Blog entry for:

in my program is a topic i write about often, especially the role they played in keeping me from being a **member** of any twelve step fellowship for the first eighteen months of my clean time. that reservation, exploded as it was all those days ago in that basement apartment in New Jersey, still has a few echoes in my life from time to time, especially when i see a friend who has uncovered the means to use in an apparently **controlled** fashion. looking at how their life has not **blown-up,** it makes me wonder if i could walk down the same path. after a minute or so, living in that fantasy, i realize that for me anyhow, i would always crave something **more** and feel disconnected from the spiritual path that brings me internal landscape out of the chaos i once knew.
this morning, i am quite certain that i am an addict and that for me, using will make my life more unmanageable than i can stand. i did not walk into recovery being anywhere close to cool, calm and collected, but i certainly could emulate that state of being, when on the inside i was a seething mass of chaotic feelings, thoughts and fantasies of getting “even” with a world i felt had dealt me a losing hand. those feelings of being “stuck” in a place i could never understand, did not recede in a minute, nor are they totally absent from my life today. what is true and where the HOPE lies for this addict, is the evidence that this program of recovery works for me and continues to do so.
my so-called “iron-clad” case against recovery goes to the heart of this issue. i can safely say that when this program of recovery stops working for me, i will move along top something else, possibly an attempt at “controlled” using. i say that with all sincerity and the catch has always been, at least since i stumbled upon this reservation has been, how do i measure whether or not the program is still working? there is no objective measure of serenity, acceptance, or FAITH, at least none that i have found. the subjective measure comes down to my daily inventory and a question i ask myself is did i do everything in my life today to foster my recovery journey? if i did, was i more open, honest and tolerant to the world around me, than i was yesterday? so far, i have yet to activate my iron-clad case and i seek a better me through the process of working an active program of recovery. to use a cliché the work i do pays dividends in living a life i could only envy and i am not talking about the material world, i am talking about the internal world that i could never quite wrap my head around. just for today, i think i will do what i did yesterday and see how things work out.

∞ DT ∞