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KNOW and admitting to what i do not KNOW, is a paradigm that was long in coming to me. there are still times when i find myself resisting the urge to give unasked for advice, based on what i think i KNOW. over the course of this past week, on more than one opportunity, i could have played the a**hole authority card and let someone know how f*cking wrong they were and what they “needed” to do. i certainly have some “expert” knowledge on the path of my recovery, but i am severely deficient in the knowledge of how others need to live THE program of recovery that has brought me this far. two facts do stand out:

1. one is an addict only when they are ready to admit to being one.
2. until the desire to use is greater than denial, that admission will never be made.

as i spoke with a friend this week, i realized that unlike me, their test of whether or not they are an addict, is the level of how unmanageable their life is. when i started coming around, i would have never stuck around if my life was any sort of being manageable, it was the fact that everyone was in my life telling me what to do, that kept me coming back, until i was sentenced to the rooms. one of the things that came out of my mouth was a statement that i had not been brainwashed by my peers in the fellowship, which got me to thinking, which is not necessarily a good thing, “what is the true test of whether or not i am an addict and do i know enough to honestly answer that question?”
here is where the “wisdom” of the fellowship fails me. many of my peers have very strong opinions about addiction and who is or is not an addict. they also have very strong opinions on what is being clean and what is not. i agree with many of their opinions, BUT i am quite certain that i am incapable of detecting whether or not someone is an addict or not. if i relied on being powerless a versus my life being unmanageable as my test for “addict-ness,” once the justice system was gone from my life, i world have left, after all, by that time my life was quite manageable and the desire to use, was long gone. by those two standards, i could have seen myself as “cured” or that my using was just a quarter of a century phase i “needed” to go through, to force me to “grow up.” if i had remained in the fellowship where i had started i would have been long gone, as their suggestion of doing a bit of “controlled” drinking would have been an experiment i carried out and IF by some chance my life did not burn down around me after a few cocktails, i would have seen no point in “hanging around.”
today, i KNOW that i am an addict. the evidence for this addict, is that this or that, in any sense of moderation was never enough and my intent ANY TIME i used was to get high and feel “comfortably numb” to the world around me. every drink or alcohol did not necessarily lead to a needle in my arm every single time, but the DESIRE for something more was tempered by my DESIRE to be socially acceptable. since i can readily OWN the fact that i am an addict, i can also own the FACT that the program, is the only way through to being the sort of person i have the DESIRE to become. judging whether or not someone else is an addict, may be an activity i WANT to do, but it is not one i will engage in today.

∞ DT ∞