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what happens when the magic wears off and the fireworks are over, as one of my peers seemed to be asking me the other night. an excellent question, and one i have posed more than once to my sponsor. my pithy reply was “who needs magic and fireworks when one has FAITH?” not all that dissimilar to the response i got from my sponse. part of the weight i am feeling these days, is a growing dissatisfaction of my need to stick close to the fellowship and actually do what i have been doing for all those days in a row. the monotony of life in recovery, and i have to admit it -- recovery can be boring and routine, is one of the weapons i use against myself to disqualify myself from an ongoing recovery program. the depth of my sophistry to avoid the fact that it is ONLY because of my routine and habitual practice of the tenets of recovery, that i have arrived at a spot where i can find my life a bit on the dull side, even though it is rarely the same day to day. when i think of those who have arrived at a similar spot in their recovery journey and decided to return to using after achieving two decades clean, i get it on all sorts of levels.
the part of me i call addiction constantly tells me it is not enough. my desires are still unfulfilled and i am entitled to so much more. as a result, instead of trying to achieve what i have not in the time i have been clean, a little dip into the pharmacopoeia of delight, will relieve my suffering and cushion the blow things are as good as they are going to get. just as the ninety and one-hundred and eighty day wonders do, i have trapped myself in an argument that i cannot win. i have a good life these days, now all it needs is a little sumthin', sumthin' to spice it up, what could that hurt and no one ever needs to know.
while that argument is a crude version of what is really going on in my head, i am much more subtle than that with myself,l it all comes down to thew two pillars of my addiction: FEAR and DESIRE. the desire for ever increasing amounts of stuff, fuels expectations that can never be met and eat away at my heart, my soul and my FAITH in the program that has got me to this point. DESIRE coupled with FEAR, creates within me the uncertainty and doubt that i may be wasting my time, after all i am just a garden variety addict and soon or later i am going to use, why not just get it over with and move along. without fireworks and magic, what can i really get from the fellowship and a program of recovery, anyhow. with that sort of argument, i can see why my peers step away from the fellowship and step into the lives they have given and become “birthday” participants, showing up occasionally to say how grateful they are and disappearing into the ether until next year. is that really the sort of recovering addict i want to be? of course the alternative is to switch to a substance specific fellowship, get a card that says i can “medically” use a substance and keep my clean time as well. which as appealing as it may be, seems even more hypocritical and evil than the first choice for me. so what do i do, now that the magic is gone?
i look for new ways to express my recovery. carrying the message in different venues, or <GASP> actually learning to socialize withing my peer group and seek joy in connecting with them, as a person and not some sort of recovery paragon of virtue. it is true, i never want to be a visitor or a tourist in the fellowship that has got me here. it is also true, that i can find a bit of gratitude to the people who have stuck by through this journey and look for what i have, instead of what i want. truth be told, i have far more than i ever dreamed was possible, BECAUSE i got sentenced to recovery and not despite it.

∞ DT ∞