Blog entry for:

i felt as if i was met by a sales pitch, when i started looking for a way out of the jam i created and thought i could find it in another fellowship. it ended up that fellowship was not the one i would end up building my life in, but those members kept me clean while i noodled around with my cross-fellowship experiment. i lived a life of obstinate self-will, even though the message i kept hearing over **there** was that i could have it all. the **all** part was even written on the printed page and seemed to be what WOULD happen. the conflicting messages of the two fellowships i had settled on, or better put, what i thought was the conflicting messages of those fellowships, fed my notions of being different from my peers and unwilling to really commit to any sort of long-term clean time. what kept me out, my pig-headed ideas of what recovery SHOULD look like for me, actually kept me in, once the DESIRE to stop using, became part of my constitution. one of the “gifts” i get when a recovery tourist comes to visit the fellowship that is my recovery, is to hear that pitch all over again and be grateful that i found a way to recover where i belong.
it is true that when i share, i almost always have a “dark” side to it. i could blame it on those who had clean-time when i got clean, as the fellowship was more direct, harder and raw, back in those days. if i wanted rainbows and unicorns, i could always find it somewhere else. what i got was the “real deal” of what my peers felt, the struggles they were facing and most importantly how they were using the program to stay clean, NO MATTER WHAT. i know that many of the newcomers that came to the rooms when i did, found that message disturbing as what they wanted, just as i did, was the means to return to their lives and not a new way of living. i sincerely believed that i COULD get my life back and it would not include any of this recovery stuff. ironically, here i sit many days later, writing about recovery stuff. the PROMISE of FREEDOM, is more than enough for me today. it is no surprise that i get very few newcomers who ask me to sponsor them, and i am more than okay with that fact of my life. it is not the newcomer that keeps me clean and i do not require “projects” to make me feel good about my life in recovery. i KNOW that each day i decide not to use and commit myself to this program of recovery, is the next right thing for me to do. i cannot stay clean on slogans or what i learned yesterday. IF i want to continue to live out the only promise, i NEED to live a program of recovery, to the best of my ability and the manner in which i “remember the new guy,” is to remember way back when, when i felt i was being “sold” a bill of goods that was no more substantive than the smoke that obfuscated my reality for all those years i used. it is for the promise i live today and the gifts that came out of it, are the bonus for doing the work, just for today.

∞ DT ∞