1st Step

You are currently browsing articles tagged 1st Step.

The Best Short Prayer

December 19, 2010 in Acceptance, Honesty, Hope by Chris | 6 comments

Tony H. from Pacific Palisades was a guest on a TV show awhile back and he related the following story:

“I once asked a Jesuit priest what was the best short prayer he knew. He said, ‘fuck it,’ as in ‘fuck it; it’s in God’s hands.’”

I wish to God it was that easy to let go; to just say ‘fuck it’ and walk away, and resolutely trudge forward, not looking back at the city burning behind us like Mrs. Lot did.  It is so tempting to “defocus” from my own recovery and try to devise some machination to save the ones I love and thwart those against whom I bear a resentment.

A member of my family is doing everything she can to get sober and her husband is doing everything he can to avoid participating or supporting and I want… I want…  The enemy of my friend is my enemy.  At least that is how I justify hanging on to this, but the real leap forward would be the first step.  To pray anything like “fuck it” is to admit powerlessness.  “Fuck it” is a first step.  And I could use a first step about this issue about now.

I still think there must be something I can do.  I should be able to coordinate a detente or at least call a ceasefire, or play the shuttle diplomat and somehow protect her from harm.  I feel like not being able to do that somehow makes me a bad son.

So tonight I’ll get on my knees, something I rarely do, and I’ll say something like, ‘fuck it.  Its in Your hands,’ and then I’ll try to come to believe that’s true.

Service and Self Sacrifice

July 17, 2010 in Death, Service, Sponsorship by Chris | 3 comments

I was just looking at a friend’s Facebook page, admiring a picture of her and someone’s baby, when I noticed a quote on the sidebar; something about love from Dostoevsky’s, “The Brothers Karamazov”.  Having just come from a meeting where the topic was Love and knowing how way leads to way I followed the trail of that quote as it has been used in several sermons.

The Dostoevsky story is the story of Father Zossima, the wise, self-effacing, good-humored orthodox monk that many people come to for spiritual direction. One day, a woman comes to talk with him. She has a big problem, she says.  She has lost her faith and therefore her reason to live. If Zossima cannot give her a reason to believe again, she says, she will kill herself.

The monk tells her to go home, and every day, do something concrete to love the people around her. If she does this, he assures her, she will find, slowly but surely, that she won’t be able to help but believe.  Love in action, he says, will change the way she sees the world.

The old woman isn’t especially impressed.  Basically she says, “That’s it?  That’s all you have?  I’m supposed to love the people around me?  I already do that.”

And to this Zossima responds with a line which has become famous: “Ah”, he says, “love in practice is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams. It may very well kill you”

Doing what is good for another can be really hard. Sometimes, it’s hard to know what would be good for someone as distinct from what would make us feel good.  And actually doing it is often very hard.  In recovery we know that to love other people until they can love themselves requires “work and self sacrifice” – and it is a requirement.  It is the foundation stone of recovery. Read the rest of this entry »

Still Beating Myself Up

June 23, 2010 in Acceptance, Faith, Fear, Honesty, Integrity, Perseverance, relationships, Resentment, Shortcomings by Chris | 5 comments

There will be an end to this, right?  I’m still beating myself up for having been blind to, or simply ignored, all of the red flags that went up with The Bullet That I Dodged.  They were there in front of me all the time, from the very first time we met, and somehow I managed to dismiss them from my mind.

It’s a tricky little machine, isn’t it, our minds?  I can be going along fit as a fiddle, right as rain, and ready for love and suddenly, WHAM!  I become blindsided by something that had been clearly in view; something obvious to everyone but me.  At 41 months sober I feel like I handle most things pretty well.  I’m not sure I “manage” them, but they don’t manage me anymore.  Then along comes something like the notion that perhaps romantic attachment may still be possible for me and I experience all over again the same kind of insanity that accompanied my drug use.  I think this time will be different.  This time it won’t hurt me.  This time will be worth it. Read the rest of this entry »

Another Case of Cannot

February 25, 2010 in Death, Fear by Chris | 5 comments

Deep down at the bottom of happy, joyous and free lies fear; fear that if I were ever to throw my sobriety away I might never get it back.   It seems the older we get, the more times we relapse, the harder it is to come back and fully embrace recovery.  I suspect that, as with a drug, I would want getting sober again to feel like the first time.  I would want to feel the magic, and I don’t know how one could.

The other thing I’ve noticed is that, as a class, those of us in 12 Step programs die with incredible regularity. Read the rest of this entry »

Winter Night

December 13, 2009 in Faith, Gratitude, Honesty, Hope by Chris | 8 comments

6th and Pueblo Street, Boise, Idaho My sobriety anniversary is very important to me and it’s coming up here soon, but it doesn’t quite move me the same way December 13th does.  December 13th, today, happens also to be my birthday, but my God, I’m 44 years old.  My “birthday” is not really a big deal anymore.  No, the anniversary I celebrate tonight, the reason this day is important to me, is that on this night, three years ago, I suddenly saw myself clearly and suddenly had a little hope that recovery would be possible.

The first two years were easy.  This last one has been a bitch.  There have been times recently when I have wished that I had died back in May.  It would have been so much easier.  I’ve even, at times, tried to tell myself that if that illness had killed me that I would be a hero.  I would have died sober.  I would have died doing the things that I was supposed to be doing.  My family and friends would mourn me, sure, but there would be something happy underneath the sorrow; the knowledge that they had known me and that in my last years I had been sober.

Lately things have been much, much harder.  I’ve had to return to being medicated to stop the insanity that has been going through my mind.  The medicines are working, so that is good, but I still have a ton of stuff to face.

Somehow, in spite of everything, I have remained sober.  In fact I’ve been sober longer now than I have ever been since I was 14 years old and I attribute it to that moment at the corner of 6th and Pueblo, under the street lamp, in the snow, when I finally understood that the pain I was in then was the very best that I could hope for, unless I got sober, and when I suddenly believed that it would be possible.

” God, I offer myself to Thee to build with me and to do with me as Thou wilt.  Relieve me of the bondage of self that I may better do Thy will.  Take away my difficulties that victory over them may bear witness to those I would help of Thy Power, Thy Love and Thy Way of Life.  May I do Thy will always.  Amen”

A little “thank you” prayer that it all turned out this way

December 14, 2008 in Gratitude, Honesty, promises, Willingness by Chris | 14 comments

It was in the early hours of the morning of the day after my birthday two years ago that I was given my first step.  It didn’t feel much like a gift at the time, but that’s exactly what it was; a gift of grace.

Out of money and out of drugs, stood up on my birthday by the boy I was obsessed with, and hurt, and more afraid than I have ever been, I had set out to hunt down the object of my obsession and get fixed.  There wasn’t anything I was feeling that smoking a gram or two of crystal meth with a handsome sociopath who called me “buddy” wasn’t going to fix.  At least for awhile.  At least through the night. Read the rest of this entry »

Picking up the tools

August 13, 2008 in Living in Recovery by Chris | 7 comments

The first tool they “lay at our feet” in DA is tracking; carefully recording all income and expenditures.  It is pretty easy to track total abstainance, but in a program for something you absolutely have to use, tracking becomes very important.

I had some money in my pocket since I got paid for a little side gig I do, so I set out to go buy the little spiral notebook they suggested I get so I could write down everything I spend and everything I take in.  Of course I only became willing to go shopping for the notebook after trying out 7 different home accounting software programs and finding that none of them were magical.

I couldn’t stand the idea of a little spiral wire living in my pocket to I took the suggestion of someone else and bought index cards.  If you’re going to have index cards you need something to put them in so I bought an expanding card file.  I know there are pens around here somewhere but you can’t be too careful, so I bought pens, too.  Picking out a pen took 20 minutes.

By then I was hungry.  I hadn’t eaten dinner yet, so I bought a salad, some snacks for at work.  I decided that K2O Special K water is going to be just the thing to magically take off the weight I’ve packed on since I started on the “I’m so poor I only eat carbs” diet.  $35 later I walked out with the index cards I went in for.

I got home and there were 2 bills in my mailbox.  They totalled $2,700.  I got to work the next day and my boss wiped 24 hours I’m supposed to work this week off the schedule.

And while I’m at work I hear a radio commercial for Happy Fish, a local sushi bar and trendy alcoholic emporium, and they’re naming and describing all these drinks.  On the radio.  And they get to to one that’s made from Godiva chocolate and Stoli and I just KNOW I would be SO SEXY on those. My god I want one of those.

I shared all of this at DA tonight, along with the fact that my bed hurts me so much to sleep on that I’ve taken to sleeping on the wood floor.  It’s less painful to get off of.  I shared that and I shared the fact that myspendingplan.com suggested, after I told it my expected income and my rent, that I set aside $41 per month for food.

After the meeting some well meaning jerk tried to tell me about some mattress pad that “isn’t very expensive.  You wouldn’t have to save for long to get one,” and I wanted to punch her in the face.

I want to run.  I want to jump on a motorcycle and hit the road.  I want to write bad checks everywhere, get drunk on chocolate martinis, get high, get laid, and disappear. I feel terrible writing that, but it’s true.  It would probably all end the same way for me that it did for Sam Nelson, just 2 blocks from where I had my moment of clarity 20 months ago.

The only progress that I’ve made is that I’m actually tracking my spending now, and at the moment it is making me feel even more hopeless than I felf when I was just in denial about the situation.

I picked up the tool, damn it.  I want to feel better now.

The Checkout

July 19, 2008 in Living in Recovery by Chris | 5 comments

I had just left the all time, well at least one of the bottom 10, all time worst AA meetings I have ever been in. I’m not judging. I’m just saying. I left grateful that I’m me, and I’m at this place in recovery. Enough said.

So the 10:00 meeting I was at is right next door to the supermarket and I had to pick up stuff for lunch so that I can eat lunch when I go to work (WAHOO! YEAH BABY! I GOT OFF MY FAT, POMPOUS ASS AND GOT A FREAKING JOB! WHOOO!) tomorrow. (In a related story, I’ll be designing and selling storage solutions -closets. I figure I’ve spent enough time in them that decorating them is the next logical step.)

In line in front of me were a couple of great looking guys. The one in his early 30s was just fantastic looking. Gorgeous teeth, stunning blue eyes, breathtaking legs. The guy with him, a mid-20s twink, was kind of red eyes, not nearly as impeccably groomed, but handsome just the same. The were both pretty animated; pretty smiley. Obviously together.

They were buying a 12 pack. And a roll of aluminum foil.

You know where my head went. I’m irritated and disgusted. And I’m kind of sad and lonely.

« Older entries

get userping