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got to be kidding! one thing that puzzles me to this day, was the notion that i developed, long before i used for the first time, that my emotions needed to be managed, dealt with, survived or swallowed. getting clean and coming to find myself having the desire to live a program of recovery, that theme seemed to be hammered home, by my peers and by what i thought i read in the recovery literature. i am grateful that i stuck at this long enough to realize that emotions are reactions to the stimuli of my environment and are transitory. as such they need not be “survived” merely acknowledged and allowed to run their course. one of my favorite clichés is that i have yet to die from an emotion and i can allow myself to feel them and move along.
in my day to day existence, however, i can hardly tell from one moment to the next what emotion i may be feeling. where once i believed that emotions came in separate and discrete packages that were easy to identify and quantify, i see today, that is far from that simple. i may not be as complex as i like to think i am, but my emotional state is much more complicated than i once realized. as a result, the “emotion” i think i am trying to manage and change, is more times than not, anything close to my true and real emotional state. learning to let go of what i think i am feeling and just allow it to take its course, is one of the toughest lessons that i have ever been asked to learn in my recovery journey. coming to see that as the correct course of action seems to fly in the face of all i have ever been taught and cultured into believing.
what came to me this morning, was more than a bit of anger at the world i grew up in, for “making” me into something i never was, and stoic and emotionless shell of a person, who walked around behind a façade of smoke and mirrors denying he was unaffected by the world around him. as i sat, that feeling passed as i came to forgive myself for drinking that particular flavor of Kool-Ade. i became what i thought i saw and just as any good addict seems to do, took those lessons in and lived them to the max. the days between getting clean and today, have been an unraveling of what i thought i “needed” to be, way back when to survive in the dog-eat-dog world i came to believe i lived in. i am certainly who i am and this morning i see myself as just another addict, learning how to be alive in the here and now and allowing himself to be what he will be. the world may be a tough place to live these days, but at least i can live through my emotions, rather than survive them, just for today.

∞ DT ∞