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growth begins where bitterness ends, with acceptance. scarcely a meeting goes by where i do not hear one of the members in attendance railing about how awful addiction is, what a mess it made of their lives and the lives around them or how they feel singled out for the punishing burden of being an addict. i understand what they are saying and i empathize with all of them, after all i did not fill out a requisition,. stating please whatever Power that may be, make me an addict. no matter how much i whined about or railed against, the fact is plain and simply that i am an addict and although it may seem like there may be more, i see only two choices in my life, accept that fact and live a program of recovery, or spin down into the misery of active addiction. even though, once upon a time, i hated binary choice situations, this is one i have come to accept today. when i walked into the rooms, i had no choice, i had to use, PERIOD! in those days between my first exposure to any sort of 12 STEP program and my clean date, the only thing that kept me “sane-ish” was waiting for the window of opportunity to open up, so i could get high. oh i learned the language and played the compliance game, but i was still in active addiction, even though i put on, what i thought at the time, was a pretty good show. that hellish half-life was still not enough to get me to accept the fact i was an addict, but that long sad story has a happy ending and eventually i finally admitted that i was an addict, of some sort, and that i wanted a solution. the time between my clean date and my eventual capitulation to the reality of who and what i was, was a twilight of sorts, seeing the hope that recovery could bring, but clinging to the notion that i was not an addict of any sort. once i became open-minded by my so-called descent into the pits of self-sponsorship and the travails of hanging with a using buddy in all the wrong places, i could start to accept that i am an addict.
these days, i am not some sort of addict, nor am i addicted to anything, nor do i have an addictive personality, those labels are for others. for me, i am just an addict, no different than my peers. once i let go of how “different” i may be, i can find room enough in a fellowship that really does not tell we what spiritual path to follow. i digress, and to get back on track, i need to bring that thought back into the fold.
i have been speaking to someone who may be on their way back into the fellowship, and can still count their clean time on their fingers and toes, days that is. they are all about a very traditional sort of spiritual path and i have yet to to tel;ll them, whilst that may be nice for them, i have gone in a quite opposite direction. i know that the path i have come to be upon, was not by choice, nor by coercion, it was part of the fellowship's wisdom, not unlike them allowing me to flip, flop and fly at the entrance to recovery. just as i had to come to terms with what i was, i had to find a path to what i NEED to stay clean today, and that was denied to me for quite some time. i struggled not to be different, when all along i knew that i was. my concern was that IF i allowed myself the freedom to find my spiritual direction, i would float out of the rooms on a cloud of religious zeal, as i have seen others do. i lacked the FAITH in myself and the program of recovery that has been given to me, to travel a road less traveled. where once i was afraid, today i have the confidence to allow others to see what i have seen and i can express it in terms that they can understand, the words and phrases that were written down by those who came before me. it is not a cop-out to say GOD, when i mean the POWER that fuels my recovery and provides the opportunity for me to meet all my needs and some of my desires today. it allows me to share a theme and common experience with my peers and even if i look at the spiritual side a bit differently, wa are all walking the same path.
i may not be grateful that i am an addict. in fact i cringe every time i hear someone say that, just saying. i do accept and have come to terms with the fact that i am an addict and that if i want something more, or to be something more, than i NEED to stay clean. abstinence without a program is insanity in my opinion and i do not get how others do it. the good part is, i do not have to understand how they do it, i just have to understand, that for this addict, the only sane thing to do, is to live a program of recovery, just for today.

∞ DT ∞