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one might say that i entered recovery as a control freak, doing my best to keep my **true** self under wraps and manipulating the world to affect the outcome of everything in my life. one might also think, that after a few days clean, i would be in a place where i have given up any fantasies that i once held dear, about controlling anything in the world around me. seeing the world and myself in such absolute and seemingly mutually exclusive states, is also a set lenses i entered recovery wearing. it was all or none. one was a symptom of total success and the other abject failure and defining myself in such black and white terms, led to many moments of turmoil and angst. this morning i need to go to that place and yes, at times i can listen for the will of the POWER that fuels my recovery.
as i sat the past few days, a few things that my peers have been sharing gnawed at me. once upon a time, especially when i was steeped in controlling the world, to the best of my ability, i separated everything out to nice, neat compartments. i had a work life, a family life, a social life and the party-animal life. i worked very hard to keep them from intersecting and the effort seemed to pay off. when i got clean, i replaced latter with recovery life and truly believed that if i was going to ever succeed, i would have to keep all those “parts” of me separate and distinct. in early recovery, started the merging process and by the time i had five or so years clean, the way i viewed myself came down to two separate and distinct parts ↝ the addict and the rest of me. thew addict was an outside force that “made” me do things against my will and on whom i could blame any missteps that i made. it was my scapegoat and certainly my savior, as i did not have to take any responsibility for anything. as a result, i got a free pass on nearly everything less than stellar in my life and could take full credit for any successes.
i could have gone on that way, blurring the lines a bit, as it seems many of my peers do, but one day i awoke to the fact that the addict was me, and not some outside force and i would never get any better, unless i replaced “addict” with “me, myself and i.” the most disturbing part of this transformation was in the phrase that “my addict wants to kill me, but will settle for me being loaded.” that became i want to kill myself, but will settle for getting loaded. the first time i said that out loud, i nearly broke into a million little pieces. since that time, however, i have found that my recovery became a whole lot less messy and certainly a whole lot more fulfilling. i work a single set of steps and when i get stuck or need to shift my focus, i start over again and work my way up to where i was. i no longer have a “committee” in my head and i no longer blame “addiction,” for whatever missteps i take in a day.
what does that have to do with listening for GOD's will and applying it in my life? just about everything, as i no longer need to erect a barrier between the disparate parts of who i am. i get to be me and i get to take responsibility for what i do. i get to be something more than just another addict in recovery. that something more is a person who is becoming, whole, genuine and self-aware, just for today.

∞ DT ∞