Blog entry for:

of the fellowship. sitting here this morning, secure in my FAITH in the love of the fellowship that has supported my growth to this date, i wonder how i can tell one of my peers, that they have been caught in a lie. i seriously want to help my peer find their way back to the love of the fellowship, but i am starting to fear that they are so far out on the margins now, that they may not be able to find their way back in. their case against the fellowship is rock solid, and now it is a matter of defending against anyone who happens to catch them in their duplicity. it happens, one starts to get their life back and all of a sudden the activities of living a program start top fall towards the bottom of the list of thin gs to do, and BOOM, just like that it is all those fellowship bums to blame for the mess their lives become.
how i avoided that trap is something i have always wondered about, after all, in the first twelve months of recovery, i had great material, financial and spiritual success. i GOT my life back and was starting on the process of fulfilling my lost dreams. i had worked twelve steps and the fellowships had very little to offer me, i was mostly “cured!” the members of the fellowship were boring, shallow and dull, and i was starting a new educational career that brought me in to contact with fresh ideas and lofty intellectual ideals. it was time to knock my recovery routine a notch back and live the new life i had been given. due to my legal situation, using was not something i wanted to choose, and after what happened in New York, i came back startled and scared for my freedom, as i found myself, by my own choice, in the same room with a substance i really, really liked, that i had purchased with my own money. there was something wrong with the non-program i was working, and all of a sudden it was not those boring and shallow members who were to blame, it was me, and i was ready for a different path. the rest of the story? here i sit today, clean and living a program of active recovery, wondering how to attract someone back into the fold.
as i see it, i can pretend i think they are being honest and wait for them to own up to what they have and have not done, or i can let them know, in no uncertain terms, that they implicated themselves through their own words and deeds. the spiritual path, as i see it today, is to breathe and move on. i need not chase them down and if and when the wake up and discover that they have excluded themselves from the love of the fellowship, offer a path back in. for me, it is my job to keep myself in the middle of the back. life without using would be such a grind, if it were not for the fellowship that has shown me this new manner of living. i KNOW that if i choose to, i never have to be alone again. i also know that if i CHOOSE to i can spin down and return the that isolated and empty existence that was active addiction for me. today i choose to be a part of the loving fellowship from which i draw my recovery support, at least just for today.

∞ DT ∞