Blog entry for:

recovery equals and can be measured by the amount of: money, popularity and people in my life continues to get me into trouble. i opened a can of worms as i closed out my blog yesterday, thinking about how isolated one of my peers has made themselves. i fell into a pattern of comparison and as i sat this morning, contemplating my **greatest need,** the topic of forming long-lasting, intimate relationships with my peers, popped off the stack. i am not the most social creature on the block, by any stretch of anyone's imagination, BUT i do know that it is BECAUSE of recovery, i have become a whole lot better connected to the world around me. it is also true that i can act aloof and detached from crowd, certainly a learned behavior that served me well in active addiction and has protected me from all sorts of real and imagined harms across the course of my recovery. as long as i am “above the fray,” i cannot be touched. needless to say, that is one of the behaviors i am willing to surrender to the POWER that fuels my recovery.
what that brings me around to, comes again to watching my peer get less and less connected to the very source of recovery, the wide spectrum of recovery experience offered by the fellowship that i find close by and accessible. what i hear from that peer, is a status-conscious bit of prejudice, that i have fallen victim to as well. in the course of my recovery, i have often sought out “bigger and better” recovery because i wanted to be “brighter and shinier” than my peers. i often made the mistake of equating tolerance for friendship and respect. once i got over my bad self and stopped trying to “hitch my wagon” to the recovery of others, i found what i needed much closer to home. i get invited to do things outside the rooms, because <GASP> i have built a relationship or three, on more than just sharing the air in a meeting, with my peers in recovery.
it is true, i still traipse off to Boulder twice a week for my usual meetings. there is a huge but there, to justify that behavior when it just is who i am these days. i could offer pages and pages of criticisms of my local fellowship, but what it comes down to is that i only go to three or so meetings a week and most of my friends in recovery attend two of the Boulder meetings. what i am getting a sense of this morning, is that the time for me to let go of my biases and prejudices about what i do and do not “see” here in my home town, is long past due. the greatest gift i got this morning, is the realization that the only person keeping me “apart” from those i need, is me. just for today, i think i will look no further than down the street for what i need to stay clean today.

∞ DT ∞