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which is neither easy nor simple to achieve. one may wonder that why after a decade or two clean, someone would still be looking to improve their honesty with themselves. in my case, what i see and what i hear is just a fraction of what is going on inside. i am a great storyteller and the one person who believes just about all of my stories, is me! more on that in a bit.
last night, at book club, i heard the most amazing thing. two of our members are staunch conservatives and live their lives in a very moral fashion. they live what they believe and i respect them greatly for that sort of example. one of them says very little about our current Commander In Chief, it seems to me that if he has nothing good to say, he chooses to say nothing at all. the other one makes all sorts of excuses and spins what the President says, to fit what that particular echo chamber is using to excuse the current administration and its use of lies, obfuscation and “alternate facts.” i can not speak to his motives and this change has only recently become apparent. i use this as an example about how my levels of self-honesty have been morphed over the days i have been clean.
once upon a time, i believed everything i told myself about me, the world around me and life in general. i could fabricate the best rationalizations and justifications for the most outrageous behavior without skipping a beat. i simply could do no wrong, regardless of what one thought they saw. everything i did made sense to me and was on the up and up. getting clean did very little to disrupt that pattern, after all it was all about just not lying, was it not? that first set of steps was all about how look as if i was in recovery, as i planned my exit to my so-called real world. until the dark night in New Jersey, i was no better than the day i got caught using, just abstinent.
that second set of steps, finally opened a door and my mind to be something more than a clean horse thief. sure i could speak the language of recovery and simulate a recovery-like sort of life, but up until i asked Mike to be my sponsor, that was all it was, a simulation to impress and hide behind. perhaps that is why i am having difficulty accepting the recovery of one or two of my peers, been there done that, got the T-shirt. coming clean, spiritually, was a process that only started for me, in my second set of steps. as i sort through the refuse of twenty-five years of using and burying the bodies in a place where no one, even me, could find them, i reach new levels of self-honesty that allow me to grow into something i have always wanted to be. the hour, however, grows late and i would be lying if i said i had a strong desire to go to work and face my busy day. honestly i would rather stay home and veg all day. i do however, have bills to pay and obligations to meet and quite honestly, going to my job is really not the most heinous thing i can imagine. it is a good day to be clean and a better day to allow myself the freedom to be something better than i was when i woke up this morning -- a bit more honest and genuine and a bit less selfish and self-centered.

∞ DT ∞