Blog entry for:

or unable to make choices, means that i am NOW a victim of life and not a participant. why would i say that and how would i know? to start with, it was HOW i lived my life in active addiction, in the days between my first meeting and when i finally became a member, and yes, even for a few years beyond that. by choosing NOT to choose, i GET to blame everyone and everything for the messes i end up in and i GET to take the credit when things go right.avoiding the responsibility and shifting the consequences and the blame, certainly seemed a sure-fire way to build my self-esteem, that is until the day i started to wake up. since that day, i deal with the blessing and the curse of making decisions and taking responsibility for those decisions.
and there you have it, my take on what the JFT reading was all about this morning, so i guess i can wrap this up and…
… but wait there is MORE.
i touched on two big issues in my life up in my paraphrased version, namely self-esteem and victimization. i know there are very REAL victims in this world and my intention is not to trivialize the reality of their lives. the honest truth is i lived many years believing that i, too, was a victim. a victim of some enormous cosmic joke or conspiracy to keep me down, quiet and in my place. none of that was ever true, the only one participating in making me a victim, was yours truly, me , myself and i. it was the easier, softer way to live in that manner, and it helped build the narrative that i could never be the best at anything, that has been running through my head, since i do not know when. when i came to be sponsored by my current sponsor, he suggested i practice being aware of what is going on, in the here and now. that i practice paying attention to the world around me, and the result of that focus, is that the narratives and stories i once held near and dear to myself, start to lose their power. when i want to slip[ back into living my life by default and i do, as i see many of my peers, even those with thousands of days clean, i remember how hard i have worked to achieve the small measure of FREEDOM i have today. the question i ask myself is this: am i willing to accept the consequences of choosing not to choose? i can live my life in front of a TV screen, streaming pirated videos and wondering how the heck i ended-up here, OR i can participate in my life and accept that there is good and bad, in every day. sure, i failed my test yesterday, it was not for lack of effort nor because i did not prepare, it was because i am not as good as i think i am and i NEED to decide to sharpen my skills, through practice and doing, choosing to let my DVR rest for another week, while i practice my craft.
i could take on my lack of success as a link in an unbreakable chain that ties me to my current job. OR, as i choose to do this morning, see my failure as a impetus to do what i NEED to do, to grow professionally. sitting on my step work, is similar. i know the advantages i GET when i choose to work steps actively and yet i hem and haw, and wait until i just cannot stand myself and my life anymore, before i do the work. it is not an unfamiliar pattern for me, and i see many of my peers, who seem to act the exact same. the payoff for me is that the part of me i call addiction, can feed those self-deprecating narratives that i so carefully crafted over the course of the decades of my life, before i decided to wake up and be a part of the world. i am worth more than falling victim to my own stories today and i CHOOSE to go to work and be grateful that another paycheck has been deposited, just for today.

∞ DT ∞