Blog entry for:

thinking to get start my recovery journey, after a very strong nudge from the judge to stop using. thinking back to those not so wonderful days at the end of my active using, i am quite certain that my best thinking would have kept me using and playing a game of compliance, using and doing my best not to get caught. the insanity of those days on doing just,made me less and less cautious and in the end, my body betrayed what i was doing, to those who felt i needed more than a little consequence. twelve weekends in a row, rather than thirty days of straight time, was quite a crimp on my life, but hardly convinced me that recovery was the path for me. it did convince me, however, to enter my phase of mere abstinence and start to make myself look as if i was a member of the “No Matter What” club.
my days of believing i have all the answers, most of the answers or any answers at all, have long passed, for the most part. i KNOW today that there is a shit ton of stuff i do not know and i am more than comfortable with not knowing and having to ask my peers, my friends my predecessors, my sponsors and my sponsees for the answers. it is actually the easier and softer way for me to not know, rather than attempting to manufacture an answer i think fits the situation.
just to be clear, so i am not dwelling in the house of pain i call false humility, i do have a few answers to the questions that pop-up over the course of my days. i have been clean for a minute. i have suffered the slings and arrows of finding a path to spirituality, as well as one that allowed me to explode the lies i told myself for so long that they had become the “TRUTH.” i fronted i had clean time when i did not and i skimmed through my first round of steps as if i was writing the CliffsNotes of my life, highlighting what i thought my sponsor wanted to hear and leaving the details in the murky dust. all of that experience, while certainly not that of the “model recovering addict” is part of who i am today and has proven to be valuable to others as they attempt to navigate the stormy seas of getting clean and staying clean.
even with all of that water under the brig-deg and over the dam, as it were, i still have a lot to learn about doing this gig called living in the present tense. with that in mind, it is getting to that time of day when i get out of the house and into that smoke-filled room that i choose to work in on most days of the week. it is a great day to be a bit better at learning what i may need to learn and add it to the corpus of the knowledge that may lead to a bit of wisdom.

∞ DT ∞