Blog entry for:

by default, is still an option for me, choosing whether or not to exercise that option is a gift of recovery. a year ago, i started looking at my finances and developed a plan to get myself a bit more financially fit. nine months ago i got an offer that was too good to be true and ended up trying to short-cut my way to a better lifestyle, only to end up deeper in debt and more stressed about paying off my debts than ever before. that lesson in self-will was an expensive one, and although i would love to whine about how f**ked up those thieving bastards are, i know it was my fault for not looking into who they said they were. today anyhow, i can forgive myself for being a “tool” and work within my new plan to get back to where i was a year ago, ready to retire all my consumer debt by living within my means and doing the next right thing. my means just have been a bit reduced these days.
personal responsibility for what i am, what i do and how i react to the world is not a concept i came to the rooms just itching to implement. in fact i was looking for someone else or something else to take the blame and allow me to wallow in self-pity about how unfair and unjust the world was to poor little old me. in the FIRST STEP, i thought i had found the perfect foil, ADDICTION would be my blame bucket, and it was for quite a bit of time in those early days. y favorite line became: “what did you expect, after all, i am an addict🙻”
the days and months passed and i became more firmly entrenched in the “addiction made me do it,” paradigm and i thought that was the miracle that my peers had told me to keep hanging around for. i could do what i wanted blame it on addiction and never look back, and then i became a member and actually worked STEP ONE in the fellowship that became my home, and that nice little blame train got derailed and killed the best excuse i ever had. even though it still took a bit of time for me to come around about accepting the power i do have for my life, that step work altered the course of my life and started me on the path of beginning to see that i have choices and that accepting choice as a part of my life, fosters what little personal power i have accumulated in my recovery journey.
today, while i am saddened about the consequences of the bad choices i have made i am optimistic about having the power to work myself out of this hole. it would be so nice to have a huge chunk of cash fall from the sky into my life, but the probability of that occurring is practically nil. what i am taking away form this is that i have a brain, i have choices and “NO” can be a word that i use when something sounds too good to be true. as i have a very early meeting this morning with another team, i think i will accept that responsibility and get a quick walk under my belt, through the frozen tundra that my neighborhood has become of late. it is a good day to be clean and i can move forward from my mistakes.

∞ DT ∞