I will sometimes, maybe even often, not do something because the idea that I will do it less than perfectly paralyzes me. I’m way better now at allowing myself to make mistakes than I ever have been before. Really, you don’t make the kind of catastrophic mistakes that we serious tweekers make, and not come to terms with them if you want to stay sober. My mistakes are visible from space. I’m thinking about having UNESCO declare them a World Heritage Site. Outfit them with some kind of perceived value that the “normal” world can understand as useful or meaningful or positive. Read the rest of this entry »
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it started to snow.
Snow!
I’m not freaking kidding. And not just a little snow, either. The forecast was for a little rain. A 40% chance of rain. And we got snow.
It was the earliest snowfall ever recorded here, beating the previous record by two days and 1/2 an inch, and while it has melted off the streets now, my lawn is still holding on to a tattered blanket of the stuff. Now, of course, it didn’t actually start to snow until three full minutes after I got on my scooter to go home from work. I was smart enough to wear a rubber jacket to work, but I didn’t put the mask on my helmet and I don’t own a pair of gloves, so by the time I got home from work my face was completely red, my hands completely frozen, and I was soaking wet from the waist down. Read the rest of this entry »
It’s funny, the ideas that people get about the relationship between loving others and loving themselves. The conventional wisdom is that learning to love oneself is essential to loving others. Yet 12 step programs insist that we must place others ahead of ourselves in order to recover.
I was at a meeting the other night where this was brought up as a topic. The person that brought it up insisted that before he can experience recovery that he needs to love himself more. “I just do whatever I want to do. If I see something I want I just buy it for myself. I always did everything for everyone. If my wife wanted something I got it for her, so I just do the same thing for me. I do what I want.†Read the rest of this entry »
and yet so stupid in others. I sometimes wonder if it isn’t actually a function of intelligence to be able to block out information when we choose to; if you don’t actually have to be really smart to have a really effective denial mechanism. A certain amount of mental power must be involved in forcing oneself to Read the rest of this entry »
Trey McIntyre's dance company performing “Leatherwing Bat†last month at Jacob’s Pillow in Becket, Mass
There are all kinds of things that I think automatically, answers I give without consideration, judgements I enter without a fair trial. Moving beyond my knee-jerk psychic construct, at least with regard to drugs and alcohol, and with regard to many of my ideas about myself, has been an absolute necessity in getting and staying sober. That process hasn’t so much been one of erasing my automatic judgements, but one of replacing them with new ones. That is the exclusive product of enough honesty, open-mindedness, and willingness to let go of my old ideas, acknowledge the truth about myself, and to view the situation through the lens of “a new pair of glasses.” Being the lazy and comfort seeking creature I am, and being that I am more often motivated by pain than anything else, many of my automatic judgments have never been called for appellate review. Read the rest of this entry »
Tonight I witnessed one of the greatest acts of faith and willingness I’ve ever seen in someone new to recovery. I don’t even know what word describes how I feel. Fulfilled. Grateful. Sruprised, Happy. Blessed. I don’t know. Full. I feel full.
I’ve been spending more time with the Cheerleader lately and I’ve been doing it because he’s been reaching out. I’m probably the only guy in town who understands about what it is to be a gay man in early recovery from crystal meth addiction that actively makes himself available to other men trying to get clean. Maybe not, but when I was trying to get clean I had a hard time even finding honest voices out in the blogosphere. Marc and Rod were the first and only for quite awhile. Read the rest of this entry »
I learned about this tool from my Irish friend because she put up a link to an online version of it on her blog.
I like tools like this, though I don’t often pick them up. Like much of what is available to me to grow spiritually. I seem to have been so desensitized to pain that I only notice that it is pain when it becomes overwhelming. I don’t work for growth until growth is the only option. I think about it a great deal, but I rarely work for it in earnestness the way I did in the beginning of my recovery. Read the rest of this entry »
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