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anything to hang onto is certainly a theme in my life these days. the FAITH i have in the recovery program that has given a minute clean, is bolstered by what i hear from my peers and how willing they are to get **real.** i can say without a doubt, getting advice from a peer who has been **around** the program for fifteen years and now has ninety days clean again, is probably not something i am going to accept. the only thing i can trust from those sources, is how NOT to do this gig. the stories of “chronic relapsers” are illustrative of what i do NOT want in my recovery and serve as an example of what i do NOT need to do. their experience is just as valuable to me as that of any of my other peers with thirty, sixty or ninety days clean.
well i was this close to starting a whole polemic about the relative worth of what my peers share about. instead i decided to turn a corner and go back to my original premise of having to trust what my peers choose to share and actively listen for their message of HOPE. way back when, in those dark times that i had very little HOPE and even less FAITH, i remember trying to figure out who was sharing about the “real” deal and who was just pitching a line of bullsh!t. the fellowship in those days was a bit “harder” and certainly more raw, so most of the “posers” quickly abandoned ship and high-tailed it over to somewhere easier and certainly softer. i was one of those posers, but instead of running i tempered my reality with the cliché-peppered and “sharing for the newcomer” message i heard in another fellowship. after my posing got exposed, yes i took clean time tokens for six months while i used at every opportunity i could find, i spent six months hiding out in that other fellowship because i was to ashamed of using, lying and cheating. do i believe that made my recovery stronger, no way, what it did do is cement the relationship between myself and the fellowship in which i now recover.
learning to trust what i heard in the rooms in both of those fellowships was a long fought battle, based on the fact that i thought i had “fooled” them all, and the nature of my shame was in not getting away with my charade. one might argue that it is evidence of a HIGHER POWER looking out for me, and i went down that path for a very long time. in the end, i saw that it was my hubris and arrogance that was at play. had i taken the additional day i had been gifted, before i marched in to provide a sample of bodily fluids, i am not sure what the course of my life would have been. more than likely, it would not have ended up at a keyboard wondering why so many of the newest of the new think that they have practical advice to offer on staying clean. i hate to say it, but there is a difference between an addict with ten years clean and ten days clean, and until one sees what it is like to have a decade clean, one probably needs to shut the fVck up about it.
OOPS -- there is go again, so i guess that means i need to wrap this up and head down to the office. for this addict it si a good day to be clean and to allow myself the freedom to express what i am feeling, just for today.

∞ DT ∞