Blog entry for:

my face and my ass at the same time, requires more skill than i have learned over the course of my recovery journey. i am not saying that it cannot be done, i just have never figured out how to accomplish that task, and trust me, i have tried.
it is quite true, i do my best to look better than i am feeling. long before i used that very first time, i learned that showing how i was really feeling was a sign of weakness. revealing what was really going on, opened me for ridicule and lessened the power i had in social situations. more importantly letting others know that something was bothering me, provided ammunition for them to harm me.i was not the healthiest kid on the block emotionally, even before taking that first dab of mind-numbing magic and using for twenty-five years did nothing to undo those attitudes. to say the l;east, i was closed off, calculating, emotionally dead and unable to face anything life sent down the pike towards me. i am fairly certain, that during my very first fifth step, my sponsor wondered what it would take for me to actually open up and let anything out. i can say today, that fifth step was a calculated piece of writing, with the pretense of being open, but in actuality just another exercise in saving my face, at the expense of my ass.
here i sit, approaching the end of another trip around the sun, clean and wondering what in the world happened. BTW, flat-earthers, you really are ignorant and you are far from being persecuted. my question to you is how can i travel in a straight line in any direction and end up in the same place? that question is not to dissimilar to the ones i asked myself way back when, especially when it came to asking for help. i believed that living behind walls kept me from getting injured. the thicker and higher the walls the safer i felt. so looking good, was always what it was about and no matter how much evidence i had to the contrary, it was recovery and my peers, who were out to make me look bad and tear me apart. my alternative facts were, that even people with significant clean time, ever let anything slip and the groups i was attending in those first eighteen months of recovery, were doing exactly that, providing evidence for the case i was building against recovery. they all talked about this or that, threw out slogans and very rarely gave any insight into what was really going on inside of them. learning to emulate those pillars of that other fellowship's community, in my sick and twisted mind, meant adding all the trappings of that sort of recovery, to my life, without making any changes to who was inside. a “pimp my ride,” version of recovery, looking good, feeling like shite.
ah, but that was quite some time ago. making the move to the fellowship that has given me a new manner in which to live, has also given me the courage to step out from the bumper stickers and slogans, and actually let others know when my life is not quite as stellar as it appears to be. i still fantasize about someday learning to save both my face and my ass at the same time, but the empirical evidence is that it cannot be done, on any sort of regular basis. i can CHOOSE to save my face, or i can CHOOSE to save my ass, but when it comes down to staying clean, looking good, strong and invincible is never, ever going to keep the pipe from out of my hands. today, i am feeling good and best of all, looking good, as it is a good day to be clean. oh yeah -- it is true Jason S, “good” is NOT a feeling, i am using it as a figure of speech, not as something literal.

∞ DT ∞