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of recovery, is one of the things i TRY to do, when i attend a meeting. i feel it is my responsibility to share a message of HOPE even when i hardly feel hopeful. it is my responsibility to share what is on my heart, rather than **ripping** one of my peers to pieces because what they shared was unmitigated bullsh!t. i have this forum to do that and as i sat this morning what popped off the the top of the stack was my reaction to the “positive report” one of my peers was all atwitter about.
i admit it, i am a stickler about the precise use of language and have been know to seek alternate definitions for terms i do not like. case in point, the word surrender. a long, long time ago, i can still remember, that when i needed to “surrender” to the program, it galled the living crap out of me, as i was certainly one of those “never give up” kind of addicts. i looked up the word surrender and out of all the definitions that i was presented, i CHOSE to accept that surrender for this addict meant to “cease fighting.” <BOOM> just like that, i arrived at my first accommodation with a twelve step program, that allowed me to live this new way of life. what got me roiling inside last night was when my peer shared about changing the meaning of words so that it was not “upsetting” to them. so sort of psycho-babble about “rewiring” the meaning of words, especially those they did not like. i was so ready to go off and let them have it with both barrels of my intellect, as they came to an intellectual gunfight armed with only a paring knife. being reminded by another peer, that cross-talk and aiming my shares at another member was not conducive to maintaining an atmosphere of of recovery, i went the discretion is the better part of valor route.
as i sat this morning, what i was most distressed by ten hours later was at their insistence that the word “try” was one that deserved significant attention. i do believe that my peer has never done any research into what the word try means. i can see why it might upset them, when i “attempt” to live a program of recovery in all my affairs, i often fall short. 😭  😭  😭 in my mind, that is just life in the big city, i do my best at any given moment and leave it at that. if the goal i am striving for, eludes me, as it often does, i can see if that is in my power and if it is, make corrections to my course. i do not take on missteps in daily living as an indictment of my value as a person, so i need not play games with semantics. i can own that i often fall short and choose to TRY again. it certainly is a great day to strive to live a program of recovery to the best of my ability.

∞ DT ∞