All the spoons are in the dishwasher....

All the spoons are in the dishwasher. I'm grateful today that I  don't need one. 

 

Recovering from addiction requires more than just not using drugs. Last fall, I relapsed.... again.. It wasn't until December, that I finally realized this wasn't working. I couldn't live with drugs, but alas I could not live without them. Something had to change, but what? I finally realized that it's more than just not using. I am an addict. I don't have alcoholwasm. I have alcoholism. For a long time I was really bitter about the whole situation. I want to be able to drink. I want to be able to wake up in the morning and not have sticking a needle in my arm being the first thought. I don't want to be triggered every time I see a spoon, foil, syringes, etc. I want to be a muggle! a normi! whatever you call it that's what I wanted, and I emphasize the WANTED part. Past tense. Today I am grateful to say I am an addict. I have a problem, but I have found a solution. Don't get me wrong, it's not easy by any means. It's my own form of chemotherapy

One of the most profound realizations of my recovery was that I was entirely unable to treat the physical and mental aspects of alcoholism.  The mental infatuation with the promise of alcohol's relief and the physical compulsion to put as much of it in my bloodstream as possible were driven by a deeper pain and distress that I'd lived with so long that I could no longer identify it.  It was my factory setting, a unique wiring system that interpreted the world differently than my fellows and processed a debilitating form of self-centered fear with regularlity.

So it made sense that I could not "just not pick up the first drink," no more than a tuberculosis patient could just not cough.  It was not in my control.  Grasping this was virtually impossible:  it ran against everything I'd been taught about self-control to consider the idea that I could not control my arm lifting a drink to my mouth. It felt incredibly silly to say, yet when you looked at the track record-- wasn't it true?  Had I not proven time and time again that I was without power against the first drink or drug?

 

Reactions. I have hundreds of them every day.  Stimulation and information come in-- through my ears, my eyes--  are processed by my hard drive, a reaction is created and then presented back to the outside world.

As an addict, I was born with a corrupt hard drive. It tends to over-interpret information, and consequently over-delivers the reaction.  This typically creates more over-stimulation and over-reaction.  I feel at odds with the world (restless, irritable and discontent) and only alcohol and drugs soothe this for me. Alcohol "treated" my alcoholism-- for a little while.  Unfortunately, by the time I understood that alcohol and drugs had betrayed me, I was unable to stop using them.

The internal rearrangement brought about by working the 12 steps begins the process of debugging the hard drive.   We become aware that our reactions are fueled by faulty information and out of proportion to the situation and the world around us.  We begin to understand that our role and behavior is what we can effect. We see self-righteous anger as a dubious luxury.

As the hard-drive gets better, we recoginize the folly of our immediate reactions.  They still come-- deprogramming takes time-- but we are able to detach and see them.  And we do something we could never do before-- we pause.  We breathe.  We pray.  We call people. We go to a meeting.  The reaction is not given permission to launch. 

Each day I ask for my thinking to be directed, for awareness and for my higher power to stay clean with me throughout that day.  I can't say I'm going to stay clean for ever at this point. I really really love heroin, cocaine, meth, xanax, needle, etc.... It's a lot to say I'm going to stay clean for ever, but I know I can stay clean today, 30 more minuet-that I can handle. Tomorrow I'll do the same thing. One day at a time... WE DO RECOVER!