Blog entry for:

in active addiction, is not something i become immune to, just because i have been clean for a few thousand of days in a row. over the past few days, i have been witness to more than one of my peers, with more clean time than myself, spin into a state of being, that i do not wish to finds myself in. i could go on and on about what i think **they** may be doing wrong, but to what ends? until i walk in their shoes, what they feel and think is beyond my ken. what i do know and what i do DESIRE, is not to end up in that place myself. what i have gained in my brief journey in recovery, is a bit of perspective about how i see the world through my own self-centered eyes and everything i value can be swept away, when i tumble down into self-willed madness. i am grateful that i have peers who know and love me, that can provide me the insight i NEED when i start that descent into darkness. i am also grateful that this simple program of recovery has opened my mind enough for me to accept that maybe they are correct and i am the one that is insane.
something that i know about myself is that when it comes to someone “trespassing” against me, i am like the elephant in that tried and true cliché, i NEVER forget. i came to recovery with a litany of sins against me and maintained that list by adding to it. any time i thought someone was “doing me wrong”, <BOOM> i had one more reason to believe in what i did. their misstep became a “pattern of behavior” rather than an anomaly and it needed to be addressed, right now! i would enlist those whom i believed i had influence over to assist in making sure that never, ever occurred again. the place i ended-up in was lonely, isolated and not trusted, and i wondered WTF i had done to deserve that fate. in short i was back in my own hell, with clean time and recovery and that hell was nearly as bad as the hell that brought me to recovery in the first place.
this morning, i CHOOSE not to suffer the slings and arrows of my own insanity and am working on helping a co-worker get up to speed on what needs to be done as part of our jobs. he, like me, suffers from not being able to let go of faulty assumptions and what he thinks he knows. my insanity, at least in this regard, was trying to cast him in my image, when clearly “pattern-spotting” and intuitive thinking are not part of his make-up, or if they are, he has yet to demonstrate those abilities. the fact is, his skill-set is not mine and i am just as “locked” in how i do things as he is. today, as i go through what we have to “train” on and bring him slowly around to what we need to do, i will need to let go of my insane, circular reasoning and see what i can do to help him let go of his.

∞ DT ∞