Blog entry for:

in recovery, -> -> here is where i insert of the litany of all the things i could or was not capable of doing in active addiction, followed by the inventory of the gifts i have received and topped off with a bit of a comparison to who i was when i walked into the rooms <- <-. yeah i know, that sounds a bit cynical, but it is also true, that as i stay clean, what once was, is no more and the message of HOPE i carry, to myself and to others, is based on what was and what is, today.the simple fact is, although i may be the same person who was sentenced to recovery, the changes that have manifest in my life, because i CHOOSE to live a program of recovery, makes me appear to be someone totally different. in active addiction i DESIRED everything i have today, i just was clueless about how to obtain it.
here i go again with this whole DESIRE trope. i am not sure why i am so stuck on it, perhaps, it is because of all the parts and pieces of me that may make my life unmanageable, it is DESIRE that binds them all, in in darkness rules them. i certainly have come to see that addiction is desire warped out of shape, even those parts of desire that are desirable, such as the desire to meet my basic needs to live, food, shelter and companionship. looking at what was left in active addiction, i was willing to be alone and starve to death, just so i could use one more time, i had yet to cave on the shelter bit of that triad. it is interesting that as i accumulate some time, i can look back and see the man behind the curtain in those days, to which i had long stopped paying any attention. what i denied and what i was unwilling to face was what was the most painful for me, namely that i was alone and owned by my need to live a “better” life through chemistry.
thinking about who i am and the story i tell myself today, i realize that the elements are more similar than i want to admit. i am still driven by addiction, that is a fact of life. i still DESIRE immediate gratification and i still get frustrated and butt-hurt when things do not go my way. i still want to control outcomes and i still have bouts of toxic self-will. not a whole bunch of HOPE there. the real HOPE comes from the notion that what was once the overarching theme of my existence, has been delegated to background noise, under the roar of my active program of recovery. living in the here and now, and letting go of all that once mattered to me, such as being right, having an answer all the time and “fixing” stuff, are certainly symptoms of a way of life that eluded me when i was using. today, the man behind the curtain is less afraid of what one might find behind the smoke and mirrors, because what one see, is what one gets over 90% of the time and i am working on the other 10%, just for today

∞ DT ∞