Blog entry for:

although i did not step back in time and see what i wrote a year ago on this topic, i have a pretty good idea and i think that perhaps this morning i may go another direction. or not that will be seen when i go take another look. a promise to me means that if i do such and such, i can expect a certain result. a gift on the other hand comes just from being around. i started my recovery life in another fellowship where the twelve promises are repeated and repeated and repeated over and over again, until they get drilled into your head. so coming to the fellowship that gave me this new life i had let down when i discovered that there was only a single promise -- the freedom from active addiction. man what a bummer, here i had to trade twelve promises for one, and i thought i got ripped-off big time! :))
it took some time to realize that the only promise i ever needed was that freedom anything else is gravy. from that freedom i received more gifts than i can even begin to count, but being the obsessive type i am i will enumerate a few -- kind of like a mini gratitude list so to speak.
the first gift i received was that i got to know, accept and yes even love the person i am. while ripping and running i had betrayed my core moral values so many times that i grew to loathe the man i saw in the mirror every morning. the more i betrayed myself the worse i felt, and the more i had to use in both quantity and frequency. the things i had to do to feed that need cut deeper into my self-image and cycle spiraled down out of control. recovery removed the using component of that cycle and allowed me to find out what kind of person i was once the substances and behaviors were removed. freedom from active addiction gives me the chance to become the person i always wanted to be.
another gift i got, was the ability to form relationships of all sorts: friends, significant others, peers, and sponsees. honestly when i got here i was down to two friends, tons of acquaintances and my family. my active disease systematically removed all my desire to maintain any sort of long-term relationships. people were disposable once they served my purposes or when they started to want more emotionally than i was ready to give. the gift of desiring relationships and the willingness to do the work to maintain them comes from the freedom of active addiction. after all i now believe that i am a worthwhile person and worthy of having people intimately involved in my life.
the last gift i will expound on today is a connection to the divine, unseen world. active addiction created a deep-seated cynicism in me that dismissed any claims of the supernatural, after all if it could not be detected by my senses how could it exist. i mean looking back on that whole mindset i could accept that matter was created of parts that were well beyond my senses to detect, but i accepted the fact of electrons, neutrons, protons and quarks on FAITH even though i could not see, touch, smell or hear them. the evidence of their existence was all around me in the physical matter comprising the universe around me. the divine however was a different matter, i could dismiss the physical evidence as luck or coincidence and i did. recovery has give me a more open mind and the ability to feel a connection to the world beyond my physical senses and to seek another manner to fill the emptiness within me.
of course i could list the material gifts, the dreams i have fulfilled, the abilities i have been given and make this blog much longer than it needs to be. the freedom from active addiction was a much greater promise than those twelve i had come to know by rote, after all that single promise gave me a whole new life beyond my wildest dreams and reawakened the hope that i thought was long dead. and for me the gift of HOPE is one of the most valuable gifts i have ever received and one i try and share with all of those with whom i have contact with today.
it is ironic that a person like me, who only wanted to take from the world is willing to give away his most valuable asset and that is yet another gift from that single promise, i am more than i ever was and if i continue to live the program who knows who i will become? certainly not me, so i think i will keep doing what i need to, to allow the promise to keep happening!
∞ DT ∞