Blog entry for:

to do whatever it took to find the ways and means to get high? of course i was and what a silly question. recovery, however, is not the same as active addiction. for me, once the NEED to use left me, and staying clean became a choice, my willingness evaporated into the vaporware i often thought it was. i was left with these choices: live a program of recovery and thrive, stay clean and white-knuckle abstinence, or attempt a life of controlled using.
when i consider those choices today, and yes staying clean and living a program of recovery is my default choice, i wonder what the price i pay for each one, is or would be. the attractive part of what is behind door number three, as it were, is the fact, it is a road i have never taken and the story i tell myself about that today was maybe it was just a phase i had to live through for twenty-five years. since i was already middle-aged when i came to recovery, maybe this whole recovery gig, was a response to my mid-life crisis and now that the consequences for using have been removed from my life, well, you know…
yup there it is, plain as day, the nature of my reservations, instead of me being “too young” for recovery, i was actually going through a mid-life thingy and i was pretty damn sure i had no reservations 😎 ️! what i heard this morning was not necessarily this reservation in so many words, but certainly the entry point into becoming aware of it. it is not a new notion and the fact that i can articulate it without any hesitation this morning speaks volumes to the story i have been telling myself lately. the trap here, at least for me, is the length of time, since the last time i used. what i forget, quite handily, is at that time, there was no choice. i marked off time on a calendar and counted the number of times i had to “submit” a sample, to find the moment each month, when i could “scratch that horrendous itch,” and get away with it. remembering the relief i felt, when i could release that pressure, is probably a better lesson for me, than looking at the manipulative behaviors i had to do to reach that spot. compliance sucks, even to this day, i am averse to complying. i want to think that i have real choices and FREEDOM.
the other story i seem to be falling back on, once again, is maybe i am not like my peers, after all, especially those who have similar amount of clean time, hence the false humility trip to make myself feel closer to the majority of my peers, rather than the “one-percenters.” ironically, i hear their own versions of a “few days clean,” now that i am listening for it. i cannot say what their motives may be, but i do know mine, it is to feed my need to decrease the distance between me and the majority of my peers. if i can “pretend” to be one them, i am worthy of their attention. as strange as it may sound, my bouts of false humility are the result of my less than stellar self-worth. the way out of that pit of misery, is to take some direction and do whatever it takes, just for today.

∞ DT ∞