Blog entry for:

in the right place, regardless of what i may tell myself about how **worthy** i THINK i feel. as i stumble across my reminders of who has a clean date anniversary, today, i had to remove a close friend and peer, as he made the decision to use. the good news is that he back in recovery, the bad news is he is doing his best to be “different” than the rest of us. ironically, me using the term “us” may actually indicate that i have made a shift in how i view my relationship with the fellowship that has given me this new manner in which yo live. a life that actually makes me pay attention to my friends and peers and acknowledge what they accomplish.

Todd T,
Eighteen (18) years clean.
Wow, way to go my friend.

speaking of irony, i guess my Google has decided that this little ditty is about the dominant spiritual path here and is showing ads promoting stuff that those who follow that path may have an interest in purchasing. blame it on some weird algorithm, but the fact is, i have seen that reality as well. the harder i attempt to define who i am, the more the “signs” seem to want me to return to what i once was. that is, if i happened to believe in signs. this morning i revel in the fact that GOOGLE may see me one way, and i see myself in a totally different way. that difference does not separate me from the pack of my peers in recovery, because it was through their loving understanding that i finally arrived where i am, in so many ways, not just spiritually.
i have recently been writing about how hard i attempted to conform to what i thought was normal for people such as myself. that fact is, what is normal, is for me to be using every single day. not using for seven thousand, seven hundred, and ninety eight days in a row, is NOT normal. that little fact of life should be enough to make me wonder about what is the new normal for me. the struggle over the course of those days, has been to find that “new” normal, and in many ways i have found it. yes, forcing myself to conform and rebelling against that conformity has created far more angst and drama in my life than necessary, but was probably just what i need to find my place in the world. today, i am grateful to be “worth” what it takes to live a program of active recovery and to hang with my peers in the rooms of recovery.

∞ DT ∞