Blog entry for:

to the still-suffering addict, even those i do not know yet. i have often been accused of playing **favorites** when it come to paying attention to my peers and that criticism is not without merit. i am far from the warmest and fuzziest dude in recovery and i often stand back from the parade of newcomers, allowing my peers to take my place in that piece of service work. there are exceptions and especially when i connect with the FNG on some other level, even though i am quite incapable of describing. the reading today brought me to a place of having to look at what it may be in me, that allows me to keep my distance.
over the course of my recovery, i have certainly gone through a “phase” or three about how warm and welcoming i may be, but the one place i do not go, is to swarm a newcomer of the opposite sex. for me, letting go of my NEED to appear all spiritual and welcoming, stops when i believe that i may be enabling another addict not to find a safe place to recover. it is my contentious that swooping in, i am fulfilling my “knight in shining armor” fantasy. although any addict, especially a newcomer, deserves to be welcomed, if i am the one doing the welcoming, i am preventing my female peers from fulfilling their obligation. i know who i am and ten times out of ten, i know what my motives are. pandering to my lowest common denominator, is no longer the person i want to be and i can choose to be better than that. what my peers choose to do is on them, and if detect one of those who trust me to comment on their behavior, behaving badly, i let them know, in no uncertain terms that perhaps they, too, should examine their motives after the rationalizations start flying out of their mouths.
of course, this late in the day, enough has happened that i have certainly moved on from what i heard this morning. the speaker at my home group this morning shared something that is very germane to where i am at in my recovery. i often joke about building and furnishing a house on this step or that, when i am comfortably or not so comfortably “stuck” on a step. this addict may have been in the room where i attended my first meeting or not. he certainly was in the room when i finally had enough freedom to take the bus over to Boulder on a Saturday night, to go to a meeting. in short, he was there as i struggled to pretend i as actually clean. what he said was that even though his concept of a HIGHER POWER was not personified and anthropomorphized, he still prayed. he viewed prayer as an affirmation that he was powerless and needed some POWER in his life to provide what he needed to recover today. that feels as if it is the missing piece in my THIRD STEP, as i was trying to figure out a way to keep prayer as part of my spiritual practice, when it is not part of my spiritual path. as i integrate that notion, into who and what i am, i finally feel complete in my acceptance that i can surrender my will and my life into the care of the POWER that fuels me recovery. i am not there yet, but i finally feel that there is a path forward for me. with that in mind, i think i will take the rest of the afternoon to do absolutely nothing constructive.

∞ DT ∞