Blog entry for:

absence of pain, in all the WRONG places. life is far from pain free, even in active addiction, all i could is **numb** the pain i felt, never remove it. i know this to be true, so why on Earth do i still have expectations of finding the “unicorn” of recovery, namely a pain-free existence? even though i know resistance is futile and painful, i still resist, as if, this time will be any different that the hundreds of times in my recovery journey that have preceded this attempt, the fact is, without change, i would not be where i am today and yet, i resist, i obfuscate, i hide behind a façade of grim determination and only when i cannot stand it anymore i do the next right thing for myself. the reading spoke of the irony of feeling better once i make a decision to move forward and while that is true, the irony as i see it, is in the fact that i know how much better it is to surrender to the program, rather than remain mired in having a life that is unmanageable, and acting in a manner one might call insane. one of my favorite clichés is: “ resistance to change is more painful, than the change itself.”
what i heard this morning, really had nothing to do with resisting the change or finding relief to the pain of living. a although both of those topics are quite germane to my life. no what i heard was that i can make a choice today, which was an echo of a question i answered last night for another addict. his question was what did i need to do to fins the willingness to stay clean day after day. he was a bit dismayed that i was on the “five-minute” plan for the first six months of this recovery journey and wondered why i even bothered, if staying clean was that difficult for me. i have said it in the past and i will repeat it now, it was simply to avoid what in my mind was a more painful consequence. while that may be true, i “heard” this morning, that was part of the façade i erected between the person i have always wanted to be and the person i was at that particular slice in time. blaming a consequence for my continued abstinence,allowed me to pretend that recovery had nothing to offer me. i could continue to assert that drugs were not the problem, i was an addict in name only and that this whole recovery gig was below me. what it took for me to find the willingness to become a member, was not the desire to avoid consequences, but the desire to be more than just a clean addict. the consequences were always a nice smoke screen for me, but knowing what i know now, had i decided to behave differently, they would not have been nearly as severs as i imagined them to be. truthfully i am grateful that i chose to live in the ignorance and fear until i could no longer stand to be where i was. i need every feeling, every minute of worry, angst and anxiety to arrive at a place in my life where i was finally willing to do what it takes. even in those first six months of five minutes at a time, i could never reach that place of willingness and it was only after i discovered that staying clean, no matter what, in the same room with a pile drugs was to painful, did i succumb and start my recovery journey. the insanity of living with the pain, instead of finding a way out, is overwhelming, even today. the reading reminds me that i DO have a choice and if i make a conscious choice to behave in a spiritual manner, i can certainly be more than i ever was, just for today.
there are sorts of distractions in my life today, and although most do not rise to the level of drug use in my obsessive compulsive world, some of my peers are not so fortunate. what i am quite certain of, and where i place my FAITH, is that if i am awake and present and truly want the change, all i need to do is welcome it and apply the process that keeps me clean, to those very same “outside issues” even though they are not really outside of anything.

∞ DT ∞