Blog entry for:

more about living rather than merely surviving. some of the time, the seed for this just jumps right out at me and i have no trouble expressing what i heard when i sat. other day, such as today, i have to massage the words and even make major alterations to get what was written to fit what i what i heard. to keep from being Captain Obvious. there certainly is a difference between living and surviving, however surviving is necessary and sufficient to being able to live my life.
when i got here, i would have told you that i was living a life and that the life i was living was beyond my wildest dreams, after all, i was high every day, i had a job that i would never be fired from, and enough of a bidness, that i could afford to use, most of the time. getting clean, i saw as just a brief rest stop in my using career, and soon enough i would return to the life i was forced to leave behind. when i look back at what my life looked like, back in the day, i am amazed that i did not open my wrists, as seeing it through the lens of some days clean,m it certainly looks dull, depressing and pointless.
today, when i compare and contrast my life, with those days of yore, i can gratefully acknowledge that i actually have a life to live, and be grateful for what i have been given. i can see that this notion of whether i am living or just surviving is one of relative value. as stated above, back in the day i thought i was living. i really had nothing to compare what i thought was “the life” to. getting high made every day a holiday and the fact that i often could not afford to eat anything but generic hamburger in generic macaroni and cheese, because i “wanted” get high, was not seen as a symptom of a deeper problem to me, it was just something i had to learn to live with, it was surviving at its best.
the bleakness of those days between my first meeting and when i got clean, was even more pronounced, as i could only escape that reality once every thirty days. i had the same boring existence, with the spice of incarceration and using when i could get away with it, thrown in for good measure. i was still oblivious to what the real problem was, and the thought that i could get away with this or that, added just enough variety to those days, so i could tolerate, appearing to be what i was not, clean.
those first six months after i finally got clean were the most heinous of my life. without the desire to use being lifted and my grim and obstinate determination to comply with my legal issues, as well as my consequence for getting caught, combined in the horror of early recovery for me. i am certainly grateful i survived that experience with living. even that was more than just surviving and i see that for me, early recovery NEEDED to be heinous enough, to keep me clean, until i finally became a member and wanted something more than just an existence. so here i sit today, i a comfortable and heated house. all my bills are current. i just finished another step cycle. i have not one but two vacations planned in the next six months. i am in a loving relationship and m,y family has become more than a meal ticket to me. i know who i am, and i am learning how to live in humility. each day, although it may start out the same, is not a boring rerun of yesterday, which is so unlike the state of my life when i got clean. yes i can celebrate the fact that i am kicking it on this side of the turf and be grateful for the gift of life today, so i guess i will get moving into what that life has to offer me today.

∞ DT ∞