Blog entry for:

to experience the **negative** feelings associated with death and loss, is a gift of recovery i have come to cherish. i have has to face death more than once in recovery, starting with the death of my Gringa at six weeks or so clean. my experience is that i have not had to use to survive the feelings that came from any of the deaths i have faced in my recovery, nor have i died from those feelings either. those experiences were painful. they were an example of life on life's terms and by walking through them clean i GOT to learn that all feelings are valid and i am worth experiencing the FULL RANGE of human emotion. it is true, that when i was using, i enjoyed the side-effect of getting high that trimmed off the extreme feelings and the deaths i experienced in active addiction had my feelings drowned in a chemical witch'brew, that numbed me to insensitivity. i was unprepared for the avalanche of sorrow, regret, anger, despair and grief that buried me when i faced the first time in my recovery journey, someone close to me died. the fact is, i did, i stayed clean and here i am today, no worse for the wear and tear upon my emotional state. now that i have the immediate part of the topic off my chest, i actually heard something quite different when i sat this morning.
what i “heard” has to do, once again, about the so-called “positive” and “negative” feelings. my peers will often go on about how they try to live their lives in a “positive” manner, repressing their “negative” feelings and if that works for them, then more power to them. for me, however, i have come to a place in my emotional growth, where i choose not to label feelings such as anger, remorse, sadness and guilt as “negative.” i can remember being told, to always smile, when i was growing up and that there was no reason for me to be sad, after all, look at all that you have. part of the reason i probably resist those feeling of gratitude is more than likely out of rebellion to the messages i got as i was growing up. i do not blame my parents for that, they did the best with what they had, and i was far from perfect myself. i internalized the message that, no matter what, i NEEDED to be freaking grateful for what i had to stop whining about what i did not have. when i used for the very first time, all that pretense could be dropped and although i did not whine like the spoiled, petulant and moody teenager i was, i no longer felt the NEED to do so, getting high made the world, for the first time ever, feel just the way it was supposed to be. for the next twenty-five years, i chased that feeling, never quite getting there again, but certainly close enough for government work. with that sort of history, it is no wonder it took me so long to come around to the notion that a feeling is just a feeling and labeling a feeling and dropping into a bucket, is not a healthy way for me to live.
today, just for today, i GET the notion that feeling all of my feelings, is FREEDOM. the prison of putting my feelings in some sort of box, while tempting, is a sick reaction to life in general. i NEED to be whole, and feeling all of my feelings, is part and parcel of being whole and genuine. yes i can be angry at my friends in recovery and let them know, before it turns into a resentment. it is my actions after i have a feeling where i dwell these days. some of those behaviors are “good” and some not so “good.” i have been give the gift of choice when it comes to these behaviors, when i allow the POWER that fuels my recovery, the opportunity to present to me a choice. i can be better that a collection of reactions to what life spins down my way today and facing death is just one of those things that may or may not happen, in the course of this twenty-four slice of life.

∞ DT ∞