Blog entry for:

live with dignity, to love myself and others, to laugh, and to find great joy and beauty in my surroundings, is quite a leap from who and what i was, once upon a time. sitting here after a restless night, walking the dawg, getting my laundry done and trekking the neighborhood, all with a broken rib, i am overwhelmed by what i have got as a result of getting clean, staying clean, finding my way to recovery and learning how to live a life of active recovery. i know yesterday i started this exercise off with a litany of sins, so today, it is nice to take a different tack as i go down this rabbit-hole.
coming to believe that i was worthy of being loved, took a bit of work, as i had to get past my denial, as i did not believe that i did not love myself, after all i was self-centered, selfish, over-entitled and all sorts of self-righteous. the argument continues, that if those are not traits of loving myself, what exactly are they? time and step work has opened my mind to the explanation. those were symptoms of my low self-worth that bordered on self-loathing. all of those traits were covering up my deeply held fear of being found out to be a fraud and that i wast incapable of being loving or being loved.
it is interesting that when i did not 100% support my using niece she was certain that i still had “demons” that needed to be addressed. what i found was i certainly was being reactive to her and it was because of the “demons” i had faced and defeated across the course of my recovery. when one, such as i has looked to what makes him tick and found all sorts of stuff that was far from stellar or even likable, my first reaction, coming from years of experience was to swallow, deflect and hide. after completing that, the next step was to shift the blame back on to the party i saw as attacking me, by changing the focus to what they may “need” to address.
now that i love and respect myself, when i start down that path, most times i have the ability to stop, take a breath and ask myself why i am hiding and blaming. when i get to that spot, i realize that i am worth more than continuing down the blame highway to protect my ever so fragile ego. i do not know if this was my niece's strategy, but it certainly has been mine, since the dawn of time, or at least for as long as i can remember. today, just for today, i can use the love i feel for myself to be a better person and stay on the straight and narrow path of accepting responsibility for my life, my recovery and my behaviors. that is a symptom of loving myself, so i can love others.

∞ DT ∞