Blog entry for:

to my old ideas. when i came to recovery, if someone had asked if i knew ho to live, i would have said, of course i do, after all i have made it through forty trips around the sun, still in one piece. the fact that i had a fractured identity and played whatever part i needed to play to get what i desired, was just part of how i had learned to survive. when the going got tough, an extra dose or three, did the trick and i got through another day. what i believed was “living” was actually surviving addiction and quite honestly the last thing i desired was a new manner in which to live. scraping along the bottom between abstinence and recovery, did very little to convince me that i needed to change and it was not until i finally got my FEAR of the justice system out into the open, did i ever consider that maybe i had it wrong.
it took me a very long time to move out of FEAR, as that seemed to be the only way i was going to stay clean. ironically as heavy as the weight of that FEAR was, i grew into accepting that was what it was always going to be for me, as this program was never, ever going to work for me and i would always bee one step away from going out the door. it was truly amazing the day i came to realize that i could move past my FEAR of relapse and into a program based on the HOPE, that if i did what i was taught to do, there would be a whole lot more living for me to do.
after thousands of days of doing this recovery gig, i can see that i still have a whole lot more living to do and i am still learning how to do just that. my life, such as it is, right here and right now, may not look anything like it did a year ago, but in the interim i have climbed to the top of Colorado more than once, taken two more inches off my waist and have the desire to be present for my parents. i even have got to the place where i can be okay with admitting that i have a whole lot more to learn about how to live. those old ideas of about what life is and what my life needs to look like, still rumble around in my head. the nice part is that when that happens, i can recognize them for what they are, the lies that kept me from seeing my value to myself, my family, my peers and the world around me. just for today, i will open my mind to something completely different and see what i get as a result, it may be worse than what i have, but chances are, it will be better.

∞ DT ∞