Blog entry for:

i wonder what course my life might have taken if it i had not been **sentenced** to recovery. before i go too far down that path, let me be perfectly clear. i am grateful that the way things worked out, i GET to be in recovery today. all the trappings of my normal looking life are great. self-knowledge and the ability to care for others and allow them to care for me, is even more profound. what i have been given, since coming to recovery is probably far more than i gave up and the sacrifices and effort i have invested into living this recovery program, certainly have been paid dividends. that does not stop me from contemplating the alternate universe of where i might be today if only i had diverged back into the using life, when the sword of justice was removed from over my head. i know that contemplating where i might have been, is certainly not politically correct, to most of my peers, but i personally do not care as i see it as an interesting exercise.
at the time when my life came crashing down, i was working for my parents, living in a rented room in Martin Acres, using my bicycle and the bus for transportation and slinging just enough dope to subsidize my habit. i had given up on long term romantic relationships and my only hobby was rafting the rivers of the West with a bunch of characters who could certainly use like i did. extrapolating from that set of circumstances to where i may have ended up if after a few years abstinent i decided that using was what i might want to do, i can see that there was not a whole lot of directions i could go. chances are, i would be in my brother's house, underemployed after my parent's business folded, wondering how the fVck i am going to get my next fix and regretting all the choices i had made. there might have even been more than additional trips through the local county lock-up and maybe a quick trip down south as a ward of the state of Colorado. i have more than enough examples of those who have come and gone from the rooms, to see that as a distinct possibility. i would still believe i “knew” everything i needed to know and would be a practitioner of “fox-hole” praying, my arrogance, conceit would have been unchecked as i grew less and less satisfied with the direction of my life and who knows, maybe even the thought of an OD suicide would have been on my mind. not a whole lot of hope in any of that and certainly not a whole lot of hyperbole either, as when i look at that path, i do not see any indications of a life like i have today.
when i finally stopped being so pissed off for being forced into living clean and saw it for an opportunity, instead of a burden, i started to find a bit of gratitude for that “bitch” of a probation officer who “forced” me to land on this path. i GET to have all the trapping of a “normal” life and i GET to have the means to better myself as a person, thanks to the program of recovery, i am learning how to live. which reminds me, i NEED to move on down the road and get to one of those gifts: a full-time job that pays me very well. just for today, no matter how high the costs i gratefully pay my dues to live another day in recovery.

∞ DT ∞