Blog entry for:

IF i earned good grades in school, cleaned my rooms, or dressed a certain way. unfortunately that behavior, judging myself through the eyes of others, has persisted in recovery. the problem of trying live up to the unvoiced expectations of others, and no one in recovery has ever told me i did not meet their expectations, is that i can never win. yes i will always be moving the bar higher and higher, and of course i will never ask, after all, that would make me look needy and oh, so, sick!
growing up? well growing up, when i lived in the big city, i conformed to the expectations of my friends to conform with them, as blatant anti-societal non-conformists. we were dark, cynical and anti-materialistic, but you could spot any one of us,from a mile away, as we wore our hair the same way and dressed in a remarkably similar fashion, brand new jeans that we bleached distressed in the tub last night.
moving to a farm town in Minnesota, while quite the shock to my system, taught me that standing out was not a good thing, and being average and normal was the way to go. so the start of not living up to the expectations of others was firmly rooted in my head here, and never quite left. it was not the fault of that town, or the people in it, as hard as i have tried to blame that place and those people. for the ills of who i became, they certainly taught me more than one valuable lesson, i just misapplied their sage wisdom.
what i took away from them, and what persisted across the course of my active addiction, was that appearances DO MATTER, and it is my job to put up a good front at all times. i came to believe that everyone was out to hurt me, life was a zero sum game and that i need to compete and protect myself, if i wanted to get what i was entitled to. it is no surprise that after decades of reinforcement, that sort of stuff still lingers in my make-up.
in recovery, the coin to my self-acceptance through your eyes was service. i had ti have the most, the most visible and what i perceived was the most influential service positions, to be acceptable in the eyes of my peers in recovery. for a decade or more, that attitude permeated all that i did, my relationship with my peers in recovery and the fellowship in general. ironically i heard an addict sharing about the good deeds they had accomplished the other night and i instantly though about sharing the wisdom in the thought that a good deed is only a good deed if no one catches you doing it. once i share about how i did something good for someone else, i have destroyed, for me, the joy of just doing the next right thing. it plays back to this whole wanting to look better than i am, paradigm and certainly is a symptom of the addict within me, being expressed. at most, for me, only two people NEED to know about the good i do, the person affected possibly and myself. if others witness it, well that is a bonus. if i call attention to it, well that is me just being sick. life in recovery is like that, there is a trace of the poison of addiction in all that i do, and my job is to purify it through my words and deeds.
which reminds me, it is time to get rolling on down the road, after all i am also, paid well to show up and work every day as well.

∞ DT ∞