Blog entry for:

many of us carry these with us into recovery!
nuff said, so long and thanks for the fish!
seriously, this is one of those readings that strikes me entirely differently each time i read it in my annual cycle. usually i am a bubbling cauldron of fear, uncertainty and doubt, when i get to this reading. i am at the end of my cycle, and the six weeks before my clean date anniversary is usually a time of great inner turmoil for me. this year it has yet to begin, for whatever reason and i accept the gift of this brief respite from my annual insanity. nevertheless, thinking about hiding behind masks to protect my way over sensitive nature and ever so fragile self-esteem always make me cringe a bit. not because it is something i do not do. hardly! mostly because it was a defensive trait that saved my bacon more than once when i was in active addiction. unfortunately, that same behavior almost killed me at the end of my active use. that trait left me untrusting and incapable of accepting that recovery was the path for me, and that the people in my life way back when were not out to get, and actually had my best interests in mind. but i was afraid of what recovery would do to me, and the last thing i wanted to be was some goody two-shoes automaton that blindly shuffled off to a life of boring nothingness. true fact! that is what i thought recovery would do for me, and although my life was not exactly the red hot, exciting, thrill a minute life i thought it was (a fact that i was starting to realize) it was all i knew and i tried my best to hang on to it for dear life. so this reading hits when i am at a place of remembering the masks i was wearing then and forces me to beat myself up about the masks i may or may not be wearing now. and i know nothing forces me to do anything, i force myself to react in a certain manner because of up until today, the shame i feel about the end of my active addiction.
today, i accept that i was unready to become more, unwilling to let anyone in, and unable to comprehend the gift that was being offered and i fell back on my default behavior. and since i was and am an addict, today i accept that there is no shame in behaving the way i did. i am no longer that man, although i am not quite sure who i am becoming i accept that if i want to continue to grow, i just need to be who i am and see what happens. life is full of gifts for me to accept or decline and today i choose to accept a few!

∞ DT ∞