Blog entry for:

is something i understand quite well, having spent five decades in its grip. for me, that hunger was all about being accepted and proving myself to be better than those around me, because i knew i could never, ever be. life in my skin was a battle between being okay and demeaning others to feel okay. it worked, for the most part, but the results were that no one trusted me and as a result i trusted no one else. i came to like being alone and apart from the crowd, that way i never had to hurt myself to look better than i was feeling. it was quite a shock to my system when i decided that i might just have had enough and took the plunge into a life of recovery, at least for a very limited time. i had no clue that recovery would be the answer to that dark hunger that manifest itself as a hole in my spirit. in fact, i never even acknowledged that i “needed” to find the ways and means to satiate that hunger, i just assumed it was part of my DNA.
before i go much further:

Steven D,
CONGRATS on V (5) years clean!
Thank you for being part of my recovery and my life.

and so it goes, life goes on and after a bit of a distraction, i can leave the darkness behind and speak to the brighter side of life.
my source material spoke of replacing that need to destroy others to build myself up, by concerning myself with helping others. as a temporary solution, i do not disagree, but in the long term, i had to find the humility to accept myself as i am, and take comfort in the notion that i have value, i have worth and i do not need any external forces to see myself as a whole and genuine person. that is an ongoing process, although these days, that dark hunger is merely an annoyance rather than a driving force in my life. it would be wonderful to say that it has been eliminated, but i still beat myself up over the most trivial of my missteps and faux pas. my reaction that self-deprecation is to seek out and destroy the most vulnerable target i can find. my response to that, however, is to take a breath, see myself as a far from perfect human being and seek a solution to prevent that from happening again, the misstep and the self-flagellation. i am certainly getting better at responding these days and that is certainly a good thing. just for today, when i feel that hunger upon me, i can ask myself what it is that i FEAR about what others see and why does that FEAR persist, after all, i really am not a piece of sh!t anymore.

∞ DT ∞