Blog entry for:

may not be gone, but i have the means to reduce and eliminate them today. what i run up against the most often is that i can **settle** for second best, because striving for first place is a exercise in diminishing returns and not worth the effort. i remember the first time i ran into this and believed not striving for the Captain of Safety Patrol in sixth grade and pretending to be okay taking second or third was the means to get my desire. what i ended up with was Sergeant and that was the first time i saw settling for what i did not want, but accepting it was okay. that set a pattern of how i approached challenges, that was basically unchanged until i finally became a member of the fellowship and took responsibility for my recovery.
sitting here this morning, i can see an example of it cropping up in the last job opportunity that i had. in the code i sent off, i left a very sloppy set of web pages and used a function that is dangerous and is generally strongly advised against using, instead of putting my head down and doing something really hard. my reasoning went that since it was out of scope, perhaps they world forgive me. well they did not and this opportunity has slipped from my grasp. what has not slipped from my grasp is my DESIRE to take what i delivered to them and make it whole and complete, including a “pretty” user interface, so the next time and opportunity comes knocking, i am better prepared to win that competition.
knowing that i “suffer” from my own lack of motivation and the stories that i have told myself for so long, can be a springboard to becoming a better, more secure and certainly freer version of me. the rub here, is combating those stories with reality and a DESIRE to do what it takes. staying clean is easy these days, the inertia of thousands of days in row, makes it seemingly simple. applying myself intellectually and physically not so much. each and every day i do something a bit more challenging, perhaps i will get a reward that i cannot fathom, as i have never done anything like that before. of course, except for getting and staying clean long enough to lose the desire to use. i certainly do not know how far i can go, but today i s a day when i can go a bit further than yesterday, if i do not talk myself out of it.

∞ DT ∞