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between my behavior and my values.ah, the joys of a personal inventory. i have written about how important i feel my daily practice of the TENTH STEP is for me. it is my safety valve as i go through my day, living an active program of recovery. i may find the corrective part of this step heinous from time to time. practicing that part of the TENTH STEP does make me more aware of what i am doing in real-time to actually avoid the “corrective” actions i may need to take. i may come back to this further down the road, but something else bubbled up to the surface this morning based on a conversation i had last night.
in the conversation, i spoke of using the terms “we” and “you” when they happened to share. for me, as i have said in the past, when one of my peers tell the gathered crowd they they should or must do something, i tend to ignore everything else that comes after it.when i am addressed in the collective “you,” it sounds like someone telling me what to do. i still have an authority complex and hearing someone with less than a year clean telling me what to do, just sounds arrogant and conceited to me, and who the hell do they think they are anyhow? i also hate being stereotyped or lumped into a group based on perceived common attributes. i have been doing my best to pay attention when i am stereotyping others, especially when that behavior affects my ability to see past my biases and prejudices. i know that seeing my peers and my fellow human being as individuals rather than a member of a group or class, is a lifelong task, and one that i seem to only have started on recently, relatively speaking. in active addiction, i used those biases and prejudices to my advantage, or at least to the advantage of maintaining my active addiction, as i could exclude all sorts of people from my life by removing their individual traits and dumping them into my “not worth my time” bucket.
the addict i was speaking with, said that they used “you” and “we” because they believed it was an exercise in humility. it was the second time in a month that someone told me, that they thought using the collective you and we, helped them to “carry the message,” because that was how it was used in the fellowship's literature. i thought about that for a minute and i replied that the literature was the result of the action of a collective we, many addicts contributing to its production, and in that context it made perfect sense. the literature is about us and our program, as whole. sharing, when i do share and i did last night, it is about how i take what i was given and apply it to my life. no one, has the same experience as i do. no one feels the way i do and no one has a program built on what i feel. there are certainly elements of my experience, strength and hope, that i do share with others. what those elements are, i have no idea, save for the notion that i am powerless over addiction and i have the desire to stay clean today. that is the bedrock of my connection to my peers in recovery. i have pretended to have ALL of the answers in the past but true humility is admitting that i have much more to learn. i have a feeling that taking advice from a newcomer is not something that i find necessary to do, any time soon. applying how they dealt with a situation today, on the other hand, is without a doubt something i relish hearing about. the difference being they are relating what they did and not suggesting i do something, i have a sponsor and closed-mouth friends that take care of giving me advice and some of those friends certainly have far less clean time than i do. it is how they live their lives and not what they say, that attracts me to them and allows me to value their feedback and advice.
living through my self-promotion phase and seeing what a dick i was during that period in my recovery, make me highly sensitized to my peers who have yet to see the light. unlike them, i will not however offer unsolicited advice, as i save that for my peers who have already given me permission to do so. when i do not self-promote, believe i have the answers to the mysteries of life in recovery or practice a SUPREME program, i grow. living a program, today, means that i know what i am, i am learning what my place in the world is, and how i can be a better participant in the fellowship that has given me this new manner of living. a daily inventory, keeps me on track and allows for me to adjust my course when i am starting to stray off into my will, just for today.

∞ DT ∞