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am an individual, as are my peers in the rooms. i might not buy the line that i was **created** this way by an infallible GOD, BUT i do know that my recovery journey is changing me in ways i deem totally acceptable and have come to welcome. one part of the fellowship that irks me to no end, is intellectual laziness. i am not sure why that popped off the stack this morning as i sat, but it certainly is on the top of my mind now.
in the days between my clean date and the pit of desperation, i heard time and again about how i “needed” to stop looking for the differences between myself and my peers. i “needed” to accept that there was a common, shared experience and those who were here in the rooms when i arrived, could offer me “suggestions” on how to navigate through my life, clean. in those bleak times, i “knew” that i was not going to be around for very long and i was pretty sure that pretending to be assimilated would be more best course of action. of course events did not transpire to make that my reality and when i was finally ready, i was ready.
over the past few days, i have heard the pronouns “we” and “you” thrown around quite liberally by my peers and i see that as a symptom of the intellectual laziness i find so off-putting. although it has been a nice change from the cliché-ridden, bumper sticker shares that can fill the rooms, it feels more than a bit lazy to me and i want to assign motives to why someone would go in that direction, which makes me just as lazy as the perpetrator. once upon a time, i believed that sharing in the first person plural voice was inclusive and was part of not looking for the differences. i was the king of the “we” shares, probably much to the chagrin of my peers. what i was attempting to do, as i uncovered through working my steps, is to make myself feel better about who i was, by casting all my behaviors, thoughts and actions as a common theme, rather than unique to myself, or a few individuals. i was attempting to hide in the herd and it kept me sick. what i learned was that my experience is mine alone and if my peers are similar to me, they will get more out of what i share when i use “me” and “i,” instead. it is true that much of what i thing and many of my thoughts may be shared by my peers, but shmearing them with the same brush as myself does little to foster my recovery.
the other side of that behavior is my use of the pronoun “you.” for me, when i say you, i am giving advice in a meeting and most of the time engaging in cross-talk, sharing at someone specific. i still have an authority issue or two and do not take being told what to do, with much grace. basically, when one of my peers use “you” in a statement, i do not hear anything that follows, as my rebellious side has kicked in. i become intellectually lazy in that instant and the judge, jury and executioner has sentenced my peer to a hundred years of hard labor. the literature is quite clear, that living a program of active recovery, does not mean that i stop thinking, in fact as i stay clean and learn that i do not “know” asking questions and learning to discern the path before me, is a daily task. right now, that path is out and about for a sweaty tour of the local environs and some time to stop thinking and allowing myself the freedom to breathe.

∞ DT ∞