Blog entry for:

and letting go of my expectations is the only way i am ever going to be able to accept life as it happens to be. what i uncovered in my TENTH STEP last night, is that i have one set of expectations about how my peers **share** in a meeting for those who have never been in recovery than i do for those who have been **around** recovery for a bit of time. when i got up and left a meeting yesterday and then was confronted in a passive-aggressive manner at the end of the meeting, i was pissed off. how dare they accuse me of finding the childhood stories boring, when actually i left because i was insulted by their implication that “all thieves ARE addicts.“ i could go on, but the realization as i sat last night was that i have been in a mood the past few weeks and all over the map, finding all sorts of examples of how so and so is disrespecting me, by tromping across my boundaries with total disregard. yes the feeling of disgust i felt about their generalization was valid. yes getting up to use the rest room was a valid way to handle my anger. and yes when they came to me to play their victim card about my behavior, i did not bite and say what i really felt. what does any of this have to with expectations that i place on my peers? when that addict opened their mouth to share i had an expectation what they were going to share,, and they met it to a ”T.” the night before, when i was in a very different room, where there were more than one in attendance, what i heard was a desire to find something different. i give those peers a huge break that i do not extend to others, especially those who i seem to have no real desire to change. the question really is who the f*ck do i think i am, to be able to judge the desire of another? which brings me back to the whole part of allowing my attitudes and expectations to be altered by living a program of recovery and seeking to move beyond where i was yesterday.
the fact that i have been more than a bit off kilter over the past ten days or so, is a symptom of me, not meeting my own expectations. walking out on one of my peers, while they share what they “feel” they need to share, so i do not blow up and say something hurtful, is an indication of my spiritual malaise. the cure, as it were, is to write out the next part of my THIRD STEP and discuss what “surrendering” means to me today. ironically, that was the topic of the meeting yesterday, that i chose to walk away from, when i shared. today, well, i may be still way too oversensitive about others treating me poorly, BUT at least i can see that and take a course of corrective action. i do not need to be bailed out by my friends and associates, only to end up in the exact same place, because i am unwilling to look at my part and allow the changes to be manifest within. one will see where this day takes me.

∞ DT ∞