Blog entry for:

today, my main concern is not feeling good but learning to understand and deal with my feelings, no matter what they are.
so if i said that i feel calm, collected and relatively satisfied with the state of my immediate world right here and right now, would that be a cop-out? after all, for me, that would be saying that i feel good, and i do. yes there is all kinds of change and churn going on in my life these days. and yes there does not seem to be enough time to do anything, much less get all the things done that i need to accomplish in a single day. and yes as i consider all of this i feel a bit overwhelmed, but you know what, none of that stuff is enough to get me to choose to use today, it all just is.
learning how to live with how i feel from moment to moment has always been one of the most difficult parts to staying clean to me. i used because i hated being on an emotional roller coaster and using allowed me to live in a blissful state of unfeeling. no highs, no lows, no inconvenient bouts of depression, just more that a few incidents of misplaced rage, but all in all, a very dull and uneventful emotional life. just what i wanted to feel -- a whole lot of the same nothing. recovery, especially early recovery has been one long and sometimes tedious lesson with learning how to live as a loving, caring human being. the lesson never stops, it just seems to get less painful as i experience the full range of human feelings over the course of living in the real world day by day. there is nothing wrong with that, and three-quarters of the time i have no clue what i am feeling. i have just come to accept and expect that i can live through whatever it is that i am feeling right now and face another minute without choosing to use or withdraw from my life. i understand that my life in emotional twilight could be returned and i could once again be a ghostly participant in the real world. how ever today i choose to accept my feelings, whatever they may be. after all "this too shall pass!"

∞ DT ∞