Some memes

know enough about recovery, who i am and where i am going, after all, i have over several thousand days clean. okay, the truth is, everything i needed to know about recovery and staying clean i heard in my first ninety meetings. that little inconvenient truth is enough st times to justify all sorts of ridiculous rationalizations about how i live my program today. the story that i tell myself goes something like this:

1. i know how to stay clean.
2. i know that i am an addict
3. if i just stay away from drugs and live my life as an upstanding citizen, all will be well

while that might be quite true, it really does miss the point and the past seven days of my life, would have certainly been reason enough to have just one more of something, anything to ease the pain of living. in fact i heard the “rest of the story” come screaming through as i DESERVE and am ENTITLED to trip into finding something to make me forget the hell of a week that was my pleasure to experience.
what kept me clean? for one thing, inertia. one of the benefits(?) of being an addict my obsessive and compulsive nature. i could not stay clean, because i never was clean, back in the day. being forces by higher powers to stay abstinent was a blessing in disguise, because i developed a habit of abstinence and once i finally arrived in the fellowship, a routine or ritual of recovery that has been part of my daily existence for the better part of twenty years. even though in the beginning i was doing that routine by rote, because i was told to do so, what it became for me, was an opportunity to practice recovery in my life, because i want to do so.
habit, ritual and routine, may keep pushing me along the path of recovery, it does not however, protect me from me telling myself the story that i finally “know enough” to do this gig on my own and BE successful, content and emotionally healthy. the fact of lkife that is not talked about in the fellowship is the number of my peers, who achieve these seemingly huge numbers of days clean and drift out to wherever. i do not wish to become one of those, as i find great solace in sharing my life with my peers in recovery, even when i have no clue what it is like to have twenty-fours clean, any more. oh i can i remember, but in reality, all i remember is what i tell myself. that story goes something like early recovery sucked and i was not going to get suckered into hanging around. i was only going to be here long enough to figure out how to use, with no adverse consequences and i am still looking for the solution to that problem. i need the rooms, my peers and friends and i need to find the ways and means to surrender to that fact, each and every day, especially just for today.

∞ DT ∞