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feeling unique and different from everyone else, is a feeling that haunted me for as long as i can remember. some days were not too bad, but for the most part, it never went away and until i used that very first time, i truly believed it was how i would feel until the end of my days, and assumed everyone else had the same feelings. the sad fact of the matter was and is, that using did not remove the feeling, it just numbed it, and even when i was hanging out and using with “friends,” i still felt different and alone, most of the time.
early recovery? the feeling became more pronounced as i sat in the rooms, because for me, getting high worked the same as it ever did, as long as i took a big enough dose. i did not lose what the others had lost, as i never accumulated anything: no children, no house, no car, no career, no respect and no long-term relationships. i did not lose anything, as i had nothing to lose. i did not have a drug problem, i had a legal problem. it took seven months of pretending i was clean, then another eighteen months of abstinence, before i finally found out that maybe, just maybe, i was not so different after all. even though i had nothing to lose, i really had lost a lot, across the course of my active addiction and the bottom i reached at eighteen or so months clean, was no different emotionally and spiritually, than many of the newcomers who walk into the doors of the rooms today.

Nathan W,
4 years CLEAN!
Congrats my friend
Thank you for showing me i am not unique.

so i could say, BOOM, i am part of the many, no longer alone and isolated, my teeth are whiter, my future is so bright i gotta wear shades, and so on, ad nauseum, because i am in recovery now! yes, that would be nice, but the fact of the matter is, some of time, i still feel different, especially as the number of days between my last use and today get larger. it is easy to feel different, when many times i am the one in the room with the most clean time. i know that clean time does not equal recovery. i also know that what i have today, FREEDOM from active addiction is because i keep coming back. yet, when i sit down and i here about the struggles of getting clean or the tales of woe form those who cannot seem to keep their asses in their chairs, i start to drift, as that is no longer part of my just for today experience. sure i say i keep coming back to remind myself of where i could go, but most of the time that is just smoke and mirrors to disguise the fact that i am feeling different.
so i have focused on what my problem is, the solution? well the solution is part of my spiritual awakening, in this set of set of steps. what i have come to feel is that i am an addict, no different than any human being in the 15% of the race that are addicted today. whether or not i felt the desperation that many of my peers felt. whether or not my bottom looked the same. the fact is, even though i have some clean time, at my core i am an addict and the most natural thing for me to do, is to separate, isolate and pick up. i want to feel alone, i want to be different, i want to be normal. it is all of those WANTS, that i lump into DESIRE, and DESIRE has been warped by active addiction, onto something that is far from healthy and certainly dangerous to me as a recovering person. after all DESIRE is the root of all that is not healthy in my life. the program and feeling like i am at my peers, counters that my natural tendencies as an addict. the fact of life i need to remember today is no matter how many days i have clean, i am still an addict.

∞ DT ∞