Blog entry for:

to improve my conscious contact. well for me, the way this has ended up being implemented is 15 minutes twice a day. i know not as suggested, however, the longer i stay clean, the more i find that “as suggested,” may not be how things end up. it is not that i am trying to rewrite this proven program, nor do i think i am smarter that the addicts who went before me, although both of those notions played a huge role, in the various phases of my recovery. no what has happened for me, is that AS a result of trying out what i was told, and doing so with zeal and conviction, those suggestions morphed into something, much, much more, at least in my life: a personal program of recovery that i can actively be a part of on a daily basis. the cheer-leading stops here, as the is often more going on inside of me, than the reading stirs up.
this morning a couple of persistent notions that have rolling around is: expectations of what it means to be a friend. a case study of two men that i am friendly with, might be illustrative, but that would end up concentrating on what they did and me making assumptions about what they were feeling or thinking, and today at least, i am not about to waste my time on such frightful inventions. what i can tell you is that when i interact with one, i come away feeling like an equal, the other, well most of the time i feel battered and bruised after having to defend myself form the onslaught of what i feel are baseless expectations and unfulfilled assumptions. i have been told more than once that i appear aloof, distant and arrogant, when someone first meets me, and as the steps work their chemistry on my system that appears to be a-changing. i know that front, and it is a front and is the result of my FEAR of social situations and my experience, real and imagined, of being hurt or damaged by being vulnerable and open. that everyone i meet is out to get me, is an attitude that saved me for a very long time and is hard to be relegated to the bit-bucket, even when its usefulness has worn off. part of that attitude is an expectation that when i am asked for something, there is a string attached, and those strings will end up strangling me in the long run. i can pretend and act ‘as-if’ all that is want to, but the truth is, i still at least on some level, consider social interactions as a zero sum game. as nasty as that sounds, that is the filter i view the world through and in the case of my two friends, it appears that one does and one does not. so when i walk away from the one who i feel; plays the game, it is always an evaluation of whether or not i got more, did i win and what did i have to sacrifice for that victory? the truth is, each and every time i play, i lose. maybe not in the interaction, but in what really counts, a bit of my self-esteem, a bit of my self-respect and more than a bit of my spiritual feeling of serenity. and that sucks.
my quiet time this morning, went through the interactions i had yesterday and for once, neither one left me feeling dirty, used or sullied. and i am starting to see, that i can be more than the game playing, role playing man that walked into the rooms, and who has been around for quite some time. i can be a good friend without giving away the keys to the kingdom or clutching my love and respect so tight that there are claw marks on oit when i finally, grudgingly submit. yes it is a great day to be off and in recovery and it is time to do my next bit of nothing at all.

∞ DT ∞