Blog entry for:

recovery celebration, wondering SHOULD i not be BETTER, by now?
the nice part, at least for me, about this reading, is it always come within the month before my clean date. i am already starting to look at where i am and where i have been and starting the checklist of what i have and have not accomplished in my recovery. the bar i set for myself i at times quite fVking high and nothing but living a 100% program will do. i am human of course, and i almost never live a 100% program, so of course i have plenty of ammunition for the self-flagellation process. and yet, i can see that accepting myself as human and prone to failure, is not the same as rationalizing and justifying my less than perfect performance.
the opposites here are accepting i will fail and just making excuses, or expecting myself to be perfect and beating myself up, when i do fail. seeing the black and white, as it were, at least in this situation allows me to see a course oi wish to maintain, striving for perfection, accepting i will not get there and taking the RESPONSIBILITY to own my mistakes and clean-up after them. for me there can be none of the excuses i here fly around my head: well i work a 90/10 program, or i am only human, or the worst one in my book, i am after all, just another addict.across the course of the past 366 days, the lesson that seems to be driven home, time and again is that, although all of those excuses listed above are true, i need not crater to them. i can use them to limit my growth and my path in recovery or use them as a springboard into becoming something more. i have heard enough lies, enough minimizations, enough rationalizations and enough justifications coming out of my own mouth in the past year, to wonder how it is i stayed clean. the only answer i can come up with is GRACE. the POWER that fuels my recovery, has given me enough spiritual abundance to get me through my less than stellar days. i do need a “rock and roll” church, a shiny new toy, a night in a gentlemen's club or a casino, to feel better about who i am and how far i may or may not have come. the POWER that fuels my recovery, is what completes me, and the rest, whole fun from time to time, are the gravy. i GET to be an equal partner in a loving long-term relationship. i get to form friendships based on mutual trust and respect. i get to interact with the world around me, and afterwards they do not feel as if they need to shower off the slime. most importantly of all, i GET to be something i never was, whole, genuine and self-aware.
there are days when my empathy becomes pity, especially when i see a friend or a peer, spinning in the exact same cycle of relapse and recovery, and being afraid to make any changes, because if they apply enough effort, enough calls to their sponsor, enough meetings or enough brute force, the insanity will end and they will find a true path to their recovery. i wonder, what it is going to take for them to crawl out of the rut they have created for themselves and actually make a move towards finding the peace and serenity i have found. of course, i am ,more powerless over their addiction than i am over my own. all i can do is wait and “listen” for the inspiration to do what i can, to help them find the way out.
so now that i look at it, i really am, exactly where i am supposed to be and i ought not take that for granted, after all, just for today i wil find a new way of living.

∞ DT ∞