Blog entry for:

for the illusory freedom of getting high, was much higher than i ever thought.
as i sat last night, i thought i had stumbled upon some dire and terrible existential crisis in my life. i thought i had lost FAITH in the program and that maybe i needed to look to see if the payoff that living a program of recovery, was worth the work i put into this recovery gig. it feels that after a bit of time clean, the returns on this effort diminish to nearly being undetectable. the law of diminishing returns, as it were, in full force.
that was was then, this morning i can see things in a bit different light and regardless of how i refer to the POWER that fuels my recovery, possessively or with a gender, the fact is, that POWER is a real force in my life, that counters the force of my self-will as expressed through my addict behaviors and thoughts. i find it interesting that some of my peers use physics and Newton's 3rd law of motion to speak of the battle they wage between addiction and recovery. it is often summed up by saying one's disease is doing push-ups in the parking lot, or using one's recovery against them. for me the counter to the part of me that is addiction, is thew POWER that fuels my recovery. because i do not see addiction as an outside or separate part of who i am, i KNOW that i NEED a stronger force in my life to overcome the Newton's 1st law.
so that crisis of FAITH came down to me feeling the weight of my days clean upon my shoulders and seeing what a few addicts who have moved on, have made of their lives outside of the recovery world. for every example of someone who has prospered and not returned to the hard core addiction, i saw two who used just one and nearly instantly started a downward spiral. i wondered which side of the fence i could land on, after all, i have a few days piled up, a few set of steps behind, a bit of self-knowledge and some insight into what addiction is and how it affects my life. what could a little sumthin', sumthin' hurt? as i sat last night and heard this argument, i saw how ludicrous it really was, at least for me. i never could do JUST a little sumthiin', sumthin', and i could never walk away from anything that made me feel the way getting high did. the facts of life as i accept them today are that i am an addict and that active addiction is a force in my life, that i can and will avoid unleashing again.
as i sat this morning i saw that what i was looking at last night was how my life looked today and the incremental, nearly invisible changes that are part of my recovery process today, versus the huge and tectonic shifts wrought by my early recovery experience. it is quite true, at least for me, that one of the gifts of a bit of clean-time, is the sense of normalcy that has returned to my life, and what i once thought was unavoidable, caving to my need to escape, is no longer part and parcel of my daily experience. because of that, what i feel today is not necessarily ennui or boredom, but a sameness of the routine of my life. feeling the same, day after day, was part of the reason i liked using, and yet now that i have that…
this morning, my crisis in FAITH has passed, so when i hear thes hoofbeats again i will think Earl and not Ryan. just for today, i am grateful the roller-coaster has mellowed out and i can be okay, just being another recovering addict.

∞ DT ∞