Blog entry for:

therapeutic value! quite a claim, and in my experience one that rights true. across the course of my time around the rooms, the one thing that tied me the fellowship and kept me coming back, even when i was forced to do so, was this notion: that everyone in the room had a REAL past and most of them were willing to talk openly about what they had gone through. what did not strike me as genuine, were those who seemed to always be dwelling in their past, or who represented how wonderful their lives became the instant that they got clean. this miraculous transformation, always rand false to me, and as a result, i wondered what else they were “misrepresenting.” it is no wonder that i gravitated towards the darker, edgier members, after all they seemed real.
i can say tat it is miracle-like of sorts, that i am clean today and have not had the desire to use for quite some time. i am not one of those who walks around looking for the hand of GOD, in all that i do nor do i believe their is some divine scoreboard keeping track. i also do not believe in the generalized version of Karma that what i put out, i get back one hundred-fold. by eliminating those basic tenets form my belief system, i am certainly set-up well for this next set of steps and the focus that seems so obvious today, but eluded me the past few months. looking at my past i can see this is where i have been heading for quite some time, and although i can regale my listeners of hilarious and heart-wrenching tales of life during the wartime of my active addiction, my REAL value these days is to share my life during recovery and chronicle how i got to where i am today.
it is certainly a “different” phase of recovery i am entering. the journey through my spiritual awakenings, has been strewn with missteps dead-ends and just when thing looked the most grim, amazing vistas. as i close in on my clean-time equaling my time in active addiction, i often wonder how much of what i remember and talk about, “back in the day.,” is exactly how i tell it, and how much has been polished up to present an image of who i want others to think i was. i know that most of the really nasty bits, i use as an example of how far i have come. for the most part, those bits are an accurate reflection of who i was, but i always wonder how i could have been so uncaring, unfeeling band seemingly without any redeeming qualities, living in that transaction based world. that person seems like a caricature, rather than a full-fleshed human being, and that is probably the result of my clean-time. as i draw away from who i was and what i did and focus on who i am and what i am doing, that connection to my past becomes more and more tenuous, and my grip on it becomes less and less certain. i am beginning, just now, of seeing the values of step cycles and revisiting that which i have left behind, as it gives me the opportunity to see where and what i have become.i also understand why some of my peers, resist looking at their past, time and again, after all what good does it do, to look at the immutable past, save to drag one down today.
thinking about my recent past, i can now see what expectations i have for meetings and even as low as they are, i can see how they will probably never again be met at the meeting i attended the other night. there really are very few that are there, simply because they want to be. i know that forced abstinence and meeting attendance, got me into the rooms, and kept me here, until i finally had the desire to come. what i see in that room, is a whole lot of addicts that really do not want to be there and do whatever they can, to distract themselves from the reality of what addiction is and means for them. even those who who do not arrive from a treatment facility, those caught in the cycle of their own insanity, choose to attend that meeting, because they can get away with the most outrageous things, including sharing time and again about life in abstinence with no recovery. i know that place quite well and when they speak of their insanity, i get it, but even i tire of hearing about how their latest relapse is going and seriously wonder when they are going to make a decision to tilt one way or another. there have been times when i wanted to walk up and say, just use already, i am weary of all your fVcking whining.
i however do digress, as i can see myself in those same shoes, only i was much better at hiding it. the last thing i wanted to know in my period of abstinence with no recovery, was that i was insane and would never fit in. that lie was the driving force of what kept me coming back, after all, if i looked “as if” i was one of the flock, maybe i could actually become one of them. and so it goes, what i once loathed and most desired, i have become: a card-carrying member, who wants to give away what he has, to anyone who will listen. i do not need to add frills, and flowery phrases about how blessed i am, i live a “blessed” and that needs to be demonstrated not talked about. if i inject some darkness into all the light, it is because that is how things work in the real world, very rarely are events and life in general a series of binary events ↝ positive or negative, as it were. for me to boil it all down to those two buckets removes the entire vista from my sight. those who choose to live there, in that black and white world, well i have to give them credit, it is so much harder than living in the real world and i certainly how that fantasy does not explode in a ginormous cataclysmic explosion.
ah but i have gone on too long, time to hit the road and get cracking at work, after all there are many tasks to do, before i get to reflect on how well i lived in the real world today.

∞ DT ∞