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is not always as i have seen it, or related it to my peers. in fact, up until a little over a year ago, i had been living under a cloud of an event i chose to bury deep, deep, deep withing the darkest, dankest vaults of my consciousness. when it surfaced, for apparently no reason at all, i would tell myself, “i have dealt with that. nothing to see here, move along.” ironically after twenty plus years clean, when it surfaced, once again, i decided that maybe, just maybe there was something there to look at. what a surprise it was to me that all that i thought i knew about myself had been altered and colored by the lie that was born of that event. this morning as i work around the fact that there is no hot water in my home, i know that getting to the bottom of who i am, which has never been an easy task, will be a bit simpler now that i can see my past through the lens of the lies i believed to save my sanity, or so i had come to accept as “TRUTH.”
there was once a time, when i felt that i had to be the most intimidating character in the room. yes, i know, being the biggest baddest is not all that unique. moving on, i prided myself on being able to shut down dissent with just a crusty look or having people try to melt into the walls, when i walked by. i know that was part of who i pretended to be and it allowed me to inflate my ego and sense of worth, when i had very little of either. thanks to loving guidance of my peers in recovery, that is no longer a behavior i need to choose to engage in. in fact, it is a behavior that once was part of the shame i used to castigate myself.
an event last night brought that into sharp focus and i would be less than honest if i did not write about it today. one of my peers, with whom i had a disagreement with, was at the meeting last night that i attended to celebrate the clean time of one of the men i sponsor. over the course of the evening, i noticed how uncomfortable they were and when the meeting was over, they turned their back to me several times, refused to make eye contact and melted into the walls in the narrow hallway that is part of the meeting space. i certainly have moved past what happened and i have my opinions of why it happened, which are irrelevant to living in the here and now. based on their behavior, i might be able to conclude that they have not. as sad as that may be, even worse, i felt a certain glee in having that much power over someone else. yes, i am not as well as i may have thought i was and to intimidate just by being present, is not an outcome i choose to foster. i could delve into the whys and wherefores, but the fact of the matter is, it felt good to take all that personal power away from that peer, as sort of a payback for what happened way back when. once again, returning to a familiar behavior of extracting a pound of flesh, for every imagined slight.
being honest this morning, i feel no shame or guilt over what happened last night, no=r what happened at the end of last year. i let go and dropped that shit into the bit bucket, because in the long run, it really did not matter and the final outcome was certainly to my liking. it cost me no prestige, no favors and when i look at my behavior, i owned the worst parts and cleaned up my mess, in real time. what someone else feels about that, is not my bidness, just for today.

∞ DT ∞