Blog entry for:

yesterday i wrote about an incident that happened in the other part of my life. the point was, in that moment, i was comfortable with who and what i was. it is true, that i was severely under the influence, BUT, in that slice of time, i felt something i hardly ever felt in all the days i was using, FREEDOM to just be me! i did not get that freedom, when i first walked into the rooms. i did not get that freedom, when i finally decided to be clean. no i did not even get that freedom the moment i became a member. no that freedom only started to materialize after step work and some time as a fully participating member of my active recovery. today, the road to be okay with who i am, is riddled with potholes and mine shafts, but the path i need to co0ntinue upon is clearly marked.
when i look back, as i often do because i really am not very capable of seeing who i am today, i see that through my actions i have become someone i can be proud of, and most importantly who can have the freedom to be who i am, just the way i am today. i may not be a hard-body male stripper nor the coolest of all hipsters, but what i am is certainly better than what i was.
the reading speaks to the process of becoming comfortable with who i am. when i got here, the message i heard was that i was a piece of sh!t, that was a defective character that roared through the lives of my loved ones as a F-5 tornado, leaving a trail of tears and destruction in my wake, and i bought into that rather simplistic version of the truth, hook, line and sinker. as i kept coming back and grew into my place in the fellowship that has given me this new way of life, i cringe when i think about the load of sh!t i took on, because i was so desperate to fit in. the literature says it plainly enough, ”we were neither as good nor as bad as we once thought we were.“
yes i caused damage to myself, my loved ones, my friends, my acquaintances and society in general, but i also contributed to their well-being from time to time. yes i was a selfish, self-centered, entitled prick, but i was also so much more, that when i look back at what i thought of myself, in those days, i see that i was suffering from a case of everything is a binary state, one is either good or evil, and there is no in between. since i heard about how bad i was, i had to be in that evil camp and should be punished to a life time of abstinence as a result, because only then did my friends, family and the world at large have a chance to recover from me. not the least bit grandiose ☺ ! moving along…
today, i feel that i lay somewhere in between those polar extremes, i am neither good nor evil, simply human. i do not and have never been a human tornado, but i certainly harmed many in my wake. most importantly, not everything i did under the influence was inherently bad, nor were all those good times worse than the worst times clean. today i feel okay just being Don and today being don is a full-time occupation, which means it is time to wrap this up, be okay with what it is i have written and move on down the road to work, after all, i do not live in a vacuum anymore.

∞ DT ∞