Blog entry for:

pray, work the steps, AND go to a meeting -- certainly a good start, for any problem. i am fortunate right now to have no **intractable** problems, and i am grateful that is the case. some of the men i sponsor and some of my peers, not so much. in fact over the past two nights i have met with two of them and heard about theirs. it is not that i lack compassion or empathy for them and what they are going through on a daily basis, but sometimes i wonder if they really want a path out, or if their particular brand of misery is so familiar, they believe it is how they are destined to live. enough casting motives and wondering about others and more on to focusing on me.
this reading uncovers my dichotomy so succinctly. recovery versus culture. asking for help betrays all that i was cultured into accepting about being a man in the American post-modern world. first off, it means acknowledging that i have an issue that needs to be addressed, active addiction was certainly one for me, for decades, and yet i denied i had a problem, believed it was just a phase or rationalized it away. looking at it from this side of the fence, however,i see that it was an intractable problem, that did not get any better the harder i tried to keep it on the down low. that hypothetical about where i would be if i had not ended up in the justice system is still an unknown wasteland, and is hopefully destined to remain so, at least just for today. owning what problems i have is the first part, becoming vulnerable and letting others in, even if it is to offer a shoulder for me to cry on, or an empty place for me to scream, is the second. culturally, i was taught that one does not give anyone any leverage and when one does, to make sure that one has enough juice on the the other to keep this particular zero sum game -- even. relationships, crap shoots that they are, are even trickier when you add vulnerability into the mix, and i came to the rooms, loathing the fact that i would have to be more of an open book about who i am and what i am about. so here i sit, on the horns of a dilemma, as it were, between what i know is culturally correct and what i know is spiritual correct, paralyzed with FEAR and wondering which solution is the correct one.
this set of steps, however, has given me a new way of looking at things. i am both a creature of culture and a creature of recovery. that is my nature and both comprise the whole. when i look at it that way, the white and the black of this dichotomy creates who i am, and who i am is someone who can be helpful without expecting any sort of quid pro quo in return and someone who can ask courageously for help when he needs to. the Yin and Yang of culture vs recovery makes the Tao of Don today, and it is to that whole i gravitate. the parts of me, do not exist in isolation they complementary and supplementary and just are. when i go down one path or the other, the other part influences and tempers my actions and on days i am acting out of recovery based culture or culturally based recovery. i am certain that one can see my point and i need not labor it any longer.
what i get from the reading today is that i can be the one who provides the safe place for my friends and peers with seemingly intractable problems to come to, or go to my friends and peers, when i am the one who is suffering. playing the stoic rock of recovery, is not a role i need take on today, however being a caring being, is! so i believe i will wrap this up, hop into a shower abnnd travel on down to the office, it has been six days suince i have been there and it is time to see if my key still works. 😎

∞ DT ∞