Blog entry for:

my favorite refrain to disqualify myself from getting any better. as my experience overnight on Monday indicate, i am not so different after all. moving in the rarefied air of decades clean, i often can find all sorts of differences, especially with the newest members of my fellowship. i do not struggle to stay clean, and as wonderful as it may sound, that fact lulls me into thinking that things have changed for me. life in the real world of this addict no longer centers on “no matter what.” honestly, if staying clean was something i had to work on, every single day, i would have been long gone. as it is, right now, living a program of recovery, has relieved me of that burden and i CHOOSE to stay clean, on a daily basis. i am not, however the only one living in the world of decades of clean time:

Jay T
we started this journey together
and i am grateful you stuck it out as well.
Congrats on Twenty (20) years clean.

when the refrains of “but i' different,≵ start to play in my head, i have to look at what is going on in my life. it is true, that as i grow, my needs from the fellowship change as well. part of the growth in this last set of steps was a move from deist world view of a HIGHER POWER. more than anything, that new vision has brought me to a whole new place in my recovery and provided more than enough evidence of being “different” from my peers. the part of me i call addiction, uses that slight variation as ammunition to separate me from my peers. after all, if they cannot move into enlightenment of any sort, what do they have to offer to me? the next “difference” is that my desire to use, has been long gone and i am starting too swirl down the toilet of being “well.” now, why do i need any of this recovery stuff, maybe the time has come to take control of my life, which is not all that unmanageable and step out of the sheltering arms of my peers, and into the real world. and so it goes, until, eventually i lose the serenity and balance that recovery has brought to my life.
the fact is, as unique as i may be and how different my program of recovery may look, i am really no different than the newest of the new. i like to think that clean time equals recovery, and in some ways it does. one does not accumulate clean time, at least this one, without doing some work. at least for me, i am not fond of doing work that does not have a result or two. when i think back to being “different” and counting down the months until i would get my freedom, i am grateful that i finally “got” the fact that i am an ordinary, garden variety addict, who needs to learn a different manner of living, just for today.

∞ DT ∞