Blog entry for:

feel the need or the desire to magnify or minimize the truth, MOST OF THE TIME.
long before i ever used, i found myself having the desire to be bigger than i ever was. i lied about where i had been, what i had done and exaggerated what i thought i knew. somewhere down the line, that desire turned on me and became a need and i lived in a fantasy world of my own making and tried to drag the rest of the world into it. using that first time, changed nothing and changed everything. no longer did i have to suffer through the dissonant cognizance of what i pretended to be, because now i could be high and being high was my great equalizer. when i was high, i felt for the first time in my life equal to everyone in the world. using for nearly a quarter of a century, the way i did, really did very little to boost my self-esteem, but the bonus for me, i was that i never noticed. many of my peers speak about numbing their feelings through the use of substances, and although i enjoyed this side-effect, my main reason was that when i was high, reality became what i wanted it to be, and i could escape. although using worked for me right to the end, my escape was becoming tenuous at best. the end result is when i was forced to “get clean,” i seriously lacked any skills to live in any sort of reality and as that world came crashing down up[on me, i was lost, frightened and certainly in a hurry to get some replacement for the substances that allowed me to be a “functional” addict for so long.
whining about being a victim of addiction, or even worse a victim of compliant abstinence, really did not help matters and as i continued to shift, shuffle and reassign blame, things only got worse. i am however, a stubborn sort of person. after bending the world to fit my reality for so long, i believed that with just the right story, the right job, the right romantic relationships and the right set of friends, i could recapture that ease of living that came when i got high. what i learned in that eighteen months of miserable abstinence is that ease of living would never return, at least in its previous form, i NEEDED a new manner of living, thinking and just being. at that point, the pain and misery of staying clean,was overwhelming and when i decided, somewhat haphazardly to ask my second sponsor to guide me through the process , as it came down to him in the fellowship that was to become my home, i was quite certain that this, like everything else i had tried since getting clean, was not going to change anything inside of me, and i would be using within the next few years.
my peers often speak of miracles and blessings, and i get it. for an addict to stay clean and find a new manner in which to live, certainly looks as if it needs divine intervention. me, pragmatic as i am, can say today, that may or may not have been divine, but something from the outside, with more power than my addiction, had to provide me the means to stay the course and stay clean another day, especially when the sword of the justice system had been lifted. that was then and yet here i am, many days later, still clean and still sitting in those very same rooms that i was certain were going to be the rock that dragged me down into the despair that only a quick little hit of this or that was going to cure. amazingly though and yes some may say miraculously, i found solace in the 12 STEPS and my need to be bigger, better and brighter than everyone, at least in my fantasy version of reality, was slowly whittled away to a mere whisper of once what was once upon a time the roar of jet engines.
i am far from cured, that i accept without any reservations today. i also accept that i stay clean on a daily basis, because i have the grace of a HIGHER POWER to fuel my recovery. i receive that grace because i stay clean and look for the opportunities to do so, in the here and now. before i go all esoteric, it is the easier, softer manner for me to look at the the notion of how and why i stay clean, as there really is no rational explanation for it. people like me, very rarely get clean and stay clean for any length of time, and as my days start to pile up, i wonder what happened to me, that i could do so. i come against the wall of reality and realize that i cannot explain, it, rationalize it, or justify it, so it comes down to a HIGHER POWER of some sort, that provides me the means to remain a member and have the desire to stay clean another day. so on that note, i think i will sign-off, and get ready to face my reality today, just for today! 😇

∞ DT ∞