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being just who i am and nothing more, i encounter more than a few obstacles in my way, most of them erected by me, myself and i. yes in this respect i am certainly my own worst enemy. i want everyone to see me has better than i am, more recover, more spiritual, more balanced and certainly more sane. i am just humble enough to realize that fact and most of the time, i share the darker side of what is happening inside of me, that others may not detect. so there is this seemingly eternal battle going on inside of me, humility versus character defects, and it is never clear which side actually wins which skirmish. this morning, as i sat, i heard more than once, that to be myself, i just need to let go of who i may think i am. after nearly sixty-one years of telling stories of who i think i am, that may be the hardest thing i have ever done.
when i was in active addiction, i denied being an addict, hell, i even denied having a “drug” problem. i denied a whole lot of things about how needy and socially inept i was and certainly acted as if i knew something about almost everything. i covered low self-esteem, with conceit and pride and became very adept at seeing the flaws in others, while ignoring those i might stumble across in myself. using, helped me to maintain the illusion of how much better i was that everyone else in the world and that i was the victim of circumstances, born in the wrong time, et cetera. getting clean did little to dispel those myths and early recovery gave me more than a few opportunities to actually bolster that argument, after all, i was far from homeless, jobless, unemployable or desperate. i could compare myself to others, especially those in the fellowship i found myself in, and see i was way different from who i found there. the eighteen months of living the lie that i was in recovery, nearly killed me and certainly did little for me, except bring me to the brink of desperation. even as i was living that lie, intuitively i knew that something had to change and my attempts to “fit in” led to some fairly outrageous deceptions and stories, the same sort of stories i had been telling my whole life to make myself “look like” those i was trying to fit in with and in those days it meant a stories about drinking on a daily basis and hiding the fact that was what i was doing. just to be clear, the pipe on my nightstand was never replaced by a bottle of vodka. breathalyzers and antabuse were part of that window dressing. because i never really had any desire to drink alcohol and was never powerless over it. even when i was self-sponsoring and running amok with a using buddy back east, i was never once tempted to have a drink, but when we left that bar, me driving of course with a gram of my favorite substance in the car, i knew for certain, then and there, that something had to change, or i would use again and probably before i was done with my legal consequence of the last time i had used.
that next set of steps, opened my eyes to my reality and ever since that 6TH STEP, the battle between who i am and who i want the rest of the world to think i am, has been raging. sure there are moments of truce and in the yin and yang of the Tao of Don, much of this makes sense. as those forces settle in and stop fighting and find some balance, i will feel better about my outside matching my insides. ironically, i probably have shared this sort of stuff, for every year since i first started writing this blog, and every year it is probably not to dissimilar than my entry today. today, however i admit i am powerless over the stories i have told myself, to the point of believing them myself, and foisting those same stories onto my peers. as a result, my life is unmanageable, as it is difficult to remember who knows what, and what have i left on the table to come back to haunt me today. just for today i can explore that unmanageable aspect of my life and allow myself the freedom to forget about who i desire to be in the eyes of others and be the man i am today.

∞ DT ∞