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8000+ days clean, i STILL resist doing things differently, clinging to what i delude myself into thinking is immutable. let me distill this down to its base part, i BELIEVED that i came to recovery, whole genuine and self-assured. i BELIEVED i was not an addict and that i was smarter and better than those who were in the rooms, when i sat down and took my seat. i BELIEVED that i would not change and certainly could not be changed through any process, such as the twelve steps. i came to comply with a sentence that was imposed on me, and all that i did in those first eighteen months or so, was simply to look as if i was a paragon of recovery. the fact that i am in recovery today is the result of a chain of serendipitous events that finally led me to see how mistaken my take on myself really was and decide that maybe i “ought” to do something to correct that, after all, i hate being wrong.
this morning, as i sat i begin to feel that nearly all the pain of growth and change i have felt, is because i had to dismantle a belief structure that “protected” from the so-called “real” world. yes i know resistance to change is a topic for another day, and i will that thought right here as well. that belief structure, however, put a spin on the serenity prayer that keeps me unwell to this day. i believe i have the “wisdom” to discern that i cannot change anything, so i just have to accept the status quo and what life dishes out me. even though i have evidence that i am more of a whole lot better in all sorts of ways, BECAUSE i stayed clean and learned to live the program, i still fall back on the “accidental recovery” story to try and convince myself that i am really no better than i was when i “thrown” into the rooms and commanded to sit still for at least three years.
putting that notion down in words is more than a little unsettling as i now realize that the story of the events that got me here, has been polished to the place that it certainly could be used by me to justify my next use. this is the “out” i have been seeking since day one. today, i see that the change i require, is not in how i act, although there is certainly plenty that requires change, or how i think. no the change that i need to work on, is my belief structure, what remains of it and the stories that structure feeds. it is the core beliefs that i have carried with me since before my last day using, that are hindering my process and perhaps it is in this FOURTH STEP, i can find the cracks in that structure to show those stories for the lies they are. maybe, just maybe, the wisdom i seek today is to change what i think, rather than how i think and see what happens. certainly a good path to start of as i step out to the real world and head on down to work.

∞ DT ∞