Blog entry for:

eggs in one basket, is without a doubt a behavior i have used and abused throughout my life. the beauty of relying on the fellowship, rather than my rather limited number of closed-mouth friends, is that i can find the HOPE i need to stay clean, just for today. in the days before recovery, even before i used, i needed validation from my peers. i did not get a whole lot of that, so once i popped my **cherry** and used for the first time, my **need** diminished enough to get by. using, however, did not remove that need and as the days turned into decades, i became more and more reliant on what i was using to make me feel “whole” and fight the need to be validated by those around me. recovery was not the instant validation panacea for me, as it is for some of my peers, BUT, it gave me a path to find what i needed, within myself to build some HOPE, that has morphed into FAITH across the days i have been clean.

Mike C,
SEVENTEEN (17) years clean!
Congrats, my friend
Thanks for making Boxing Day, something to celebrate.

without having to go into the whole “GOD-guy” concept, i have a POWER that i KNOW will keep me clean and provide for my needs, and although my journey from unwilling participant to and active part of my own recovery is an interesting topic, i have been over that ground, many,many times before. i am grateful for the path i have found and even more grateful that i have the willingness to do the next right thing, even when no one is looking.
ironically, as i sat this morning, what came up was my feeling of being butt-hurt because none of my neighbors acknowledged the fact that i got the snow mound removed from the end of our alley. the irony here is that not one of them saw me do it. i did it out of self-interest and now as my back is still a bit stiff and sore from the effort, i am whining that no good deed goes unpunished. 😆 great work when one can get it! 😜
as i sit here and let all my foibles hang out, i KNOW that i am still part of the problem, even when i am also mostly part of the solution. i have the DESIRE to have all that i do acknowledged, because there are times when i still feel as if i am that ten year old boy, crying in my room, because no one likes me. the fellowship gave me a path to finding a POWER to fuel my recovery, keep me clean and provide for my needs. that POWER is part of a distributed grid of all of my peer's HIGHER POWERs and as such, always has my back, even when i do not “feel” that way.
the other thing that popped to the top this morning, is, what will it take before one of my peers realizes that i want nothing to do with them? i kind of believe they think they are similar to water and that over time, the will drip, drip, drip their way back into my life. the truth is, that each and every time they force themselves upon me, i respect them even less. instead of diminishing my feelings of not wanting to have them in my life, they reinforce them, worse they do not even have the enough self-respect to pull me aside and ask why i am behaving the way i am, towards them. that too, is something i lack power over and maybe, just for today, i can allow myself the FREEDOM to realize that is not my stuff. my feelings about them is. how i behave around them, certainly is as well. giving the clueless a clue, not mine. just for today, i can allow a HIGHER POWER to work in their lives as well, and guess what, i am not IT!

∞ DT ∞