Some memes

i forgive others, and i find peace -- regardless of what others may think or feel or tell me. forgiving myself, however, is not about minimizing the damage i cause, ignoring my less than stellar acts or gaslighting myself by justifications, rationalizations or flat out lies. i have learned over the days i have been clean, that unless i own what i did and take responsibility for the damage i do, no matter how minimal that damage may be, i will never ever be able to accept the forgiveness of others, much less, forgive myself. my daily inventories are not long litanies of what i did not do correctly these days and my EIGHTH and NINTH STEP inventories are just as brief. living without shame, as i have learned to do, means taking care of the messes i have left behind and forgiving myself for making them in the first place.
when i first got clean, i was in no hurry to ever approach an EIGHTH or NINTH STEP, because i believed i had never done anything wrong enough to approach needed to revisit it and ask for forgiveness. i truly had no shame, and what little i did have, well relief was just a snort, drink or toke away. getting clean, did little to tweak my conscience about what was, who i had injured and what disasters i left behind. as that reality changed, i quickly came to be ashamed of my past and did my best to put it behind me, as how could i ever forgive myself for being such a lowlife piece of shit. step work, clean time and recovery has certainly changed that opinion of myself and these days, when i own what i have done and ask for forgiveness, i am already in the process of forgiving myself.
walking out into the real world for another day of work, i am content that i have found a path to the self-forgiveness that i once believed i did not need. i know that today, just for today, i will stumble and make a mistake or three that will require at least an acknowledgement that i was wrong. i am only human and although that could be a juicy rationalization, for me it is a path into forgiving myself for not being perfect, twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, three hundred and sixty five and a quarter days a year. when i walk in the sunlight of the spirit as the cliché goes, i get the rewards of another day clean and the opportunity to choose that path in real-time, perhaps, seeing the pit of inequity before me and avoiding stepping into that trap. i place my FAITH in the recovery process that gives me the desire to be just a little bit better today, than i was yesterday.

∞ DT ∞