Blog entry for:

i will realize that i am beginning to think differently. each action i take in this vein brings me closer to becoming the person 1 was meant to be.
today is the fiftieth anniversary of my birth, a day that i never thought would arrive, well actually i knew it would arrive, i just did not believe that i would be around to see it. in active addiction i had given up any HOPE that i would live a long and fruitful life and had resigned myself to living to the end of my days in active addiction. as a consequence my birthday was spent in forty-eight hours or more of chemical haze.
so here i sit today, thinking about acting my way into better thinking. the line i always seem to miss in this reading is when it speaks of dishonesty if i act contrary to my feelings. i am finally coming to realize that the reading is not speaking to being dishonest, what it is speaking to is following a few simple suggestions that may be contrary to what i once believed. yes i was one of those who prayed long before i ever accepted the nurturing care of a HIGHER POWER. i was one of those who kept coming to meetings even though i felt i was getting nothing from them. i was even one of those addicts who jonesed with every fiber of my being for the first six months in recovery and kept doing whatever it took not to use in the minutes that stretched across that period of my recovery. truthfully, i never believed the desire to use would ever be lifted from and yet i kept coming back with only the faintest of HOPE that this whole recovery gig would work for me.
so as a practitioner of the the principle of "acting as if," in my recovery life i am finally accepting the value of taking a suggestion or three and behaving in a manner that is contrary to my beliefs. it is my experience that doing that allows me to change my beliefs, and as a result forced behavior becomes natural behavior for this addict. only i can change my belief system and the rigidity of that system is what prevents me from growing. i do want to become the person i was meant to be, and i what i believe that person is has changed over the course of my recovery. it is the will of my HIGHER POWER for me to stay clean today and celebrate my 50th birthday, why that is so is quite unimportant. so off to the showers with a feeling of gratitude that recovery has given me the gift of another birthday and perhaps even i can find a way to behave my way into better thinking today!

∞ DT ∞