded in my social skills. active addiction stopped my growth process way back when, and socially i did not start growing again, until i was clean for good bit of time. for me, those i called my friends, were either those who were in a mutually-assured destruction kind of relationship, someone who had enough dirt on me, and whom i had enough dirt on as well. these relationships were always a balance of power game, not too dissimilar to the ones, certain nation states play still today. subtle, always having an underlying threat, and a stroke me, stroke you kind of social dynamic. i did “favors” only for those i know could pay me back. there was very little “milk of human kindness” in my interactions with the world, and always a calculus of how much it was going to cost me, and was it worth the investment. as my life progressed, it got harder and harder to play the game, so i just gave up and withdrew into my own little world, filled with those who used like i did, but secretly having a stash that i never ever shared with anyone else. this included far more than drugs, it also included my feelings, my fears, what few aspirations i had left, and my true and real self, as i knew it way back when.
so it is not that surprising that when i got clean, i could revert to my old behavior and just “ex” those people out of my life, after all, the program told me i had to change playmates. the notion of friends, closed-mouth or otherwise was something quite foreign to me, and certainly nothing i was very practiced at being. finding myself naked as it were, when i started to hang around and make sounds like this was going to be my life,. created a panic in me. i was quite comfortable being alone, but for me, that was just me isolating and denying that yes, even i needed others in my life, as friends, confidantes and peers. as i struggled to build an identity in the fellowships i was cross-dressing in, i was an alcoholic-addict in one and in the other an addict-alcoholic, i started to get a sense of who i was not and no sense of direction about who i was becoming, so for those first thirteen months i hung with the others who shared approximately the same amount of clean time and actually had a fairly good time doing so. slowly but surely i built a few relationships, and learned what it meant to just hang out. those first stumbling steps to developing into a friend and what that means, were the beginning of quite a long and often tortuous journey for me. i had to go through service and making a big splash before i got the notion, that as i found out who i was, i could be myself and allow others to be themselves, and i DID NOT need to be a servant to everyone, trusted or otherwise, to develop my social skills. in fact, this set of steps has been about finding myself socially and gracefully, in the fellowship, in my professional life and in the world around me. more and more i look like one of the other 85%, as i began to find myself more and more comfortable in social situations.
today, i am growing into someone, who can be a friend and developing friendships with those who happen to be in my life. favors no longer come with strings attached. i no longer consciously calculate what a relationship is going to cost and what kind of benefits i can get out of it. most importantly, today i want to do the work required to build a friendship, and not merely go through the motions.
anyhow, the time has come to ease on, ease on, down the road, to build my relationship with my current employer. it certainly is a good day to be clean and one in which i am grateful that unlike some of my friends i am free from active addiction today.

∞ DT ∞