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was never what i thought this recovery gig was all about. in fact, if one had asked, i would have responded of course i love myself! when i heard my peer in recovery parroting the phrase: **we will love you until you can learn to love yourself,** i scoffed and laughed about how toolish it was for them to believe that anyone would not love themselves.a few days and steps later, i may still think that is a ridiculous “bumper sticker” cliché but at least i understand what it is that they are attempting to say.
sitting in my nice warm home on the coldest day of the year and the first full day of winter, i realize that i denied who i was and what i felt about who i was for decades on end. even now, it is so simple for me to slip back into the notion that the best i can be is second or third best, so why even attempt to do anything more. when i let go of what i think i “should” look like and who i “should” be, i can believe in myself,which for me is far more important than loving myself. i actually believe that i have always loved myself, even though i was not particularly proud of who i was or the collection of behaviors that seemed to define me. the love i felt, however was overshadowed by the disgust i felt for what i had become and how much i had to hide in plain sight, from those around me. the combination of fear and loathing certainly drove me to places i would rather not be and in the end, left me with very little upon which to base a healthy, whole and genuine life. coming out of that fog has revealed a person that i no longer see as a collection of defects trying to find the ways and means to polish himself into social acceptability. i am certainly far from perfect, but i am more comfortable in the skin i have been given, than ever before and yes, i have even began to uncover the love for myself that was always there. after all, if i did not have any love for myself, why would i have endured all those years of misery, in the faint hope that maybe things might get a bit better?
as i wrap this up and get wrapped up to go re-arrange the snow in my yard on this very frigid morning, i see that i have been given a new manner in which to live. i may not celebrate my clean date anniversary as if it is the birth of this new life, as for me it was not. just for today, i am grateful that i persevered through those first months of my plodding existence on the fringes of recovery, to get to the place where i could accept that yes, even i, needed a new way to live, just for today.

∞ DT ∞