Blog entry for:

shame or despair at calling myself an addict?
am i still fearful that my past will jump out of the bushes and do horrible terrible things to me?
those two questions, as silly and trivial as they may appear on the surface, are at the heart of many of my doubts about the program of recovery i ascribe to and the path i am walking. as such, i NEED to address them every now and again, just to see where i happen to be with them. being focused as i have been on the period of time between my first meeting and when i finally became a member, i can see today, that these two concerns about my past, haunted me to no end, in those dark, dank and dreary days, way back when. looking back to who i was in that slice of time and comparing it to who i am today, i see that those questions, that once loomed so large in my conscious self, really have become trivial and silly in the face of the light of this new day.
i may not go out to every street corner and shout “i am an addict, follow me to the light,” but i do not hide my light under a bushel of false humility, obfuscation and minimization. i am grateful to be an addict today, because it explains a whole sh!t ton of why i act and think the way i do. i am also grateful; that i have achieved a level of social acceptability, after a few days clean, that i can “pass” for a member of the other 85%. i no longer constantly seek outside validation of the person i am, by NEEDING to have baubles and pretty things at my disposal, but i like having them nevertheless. most of all, as i sit here at the end of my 12TH STEP, i am grateful that my angst-filled teenage years, have finally been put in their place, and i no longer savor the notion of wiping an entire town and all of its inhabitants off the map and into the infinity of the cosmic bit bucket. i realize that those experiences were not nearly as life-changing and heinous as i made them out to be, but they certainly were part of forming the person i am today, after a detour through the filter of the steps. that burning resentment and revenge fantasy, colored my world forever, and only in this FOURTH STEP did i even acknowledge it was part and parcel of who i am.
what i heard this morning was that knowing and feeling are certainly two different things,. knowing is an event and implies completion, feeling is a process and is never quite complete. i am starting to comprehend why my sponse was so adamant about moving out of the “knowing” paradigm and into the “feeling” one, as that journey has opened up all sorts of new and quite different paths for me to consider and follow and ongoing recovery is only one of them. i can now understand on a feelings level why some of my peers get swept out of the rooms on a cloud of religious zeal and plain and simple hedonism, they are alternate paths that i could now follow. i can see why some of my peers decide to separate themselves after they achieve some clean time and some social acceptability. for me, if i ever choose any of those paths, it will be because i have reclaimed the shame of being an addict, instead of returning to the 3rd disturbing realization: “i am not responsible for my addiction.”
i cannot cast my motives on to them, but i can certainly find motives in myself to behave as they do. living life outside my will is tough. learning to accept without guilt and shame that i am now and will continue to be an addict, not so much. allowing others to find their paths to a similar outlook, is what i am all about this morning and the time has come to pack this up and move along to work. it is a good day to live as who i am, and not who i think i ought to be.

∞ DT ∞